One Broken Mom Hosted by Ameé Quiriconi

1.27 Childhood Trauma and Our Health

December 01, 2018 Amee Quiriconi Season 1 Episode 27
One Broken Mom Hosted by Ameé Quiriconi
1.27 Childhood Trauma and Our Health
Show Notes Transcript

On this episode, Amee speaks with Veronique Mead,a family physician and assistant professor who changed careers looking for a better understanding and more effective tools for working with chronic illness.

On her website www.chronicillnessstudies.com, she has collected and shared the abundance of new research showing how adverse life events increase risk for sensitivity to infections, toxins, and other environmental stressors that increase risk and trigger onset of chronic disease.

Through sharing Amee's own experience and rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis, this episode shares the latest research that shows risk factors for autoimmune and other chronic diseases, as well as how life events are part of that risk, and explains why it's not in your head. 

Speaker 1:

You are listening to one broken mom it podcast dedicated to raising awareness about mental health, parenting and self improvement on host[inaudible]. One broken mom is not a family show. It is intended for adults only and may contain its own language. Sometimes the topics are serious but you can count on the episodes to be entertained. Also, one broken mom is not offering any psychiatric or medical diagnosis or just here giving away useful and important information. So if you're ready to hear real talk my real people so that we can all get better together, then you're in the right place and welcome.

Speaker 2:

Okay. I would like to think that I have done some outstanding interviews since I launched one broken mom and I have to say has, I've had a chance to meet and speak with so many cool people who've taught me more about myself, but by offering their expertise and their experience, it's, it's clear that they're doing so many different things to help other people and so this has just been, you know, so amazing for, you know, I don't know, five or six months, seven months. I think now that I've been doing this, this episode in particular though is really, really special to me because I'm finally getting in and jumping into a topic that has been really a powerful piece of my life and a powerful piece of my own transformation. And then this woman that I have on today's episode, her website, when I founded, I was, you know, researching some theories I had going around in my brain with stress. And I hadn't quite gotten to childhood trauma yet, but I was thinking about can stress trigger flareups and rheumatoid arthritis and found through, you know, organic searching and article that she had written about her father and his own rheumatoid arthritis and her connecting some of his adverse childhood experiences to, you know, his development of the disease and himself. And having been diagnosed with Ra back in 2013 I was always confused at why a, you know, a healthy, physically healthy woman develop such an unusual disorder. Um, rheumatoid arthritis affects less than one 10th of a percent of the population. And two thirds of the people that develop the disease are actually women. And most of them on top of that start to display the symptoms of Ra in their thirties and forties kind of in into their middle, middle age is mid life. And to me, I found that to be particularly strange, family history wasn't necessarily a factor. Like it didn't run in families per se. There didn't seem to be any clear answers. In fact, everything out there that I had seen medically said, we don't really know what causes it. So that sucks. But, and without knowing an an origin for a cause, it, it treatment pretty limited I think in scope. And so, you know, I think it's important to walk through because not a lot of people also know exactly what was happening to me. And, and, and when this disease developed in me. And I think this is an important piece of this, um, because chronic diseases affect a lot of people and they are mysterious and unknown and some people hide them very well. And I think that a lot of people don't know to even today that I have rheumatoid arthritis. But what happened was in 2012 I began experiencing some severe shoulder pain in my right arm. Now 2012 is one to two years after coming off a really stressful major life event of losing a business, going through a breakup with a, an abusive business partner, changing life course, you know, completely, you know, within a matter of two to three years and um, and not understanding that that might've had something to do with what was going to happen to me for the next several years. So 2012 I've got the severe shoulder pain now at the exact same time I have a small tile company and I am doing a lot of heavy lifting. So it, you know, what is this five years ago in your early forties it's not unusual to go, well I guess I'm just getting older and that lifting all this heavy stuff, you know, it was making my shoulder hurt. I'm not young anymore, but when it cropped up, it was the week I was preparing for a television appearance on a show called House crashers that was being filmed in Seattle. At that point. And I was making my metal tiles that I had designed and there was a lot of them, you know, for the television show. So it was exciting. But at the same time, my personal relationship was with a man who was also supposed to be my business partner in this tile business. And that week he refused to help me out with any of the work and there was a ton of work to be done. And so it stands out for me because at the time I'm making all of these tiles, I'm also sitting there putting in long hours, exhausting nights, trying to do this and feeling really let down and disappointed and alone and you know, all the feelings that go along with it. Um, I head out to Seattle, you know, I have to pack the truck at five o'clock in the morning myself with, I mean hundreds of pounds of tiles, drive them to Seattle, film my segment. And if you see photos of me from that day, you can see it in my face. I hurt, I look terrible. Um, I could barely get my hair put together that day and I can see the beginnings of, you know, the disease kind of coming in without even knowing it. Now, over the course of the year, what would happen is that the shoulder pain would go away and then it would come back. And it did this about every four weeks, go away, stay for a couple of days and go away. And I kept thinking that this was just a chronic inflammation in my shoulder because I had injured it. But it was when it switched over to my other shoulder and my left, you know, and I'm right handed that I was starting to get a little confused. And then it started to happen in my wrist and my wrist would get really painful and sore and I couldn't actually move it. So for a year, I'm dealing with this phantom pain moving around my joints. And when I described everybody, just how bad this pain was, I use my best, my best estimate of what a 10 on my pain scale would be. I had my daughter without any pain medication, 100% natural childbirth. I feel like the, to me that qualifies as a 10 because I have never gone through any physical experience, as intense as having a, you know, a child without the use of any pain medication. And so to put this in perspective, these shoulder pains were like eights. They, nothing took them away. No heat, no rubbing, no massaging. I couldn't take enough Advil or anything like that to make it go away. And they would peek in the middle of the night and then go away by, you know, by morning. And I'd spent night after night, you know, in agony, laying there crying with zero comfort. There was nothing I could do medically to make it go away and to ease it. And I'm also at the same time, my partner didn't even know what to do with it. And so I didn't get any sympathy or empathy from him in this. And so I was being drawn into this super lonely, you know, place and not understanding this. Now. Then in April of 2013 so probably about nine to 10 months after this paint showed up, we all head out to the desert for a dirt bike race that he's competing in and we arrived on a Friday afternoon so that he could be well prepared for the race that would be on Sunday, but we weren't there an hour at the camp and he ended up having a terrible accident on his motorcycle. He wrecked his bike, hitting a rock or something in there, flew off the bike. He dislocated his shoulder and broke his scapula. But it was the realization that as he was describing what happened, that he had actually blacked out during this whole thing that actually terrified me and I mean my body felt terror, my stomach dropped out. The you could feel the surge of adrenaline and all the chemicals go through the body because I had already had some experiences with brain injuries and from other people that I knew. And I understood that just because he was looking at me right now did not necessarily mean that everything was going to be fine. And so at that moment I had a genuine fear for his life, which I had not felt for a very, very, very, very long time. And what happened was, is that within a few hours after this accident, my right risks start to hurt. And the pain built up to the point in my wrist that I couldn't physically move it. I could not bend my wrist at all. As much as I thought about it and wanted to, it wouldn't move. I had lost function of the risk completely. We'd get home, uh, the nursing of him would continue and my wrist pain would still be there, but it didn't go away after a few days. And so we joked and we called it sympathy pain that I was feeling the pain in my wrist because I was being sympathetic to his pain in his shoulder. But then it was after a month, and I remember looking at him going, this isn't sympathy pain anymore. There is something going on. This is not normal. Because the pain had moved from my wrist and into my hand and I was no longer able to even open them. Close my hand without pain and I couldn't even make a fist anymore. So that's when I got concerned that I needed to go figure out what was going on. And I had started to maybe make the connections between the strange pain that I'd had migrating through my shoulders in my wrist. I go see a doctor, she would prescribe physical therapy and then also suggested I go see a rheumatologist because when we took the RF test, it came back negative. So the the medial test of determining if I had rheumatoid arthritis, I failed. Great. But when I went to the rheumatologist and explained the shoulder pains, he put a name on it right away. He called those incidents is palindromic rheumatism and he'd asked me to go take a blood test called an anti CCP and it would tell us whether or not I actually did indeed have Ra. And he called back with the results in a couple of days and confirmed that I did. So with this meant was I had an autoimmune disorder that for some reason my immune system had decided that the Sunovion fluid, which is the lubricant we all have in our joints, was now a foreign body to my immune system. And so it was attacking it and trying to destroy it. The prognosis that I was told was that in five years after diagnosis that I would start to have defamation in my joints and that in 10 years I could actually start to become disabled. My choices and medications ranged from terrible to worse in my opinion. Um, because essentially without knowing what really specifically causes rheumatoid arthritis, the best case was just a weekend, the immune system to calm it down, which would then of course opened me up to developing any other diseases and illnesses that could come around, you know, flus and h and TB tests and I mean everything naturally that put me in a state of depression because here I was a physical woman who was used to playing sports, working out, working on our farm, and now I had this disease that basically once it took root in my body and took over limited what I was able to do. I, you know, I couldn't go out on the farm and do work like I did before because if I overexerted myself, my immune system would respond, you know, a thousand percent stronger than it needed to and I wouldn't be able to lift my arms for a couple of days. Um, what ended up happening is that the result of the disease formed, you know, acrimony. I, you know, between my partner and I, because I couldn't do any of the work that I was doing before. And without having some sympathy as to the fact that I was suffering from a disease that was attacking my body. I was just being viewed as you know, lazy or you know, unreliable in any of those things. So imagine the loneliness you could find yourself in when nobody seems to get you're in pain all the time. Your choices of medications likely will shorten your life and everything you've been able to do up until that moment in time you're completely cut off from. And so I internalized an awful lot of the suffering for a very, very long time. It would take me two years of finally going to a different doctor, a different rheumatologists, and he would just look me in the eye and he said to me, you are too young to not do something about this. You've got to get aggressive. And it came down to is that the quantity of the years I'm looking forward to or the quality. And so I ended up deciding to take the more aggressive approach to treatment, which is for me Humira and taking the pain shots every two weeks and stuff. And it's a a medication that doesn't come without side effects and doesn't come without risks. But at the end of the day he was right. I needed to stop fearing everything around it and just kind of take control of it and see what I could do with it. But what was really in my brain and which is why we have very unique on the show today, was that I started to see a pattern. The pattern was anytime I started to feel this anxiety from something going on around me, my relationship with my boyfriend, something going on at work, people in general, I would get a flare up from it and my wrist would start to hurt. My hands would start to hurt. It didn't matter. It was less and less about what I was doing to my body physically as much as what was happening to me emotionally that was connecting it. And so in February of this year I was doing all this research looking for what stress and and autoimmune disorders are there any links in there? And again, that's how I came into this amazing website called chronic illness, trauma studies. And I sent a note out on February six saying, hey, you seem to be on to something here and I'm very interested in the topic. I'd love to write about it and learn more about it. I don't want to duplicate the work that you're doing. I'd love to hear back from you. And that's when Dr Veronique mead answered and said, yeah, let's do this and start talking. And so I have today with me finally, um, Veronique, she is a family physician and a professor, um, as well as a person who has dealt with chronic illness on her own, who has changed the course of her life when she started to recognize a lot of these patterns here. And this website will blow your mind because she has, and I love her word that she used to describe herself. She's an integrator. She isn't doing the studies and the research, but she has founded and her, her ability to pull together so much information and make all these connections and links are just amazing and powerful. And I finally felt like after reading this that I think that we're coming close to understanding the origins of some of these immune autoimmune disorders in particular my own disease and what the origin of my own disease in my body was. And it, it made me finally hopeful, um, that something could be done for myself and for anybody else that's out there. So I know that's a long introduction, but I felt like everybody needed to know all that pieces first that Veronique, thank you so much for being on today with me on one bro

Speaker 3:

and mom, oh, it's so much my pleasure. I me and your story. I am so moved actually such a common story. I think it was really important to share all of that, how long it took for you to get it figured out, how much you thought it was just a normal thing because what was happening at the time with lifting heavy things and how over time it started to spread, we still tend to think well, in a healthy body it's like, well yeah, this is just a sympathy. Pain is the next step. And then you start to really ask questions and how alone you can feel because your doctors and your healthcare providers don't get it. And, and then when you start to finally see a pattern like the anxiety triggering flare ups, I think that was just really critical. This share that. And it can be so invisible and so unrecognized and people with all kinds of chronic illnesses share this very kind of store.

Speaker 2:

And I've, I've ran across several other, you know, women too that, um, when they do say, listen, I've got chronic pain and nobody seems to know about it. And, or the doctors don't know what it's from. You know, there's a stigma with that, that our society places on them, that we're making it up. It's all in our head. And that for some reason, well, yeah, it may actually in fact be in our head. But that doesn't mean we're crazy. And you see a lot of people with chronic pain that feel that feel alone because nobody believes them. You know, nobody gets that. You can generate that right, that your brain can, your brain, your brain can do this to you. Um, yeah. And so, so let's talk about you. How did you move from being the family doctor, the family physician into, um, because you're also a therapist now. Um, how did this transformation for you happen?

Speaker 3:

I left Madison 25 years ago after some very deep soul pain. And in a nutshell, it was this sense that I really wasn't helping people with chronic illnesses beyond managing symptoms. And I, I don't know where it came from, but I just had this feeling that there's gotta be more than giving medications to just treat the symptom. There's gotta be some underlying thing we can work with better or address. And that along with, I don't know, I just felt I was causing harm. Um, the medications that we had, as you discovered, you know, they're really limited, they have side effects or they don't work, like all the things that you tried at the beginning. And I didn't deal with chronic illness that much, but somehow that was a big picture. And along the way, at the very same time, I was actually in the very early phases of developing pretty profound fatigue. And I thought it was the stress of work, but that ended up not being why I left. I left with this really deep curiosity that there's gotta be something different and I had no idea what direction I was going to go in. And I took a year off and slow down thinking that would help and my own fatigue got worse. And then I went back to school and I had started therapy when I was working as a physician because I felt such profound distress, um, bordering on depression with my work. It was sort of my life, my work life that was just too busy and too overwhelming and no downtime. But it was this, there was something else that was at the core and the person I ended up working with was a Rolfer. So he worked on my physical body because I developed low back pain around the same time. And I had trouble walking and sitting and I would supervise residents and medical students in clinic at the back in this back room in the clinic by laying down on the floor with my legs propped up on a chair. And that's how I would supervise them because I couldn't sit and low. Yeah, low back pain is also kind of a bane of medical care because it's can be very, very difficult to find the cause and very difficult to treat it. So I saw this role for an after a few sessions of him working in my body. I said, can we just talk instead? And the sessions were an hour and a half long. It was the most luxurious thing I, I'd ever experienced. You know, coming from being a doctor who has 10 15 minutes with a patient, or even when you do an hour long annual exam, you've got a lot of history to run through. And so this hour and a half there was something deeply connecting about that and his presence and his listening and all of that started a jumbling together. And it helped me begin to start listening to myself. And I ended up leaving, taking that year off and then thinking, you know, I, I'd Kinda like to learn what Kevin was doing. And I ended up enrolling in a masters degree program in somatic psychology, which is a psychotherapy program. Learning how to listen to the wisdom of the body, learning that language and the direction that my program generally goes in is producing people who focus on psychotherapy and mental health conditions. But because of my own background, I ended up getting curious about chronic illness. And I started using what I was learning in that program and looking into the science to see, well, could this possibly apply to chronic illness? Not because it's psychological, but because there's something else going on. And so that's kind of the beginning of what got me started on this path.

Speaker 2:

Hmm. So, um, you know, one of the things that I did this week was I finally read Alice Miller's the body. Um, the body never lies. And, um, and which was, you know, it because I was preparing, you know, it'd be able to talk with you and plus my own stuff. And, um, she in that book was published in 2010 was drawing a lot of correlations, you know, B, two different diseases, cancers and asthma's and stuff like that. Um, and so it was pretty, and she, I told somebody else today like she pulls no punches about placing blame and you know, in her opinion of, you know, and resolved, you know, repression of feelings and being denied, you know, being able to express them in some capacity. Um, and so you know, when we talk about chronic illness and we talk about childhood trauma pieces, sometimes it's difficult for people to feel like they had traumatic experiences now. Absolutely. Now so lets, a lot of people started to hear about ace, the adverse childhood experience. Like it was a study, is that correct?

Speaker 3:

Yes. Okay. Yes, it was a study done in 1998 with about 17,000 patients from a Kaiser program. They sent them questionnaires to all, all of these patients. Most of them responded. And from that they, they were wondering because of some of their own experiences as doctors, the two lead investigators, weather adversity in childhood could have any impact on chronic illness and other chronic health conditions in adults. And they found that it did vary significantly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And so then they developed, um, a, you know, a way of measuring it, a test that someone can do, um, to see where people will land on that and stuff. And you know, and the adverse childhood experiences range from, you know, terrible things to even being around like things like divorce and stuff like that. So now what's interesting is, um, well let's, let's talk about this. When did you start collecting the research and putting it together on this, this website that you have in this blogs that you have?

Speaker 3:

I kind of had my Aha moment around two year, 2000 during one of my introductory classes. And the Aha moment was hollow, was writing a paper. And in somatic psychology, they talk about a little bit what else Miller was referring to that, um, adversity, overwhelming events can actually interrupt our body's ability to mobilize our innate capacity. Just keep moving through, fight our way through, flea our way through escape, um, and overcome a difficult situations or runaway from the bear or whatever it is. But when you can't do that, when you're not going to be able to fight it from the bear or flee the bear, your system actually can interrupt that whole mobilized thing and go into shutdown or freeze. That interrupts cycles in the body. Go ahead.

Speaker 2:

Well, it was so I was going to say somebody reacquainted this, but you know, or mentioned this before, that childhood is that is one of those situations where we are trapped by our childhood. Um, you know, I mean, kids, kids don't have a lot of freewill, so it's, it's an experience that, you know, if your parents or caregivers are subjecting these conditions to you, that you have to respond with a fight or a flight. Um, and you don't have a way of, uh, doing either. I mean that's, that's being trapped up and being a minor under the control of your parents.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And kids are essentially, kids are vulnerable because they are completely dependent on adults for getting their basic survival needs. That being fed, being sheltered, being provided for, but also having support for regulating really difficult or overwhelming emotions cause our brains aren't mature enough to do it on their own. They're designed, interacts with parents. So yeah, being a child is actually a huge developmental growing period when we're um, uh, about the most vulnerable other than pregnancy and birth in childhood. It's when we're the most vulnerable to what's happening in our lives

Speaker 2:

now. Um, so with a chronic illness and you had your Aha moment that you were like starting to start linking these things together, what have you seen now in the like 18 years since she's been doing this? What are some of the, the big sayings that, you know, through reviewing all these studies and, and researching this topic and there, what are some connections that you've been able to kind of visually make by integrating all these studies together?

Speaker 3:

Okay. So what I was saying about the Aha moment about realizing that cycles can get interrupted, that's pretty well. Well, it's fairly well acknowledged in mental health that that can be what leaves anxiety or depression or PTSD. At least from a somatic psychology perspective. It may not be in traditional mental health care, but that's, that is within smart psychology, quite well accepted. And I wondered whether there could be cycles interrupted that could lead to different chronic illnesses. So if the healthy cycle of how our blood pressure increases to keep blood circulating when we go for a walk or a jog or a marathon, what happens if that healthy cycle that knows how to come back to baseline gets interrupted? Can it cause high blood pressure to get stuck in a mode they can't come back down. And that's, that's actually what I've been finding throughout the literature all over the place because I was looking at it from this lens and there's been a lot of research coming out now in epigenetics, which is that our genes don't totally determine whether we get a chronic illness or not. Not everyone with chronic illness has genetic risk, but our genes interact with our life experiences and the two of them together shape whether genes, certain genes turn on, whether they turn off and all of those things actually regulate the minute processes in our cells, in our biology. And so that can actually make it so that you have a cycle where your blood pressure doesn't come down, it gets stuck. Or it's a cycle where, I don't know what's happening in rheumatoid arthritis, but chances are there's some cycle to has to do with the Sino VM and the fluid that gets stuck in type one diabetes. It's a process that you see in very normal mobilization, fight flight activity, where in order for our muscles to have the energy they need and the sh the fuel is sugar, our bodies will actively decrease the insulin that keeps the blood sugar levels high enough that our muscles have plenty of fuel. But if that gets stuck and doesn't come back to baseline, my theory is that that can go into diabetes.

Speaker 2:

Huh.

Speaker 3:

And yeah, it's, it sounds kind of out there, but there's, there's a, the latest research I've found is by a doctor Robert Navio at UC San Diego who does metabolic genetics, virology and he talks about the cell danger response. They can get activated and this cell danger response is at a micro biology cellular level. So it's not psychological. What's going on is how our bodies tried to defend themselves against threats can lead to all kinds of different symptoms in the longterm.

Speaker 2:

And you, you mentioned epigenetics, which is one of the really fascinating topic. Somebody you had described its definition. So for people that are listening that are like, ah, I don't know what that means. The definition that I'd heard that just was like, okay, I like this one was that, you know, we are born with our DNA. You know, it's there. It's the combination of everything that creates us who we are. But not all of it comes online. But that what experience does is it's a highlighter and the highlighter goes down the DNA and it highlights based on what just happened, what part of the DNA will end up coming online and being utilized, you know, by our bodies. Um, and so that's where that influence of the experience of the nature versus nurture comes into, you know, why people have that can have the same genetic DNA background but not get the same kind of diseases or effects or, you know, things like that. So that was to me like a nice, simple explanation of that. Um, what was interesting that I was even seeing too is that they think that even that some of that change can actually even be passed down, that once the, at the genetics effect, you know, one generation that there's a possibility that that can become an inheritable trait. Um, I haven't, you know, read too deeply in that, so I'm not going to make that claim that, because again, like I tell people, I'm not the expert here. You're the expert here. Um, I'm just trying to be educated, you know, about as many things as possible. Um, I remember you and I talking, um, some time ago and, uh, on the phone kind of bouncing back ideas and stuff because of my curiosity around this was, you know, is there something I could do in the world of rheumatoid arthritis to kind of help shed some light on disease origin? You know, myself and we were just kind of spinning around in and you had talked about a study in Europe that still stuck with me and it had to do with the fact that the study had showed that the geopolitical boundaries had more bearing on the development of a certain disease then the people's heritage, you know, DNA heritage did. Can you, can you talk about them? Because I went, it was just like, holy crap. That's, that's amazing.

Speaker 3:

It is. I think there was a study by Exxon on inflammatory bowel disease. I know it was on inflammatory bowel disease. Uh, and they had looked at the sense that people across one little boundary that hall have the same genetic makeup. It's actually really, people are very similar ethnic backgrounds and origins, but that the rates of the[inaudible] were really different. And that was the main thing about this. And, and yeah, I mean I don't remember the extra details for me. That's what struck me the most too.

Speaker 2:

Uh, you wrote about your dad, I mean this is what brought me to you was your dad's own or grandfather I guess, um, his own diagnosis with rheumatoid arthritis. Talk about that piece of it and how you kind of saw this in your own, in your own family here.

Speaker 3:

Well, I, um, was curious about my lineage and this was, I knew more about my mother's side and my dad's mother's side, but my dad's parents split up when he was young, like two years old. And so we really didn't know much about his dad. I'd met him once or twice. We'd stopped to see him when we were in that part of the country just a couple of times in my childhood. My Dad hadn't seen him most of his life. And so I started researching this with ancestry.com and some of these programs online that can let you look for the history and learned a little bit more about him. And some of the records I found, I was able to get his medical records. The, the, the stories had been that he also had diabetes, but I never saw that he had developed rheumatoid arthritis pretty late. I think it was in his sixties after he'd been in the army in World War II and it was really severe. The record showed that his Ra had, was amongst the most visibly severe they'd ever seen with the amount of deformity. And I remember as a child being really struck by his hands and his feet and the degree of deformity he had. And, you know, talking with my parents, we didn't even remember that. So there was something about that that struck me even then. And so trying to pursue what his own experiences were and maybe his own childhood. I, um, I couldn't find much. I found cemetery marketing's, I found dates for when his parents married. I found he had a little sister, but I kind of ran into roadblocks. And so I was able to actually apply for his death certificate, his parents death certificates. And it turned out that his mother had committed suicide. Oh Wow. And that just, yeah, completely blew me away. That kind of thing is such a major event. And he was something like six and a half when she committed suicide.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 3:

His little sister had been born, yeah. Like 15 months. She had a 15 month old baby. And that's all, you know, that suggests that there was some major stuff going on

Speaker 2:

for sure. And then a time period, you know, where our lack of information and knowledge of brain development and emotional development stuff. I mean, yeah, that's uh, that's pretty amazing. Um, and sad, truly sad. So when we talk about, uh, uh, adverse child experiences and aces, you know, one of the things that you've done on your website is that you've, you've created a fact sheet and a way for a person to measure themselves first and see if their score puts them in some place of where there could be some risk factor. Um, so describe what the ace test looks like and what's involved in taking me the ace test.

Speaker 3:

So I'll start off by, by clarifying. It's not actually a test. It's sort of like, it's not so much about a big score, a good score or a bad score, it's about, it's more like a survey that gives you a first clue as to whether some of these events, if you've experienced some of these events to consider, then the possibility that these events may be shaping your health today, whether it's emotional health or physical health or relationship health, chronic pain, cancer, it really has a big impact on all kinds of our behaviors and health state. And so what they boiled it down to was 10 questions. There are probably hundreds of different scenarios, but they boiled it down to 10 that were very significant in the study they did. And these are experiences a child has from birth to their 18th birthday. And so you look at these 10 questions to see if you've experienced them. One is the loss of a parent through divorce or separation. And this original one, they did not include the death of a parent, which could be essentially a whole lot more severe than divorce and separation. Right? So that's one. And, um, other things are whether a parent has a mental illness such as depression or PTSD. There's also physical, emotional, sexual abuse, but also physical or emotional neglect. So you may have a parent who's really glad to be a parent and who really loves you but works a ton of hours and is never home. There may be some degree of neglect that happens in that way. Although in their survey, they're kind of looking at the more severe extreme of parents who really aren't paying a lot of tension. They also include having a, had a parent who was in jail or who has a substance abuse issue like alcohol. So when you look at the questionnaire, the survey, you add up, how many of these 10 events you've experienced and the higher your score, the higher the risk of having have some ongoing longterm effects to your health and in other places in your life. So the startling finding, doctor Robert and a was with the CDC and Dr. Vincent Felitti was with Kaiser. They were the two who did this study. And when doctor and started looking at the results, he said he cried. He says he could not believe the high percentage of people from a very middle class, really normal looking regular population of people who have enough money to have insurance. The degree of suffering they'd had, his kids and the percentages were really high. And even with a score of two out of 10, it greatly increases your risk of having some kind of chronic health effects.

Speaker 2:

[inaudible] I know some people have seen probably some of the videos that have gone around on Facebook or one of the doctors was talking about it because it was, it did begin to shape, you know, pediatricians in terms of, you know, not just treating a kid that was coming in with asthma, that actually being able to, you know, look at mom and dad and start asking some really pertinent questions of them to get a sense of what was going on in the house. And you know, what I love about what happened with ace and, and this movement, you know, in the medical community to look at this, is that intervention as children into what be causing this, these, um, these adverse experiences and getting help at that level. You know, it was going to have a, a big impact that we're not going to see for years. You know, I mean, because the children are going to have to grow assuming that the intervention is successful, you know, with the families and that, you know, nothing's actually happening with it. So, you know, it's funny, you know, and it's not funny, but I, I know that, you know, you say that if, when you take this test, your ace score was a zero. Yeah. Okay. So what about somebody that would take an exam like this and go, well, I don't have any adverse childhood experiences. Is My chronic illness still a trauma based thing or is it, you know, does it my DNA or my, my genetics.

Speaker 3:

That's really common. A lot of people, uh, that's probably the biggest concern or complaint about the ace survey is that a lot of people say, yeah, but what if I was bullied in school? Or what if I grew up in a dangerous neighborhood or what if I'm a refugee or what if a parent died? Um, one of the risk factors is domestic violence between the parents and they specify that it's the mother who's being abused by the father. And so another question will be, well, what if it was my dad who was abused by my mother? Or the list goes on. There are a lot of ways to have a zero on the survey but still have experienced all kinds of traumas. And the ones I'm talking about are kind of more obvious forms of trauma once you begin to understand what that means. But there's also a whole other separate level. And this was one of the things in our first conversation, which was really about the attachment experience and what your relationship is like with your parents. And so that was a whole other area that I discovered as well, which is the way a parent is able to interact with their child, listen to them, attuned to them, repair, sort of, kind of come back when they've made the inevitable mistakes because no one's perfect and really keep coming back to connecting with their child. That's attachment when those kinds of nurturing, comforting, safe, relational experiences are missing, that's also a risk factor for later physical health problems and mental health conditions. I see that, that I, I talk about that as an an, uh, an ace score of zero or the sort of invisible aces and that's probably the hardest one for people to get the has to do with attachment. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And I, and so I remember when we talked about it, you turned me on to the results of the Longitudinal study that the University of Minnesota did. And I know that's not everyone's easy reading, but I did read it, I downloaded it and it was fascinating to go through that because now they've got 30 years of data and they were able to follow a couple hundred participants from about three before they were born to about 30 years in age. So they were able to go through this experience and what was mind blowing was that after they had gotten enough information and started to really understand the attachments that some of these participants had with their parents, they could predict with like 80% accuracy what the future behavior was going to be like, what was this kid going to do next? How are they gonna respond in this situation? Um, and that it, they started to see that the socioeconomic background was a non factor. You couldn't blame it on them being poor or black or white or any of that stuff. That it would go back to the attachment if the Iq didn't matter. You know, highly intelligent children and children that didn't measure on the Iq, their attachment guided more what their future was going to look like. Zen, any of those other factors. And that's part of the piece of that study that was just like, wow. I mean, you know that, that relationship there. So I appreciate it that you, you know, you and I had discussed all that, does those things, and like you and I talked about, it's hard for us to understand what our attachment might actually be like. We don't always get the benefit of sitting down with our mom and saying, so how did it go? You know, because they may not have been as reflective as necessary or they may be gone. And so trying to understand our earliest moments in earliest years and months of our life is almost an impossibility, which I think is why it makes it hard for people to put their brain around the fact that that's kind of an important time period, you know?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. It really is. And something I'd like to add that we opened up this little awhile ago, um, was a lot of people think that if we're talking trauma or we're talking adversity or we're truck talking about these attachment relationships, all potentially influencing health, many people think that this means it's psychological. And that's probably the biggest question I get. And what the science is finally uncovering is that it's not. And that's where it comes back to epigenetics and it comes back to the fact that our genes don't operate in a vacuum and they actually interact and so do our growing brains and immune systems. Everything is interacting with the environment and shaping itself to deal with the environment that we have. And so these are changes that are happening deep in our physiology, in our bodies and they are not out of Willpower or laziness like you talked about earlier or a weakness. It's a nervous system issue is what's going on.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And I'm so glad you mentioned that because that's one of the like residency seems for me is you know, my whole mindset changed dramatically once I could see that, you know, we were beyond the realm of theory and we were actually getting into results. Scientific results were showing that these things are a variety of these things actually did have a, a physiological and a neurological basis to them that, you know, the benefit of looking in the brain, like literally looking at the brain, measuring it, taking blood tests while the brain is working to understand, you know, what the body is doing and the adrenal system and all those things. Before we could do that, all that, all that researchers and psychologists and psychiatrists could do is just to theorize, you know, just put it out there and said there were all competing series on what made us do things, Freud and everybody else that you get to read about. And that's not what we have to rely on today. And understanding, you know, our emotional and our neurological development, we don't have to worry about the series we now have. The science is starting to come up out of here for us to be able to look at and review and so thank you for putting that out there and saying that. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And you know, if we look at autoimmune disease, the current main perspective is that our bodies are mistaking their own tissues and attacking themselves at random or by accident. And what this, there's a really a new paradigm emerging around chronic illness. The cell danger response. Robert Navios lab is one of the groups that's talking about this and that is that it's because a, the nervous system has gotten switched into a defense mode survival mode and that's what's driving the states underneath all these different diseases. And so from that perspective, he doesn't talk about this specifically for auto immunity, but this is my hypothesis is that the body is very specifically determining what should be turned on and what should be turned off. If your body, your brain has decided that, look, we are in a world of threat. There is no sense of safety. We need to be in survival mode and we need to maintain this particular cycle. Then we need to kill off these cells and promote these ones. And I think that's where autoimmune disease comes in. It's from a brain that believes it's in. It's still caught in a life threatening or relatively life threatening type of situation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And that was, that's always been, you know, I, I subscribed to that series, um, you know, okay. In the last year, I guess it's actually been two years ago in October. Um, my, my partner, he and I were still together at that time and he had another motorcycle accident cause that's just what happens when you were riding dirt bikes. Um, his was less severe at that point, but he ended up shattering his ankle and, uh, in multiple places. And the stress was that I had a job outside our farm and I had just taken a few days off for him and I had to go on a hunting trip. And so I was gone for a few days and my job was, I was the general manager. Like I was the boss of this entire, you know, business. And so I taken a few days off and you know, for a vacation, came back and didn't even get a chance to get back and get to work before I now had a medical emergency on my hand because my, my partners, um, you broke his leg on a Saturday, but we weren't able to get him into surgery until the following Friday. And, and a broken leg is a really major injury because it, we lose a leg, figure out how life is without it, you know? And plus it wasn't set so there was extreme pain because he w you know, we have bones that are not in their proper position, so, and use a doctor, you know, so instead of gay being able to jump back into work, I'm now in nurse mode and I'm, I'm exhausted from that as well because I, you know, I set a timer for myself so that every three hours you could keep pain medication and I'm just to make them comfortable until we could get them into surgery and get it all put back together. During the course of that, the stress of taking care of him wasn't the issue. What happened was is that at my plant and at my company, the owner of the business was not had lost his sympathy of my situation. And so there was that stress of, well, you need to come back. And I'm like, I can't come back. Like, and it was arbitrary. There was so much other things going on. Like I'm not going to blame this guy for that. But the stress of that situation started and my wrists started to hurt again. And it started around November and in the course of time it took two years because I went from that moment to so many things in life, started to kind of unwind and unravel that I was in a constant threatened state and as a result, my right wrist was in pain. It got worse. I have shared the story with other people. It got worse. I don't know, probably about a couple of months ago, the pain was always there. My doctor, my rheumatologist noted it. We x it to make sure that the, the inflammation wasn't causing damage, but he was like, you, I can tell you can't move it. You know, I can't, I can't really, and I tried weightlifting and working out and all these and they're not doing anything. Um, and so he's like, well, we need to really keep an eye on this because this, this could end up becoming like a disabling piece of it. And then I started dating, like after taking a year off of, you know, breaking up and kind of, you know, being in a state of a self induced state of celibacy, I'd thought, well, I'd like to start dating again. But the dating world thrust me back into old wounded feelings of not being chosen, you know, and having to deal with the, you know, the, um, the, the, the mindset of rejection and not wanting to go through rejection and all that. And the pain in my wrists started to rise up again. And so I went to my therapist and said, um, I've never dated with rheumatoid arthritis. This is no fun. You know, because the, the stressors and all that were contributing to it. So we, we spent some time focusing on this mindset, you know, of of, you know, of dealing with this part of the, of the traumatic, you know, my, my trauma experiences and stuff. And, and then a funny thing happened. I went out when evening with a gentleman and we had some very frank and honest conversations. And through the therapeutic process I found myself able to comfort myself during the discussion, being able to parent myself, all the things that I've been training to do. And I kid you not. The next morning my wrist stopped hurting for the first time in two years. And I told my therapist, I was like the switch that had been flipped on. I felt it go off. I don't know exactly what the nature of the conversation was. I don't know exactly what that thing was, but that's why I like, I do believe that like, and I would it be great to be cured of this disease forever. Amazing. Yes, it would be that it can happen, but I do know that I was able somehow to flip a switch off. It had been, I was no longer in that constant state of stress and fighting and it went away.

Speaker 3:

Fantastic.

Speaker 2:

Right? So that's why, you know, talking to you and the things that you do, that's why I want, you know, other people that are out there that have, that have been going through this, you know, dealing with something like a, you know, a rheumatoid arthritis or, or had been seeing these signals between their body and their diseases and having them being emotionally related to say, that's not in your mind. That could very well be exactly what's going on.

Speaker 3:

Right. Emotions are really just an indication that something's going on and going on with your nervous system at some level. And so would it be of interest, if I were to explain just briefly what it is that you might be working with?

Speaker 2:

Totally

Speaker 3:

grabbing, it gave me goosebumps. Um, the pattern you described where your symptoms would, it would be, you know, maybe once a month you'd have a flare up and then it would migrate to a different part of your body and then it was your wrist. And then it became kind of all the time that, uh, from the trauma, the field of science in trauma, the term for that is that the pattern underneath it that you started to track, the pattern that's driving the pain is kindling. It's actually like the little bits of wood you put to get a fire started. Those are catching fire and it's the nerves and the wiring and the pathways of a particular cell danger response that's getting kindled and strengthened and built up. And that, that the pattern that's driving symptoms. And so there comes a tipping point where all of a sudden instead of just kindling having a little fire and then it goes out a little fire and then it goes out, it becomes a more or less constant thing that's sort of on all the time. And when you described this event where you went out in the evening and you were able to regulate yourself, calm yourself, that is you working with your nervous system. It's not just your psychology, you're actually helping your nervous system shift gears from fight flight to a state that has a more, a greater capacity to regulate and that regulation can turn down the fight flight. And so it's not some great big fight flight thing that's driving your symptoms. It's very likely a very specific cell danger response happening. And this nervous system you're accessing and calming helped turn that response back off. And so there's a lot within our power. And another piece about the psychology is that people think, Oh, if you can do something with your mind like acknowledge what's going on, recognize it and then be able to regulate and self soothing, self regulate, calm yourself down. It must mean that what you're treating is psychological too, but that's not the case. You're actually working with a particular branch of your nervous system that can calm down the activated ones.

Speaker 2:

Hmm. And that's, I'm glad, and I'm glad you said that piece too, because you know, one of the things that we get and meaning the collective people have that are in this, you know, chronic pain or chronic disease world is, uh, you know, people that are trying to tell us that, you know, our thoughts are hurting us and if we just think more positively and you know, meditate on, you know, better visions that somehow that like change everything. And, and, and I have a friend who actually has crones disease and she and I both just kind of like, you know, deal with the fact of like, well, I wish that really worked because he had, that'd be great. But the reality is, is I still have to take these medications because my bro, you know, the, the physiology of the disease has to be managed to some extent. You know, it's like I can't positively sync my way out now. I say that after having to share a story where I'm like, Hey, somehow I did something with my brain. Which, but like you're, you're tying the two of those things together, you know, for, for people to understand. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for, yeah,

Speaker 3:

well, you know, that positive mindset. Go ahead.

Speaker 2:

No, no, no. Please continue. That positive mindset.

Speaker 3:

The positive mindset is something that gets talked about a lot. Just think positive. It will be okay. And if there is truth in scientific studies that if we do have a more optimistic, positive mindset, it can have a positive impact on our body. But what doesn't get included in this as, why are we having negative thoughts or difficult or self blaming or self critical or anxious thoughts in the first place. And then that takes us back to aces and attachment and early trauma and things that stimulated certain pathways, beliefs, um, and ways of being in the world, in our nervous systems that lead to those thoughts. And so sometimes starting to make yourself think differently in a conscious way can make a difference. But other times you actually have to work with what's driving those thoughts in the first place.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I agree 100%. I, you know, I felt like for years, you know, people joke, like I tried all the Robin's methods, Tony and Mel Robbins, you know, and all the self help stuff. And it wasn't until getting to the place of acknowledging, just like you said, they're like, I positively sunk my way everyday. Shared means. I mean, I did everything and I, you know, meditated on what I wanted my life to be, what I wanted to manifest, all that other stuff. But it changed until I got down to the root of the fact that I had effects of PTSD from a, you know, some traumatic experiences, uh, as a, as a young girl, um, you know, un Un, you know, the emotional neglect aspects and all the things that, you know, came that embodied what my experience was growing up and getting to that, well then, then you go back and you apply some Tony Robbins and some Mel Robbins to it and you're far more effective, you know?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So this brings up another thing, which is that it's not often, um, symptoms are chronic illness. We'll start like yours did after a particularly stressful period, a specific traumatic of traumatic event, or maybe you've been caregiving for a loved one for 18 months. So it'll often get triggered by that. But that triggers the last straw. It's not actually the cause, even when it's an infection. It's often the last straw in a series over your entire life from prenatal birth, infancy and childhood adverse events that add their effects add up over time until they finally turned from kindling to really turning on our danger response fully on. But the opposite is what's so wonderful to know about. Every time you add a buffer or a, an experience that helps your nervous system or you to regulate a bit more, or to turn that survival response down or turn it off, all of those add up to, and so the more of those you have on board, the easier the next ones that you try become. So it could be changing your diet because that actually works with the nervous system and inflammation. It could be meditating. It works with the nervous system also. These aren't actually just psychological tools and so the more of these view add up, the easier it becomes to turn the switch and turn things down or for other things that didn't work before to then begin to work. Even medications can work better.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So your website, Veronique, the chronic illness, trauma studies, uh, dot com and I'll actually have a link to this in the podcast notes in here. We want people to come and visit this website. What are they going to see here that you've collected for people that are interested in exploring perhaps relationship between their own chronic illnesses and maybe what some of the sources for that might be.

Speaker 3:

If they go to the homepage, they're kind of get an overview of most of the major posts on that blog and they can kind of pick from there what they might be interested in following or looking into. There's, uh, I have a couple of articles on the adverse childhood experiences where you can download these fact sheets you were talking about and maybe give them to your doctor or give them to a friend. There is also a section there. I've, I've kind of built it up around different time periods and different types of trauma that can increase your risk for chronic illness. So there'll be a set of articles on pregnancy, birth and infancy related risks. There's a section on the adverse childhood. I only have a couple of articles on multigenerational trauma that's not really built in, in depth yet. There's also, I'm an article on attachment and so people can look at what they feel might have impacted them and get a little bit of the science that supports this and how it's not psychological. Um, I have a few headers in the menu. One of them has chronic diseases and so I talk about some of the science specifically with different diseases. Type one diabetes is when I've written about a lot. But reading about type one diabetes will actually help you see how it could apply to your own disease. I've just used the science in one particular area because there's so much, I haven't been able to cover all the different diseases, but they tend, what I discovered is that they do really apply to all the different diseases. So you could look at type one diabetes to get some sense. There's one on asthma because it talks about bonding and how the mother baby bond can influence health. And then there is um, a section of tools and under the tools I have things that people can do for themselves or how to find therapists who specialize in working with trauma from a body based perspective so that it's not psychological or in your head it's actually accessing how to work with the nervous system. So they'll find the list of books within, get learn more about all of this in different topics. There's a list of therapies and the books for different types of trauma and how they could work with that or just learn about that. There's workbooks and a few online courses I refer to. I had personally don't offer therapy or online courses and it's more about empowering people to begin to understand what they're looking for. So then you can go find what feels like a good fit for you and your life. And I'll have a blog post on um, yeah, different tools that people can use and why. Things like diet and mind, body medical medicine practices can actually be helpful with the nervous system. So I'm really interested in helping people get the information they need so that they can then find what they themselves are drawn to because it's going to be different for everybody.

Speaker 2:

Right, right. Yeah, and I, this is, I mean for everybody that's listening to this isn't, this is an invaluable resource. I mean, and I appreciate that you've just, you've got it all out there and that this isn't one of those things where you have to sign up and you get a course for nine 99 or anything like, not that anybody's doing anything wrong by making money off of it, but you are just, you're just throwing it out there. And trying to get everybody well educated. And I found that in this experience of doing, you know, one broken mom, it's been, I don't want to say it's been easy to get people to talk to me, but it kind of has been because it's very hard to reach the public, you know, the, the populous at large and to, to feed out and, and D and get this information to them because we don't have, you know, processes or standards or, you know, a ways in place for us to be able to, to do this effectively, to, to share this information that researchers and doctors and therapists all know that they've studied and found and to get it out there, you know, because the schools aren't teaching, you know, mental health and wellness. It's not like it's a regular part of curriculum, you know, pes get cut and let alone talking about that. Parenting parents are sent off into the world really without instruction manuals and um, but yet with no problem. And so we just, we kind of are flailing around in social media is an effective way of doing it. If everything out there was truthful, but that's not always the case. Um, and so it's, it's really hard. Um, and so I, you know, I appreciate that you're here and that's why I wanted you here with me. It was because I wanted other people to know that this is a resource for them to, to dig into and stuff because there are a lot of folks that, um, you know, that do have these illnesses that just have just believe at some level that they're just a broken person and they were just born this way. And it's, it's like I said, my lifestyle changed to know that. And I, and I truly believe this because again, being rigorous about my own therapy therapeutic process that, um, you know, heart disease is one of the leading killers in the country and it's one of the side effects of some of the drugs that we take for Ra. And I began to wonder, is heart disease really the the outcome of the drug or is it the outcome of the life and all the, the experiences that somebody had if they lived in an adverse childhood that may, you know, is that more of an influence on their development of heart disease? Then the, you know, the shotgun they had to take and stuff and so to think that you couldn't, you really can be if you're willing. I mean, here's the willingness part. Not Everybody's willing to dig in and go through a process of healing from trauma. It is hard. I will tell you that personally and I'm sure you know that as well. Trauma healing is not, it is, it does take courage. Yeah. And it, and it will take, go ahead. Go ahead. You're the therapist. Well,

Speaker 3:

I like to keep normalizing because it does often seem like people aren't willing and sometimes it really is that, but other times if we have a shutdown response because of traumas in our lives, whether they're subtle or obvious, it can make it very hard to mobilize even towards things. It could be helpful for us. And so there's a certain group of people that have a pretty strong freeze response at a, again, it's at a brain nervous system, physiological level. It just makes it really hard to do things or try things or experiment things or to take risks, which all of these things feel like too. So it can be really a double, triple, quadruple whammy when you look at and begin to understand how all these things affect us, including how they affect our attempts to learn more and try to get better.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah, that's very true. And that's one of those things too that, you know, when we talk about that there's some people you can't help. I mean, the reality is with this is that you, you have to realize that we all have to be taking accountability for ourselves. And maybe someone's listening and goes, hey, this person like I that I know and love and care about, they might benefit from that. If they aren't open. Like you said, they're freeze is shut them down. You, you, you may not immune. I think you can subtly influence them, that you can't force anybody down this path or into this role. They can't be shot or anything. So

Speaker 3:

going to be the greatest gifts for everybody, either they're people, you know, people find all kinds of different ways to heal. And this is gonna piss some people off because they're going to immediately assume they, since they've been blamed by so many people, they're going to assume that we're saying or I'm saying that it's psychological even though the new research is really making that in an clearly inaccurate entity

Speaker 2:

statement. Yes, that's an important point. So everybody listening, what we're talking about is that yes, we've got science to back this up, that we've got nervous system things going on here that mean you're, you're okay and you can be fixed. So, um, well Veronique again, I know we're going to talk again. Um, and, but this, giving this big overview of this concept to get people really thinking about it, getting them to your website to do some kind of exploring and find some tools and maybe to start to open up their own internal conversations, I think has been tremendous. And so thank you so much for taking all this time to speak with me. Um, I, um, I feel like blessed and honored that I landed, you know, into your, your sphere, you know, so many months ago. And, um, and I appreciate everything that you do with taking, I mean cause this is, this is no small feat, which you've done compiling all of this research and understanding all of this and having it out there for people to get access to it, I think is just, I mean it's a, it's a generous contribution to, you know, to everyone that's out there. So thank you so much for doing that. And thank you for talking with me today.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much. Do you, I mean it's really, it's been a real pleasure and an honor for me to, and I look forward to our continued future conversation. Awesome. Thank you for listening to one broken mom. You can find podcasts notes on my website,[inaudible] dot com and they're all provide all links to all of the resources that we mentioned on the episode. Also, if you have any questions, comments for ideas for other episodes, feel free to send me an email. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, I'd love to have you be a part of the team. Finally, if you like what you hear, please share the podcast and leave a review so that others can find it. You're all here to get better together. I am the host I need for cornea, and as always, I'm super grateful to have you as a listener.

Speaker 2:

Until next time, have a great day.