A point I have tried to make since I was told about it in 2010 is that successful people can hurt too. What do I mean by successful? I guess it would be like me, of like the woman in this story aired on NPR. We are people who have tried to do things right. We graduated from high school, college and professional school. We have established careers. We have families. We don’t break the law. But we hurt, and that hurt leads us to a variety of behavior, “Negative,” “Neutral” and “Positive,” that may eventually lead us to poor health later in life (or maybe earlier).
In the story, Carol Redding reveals she has all 10 Adverse Childhood Experiences. I know lots of people who have all ten. Some of them are considered amazingly successful. But they hurt. That’s what ACE’s do to you. You may have all consuming fear, anxiety, stress, tension and phobias that find their Root Cause in your ACE’s. Your brain has been changed. I describe it like a thermostat. If it’s set at 65 degrees, you generally feel comfortable. If it’s set at 80 degrees, your furnace is always going on. You use a lot of fuel. If you have a high fear response, it’s always going on. Instead of fuel oil, chemicals are set off and course through your body. As a person, your fear response has one purpose—to protect you from harm. It activates automatically. You don’t really know its happening because the activation is not something you think about in your prefrontal cortex. When you activate, you are going to do one of three things: fight, flee or freeze. If you fight or flee, you use up the chemicals, and that’s good for you. Maybe not so much in our society, but in nature it’s good for you. Your body dissipates the chemicals and resets the fear response once you feel safe. You are ready to meet the next challenge.
When you freeze, however, the chemicals remain in your body. Animals have a method for releasing the chemicals. After freezing, they will seek safety, start deep, rhythmic breathing, and start tremoring, body shaking. It’s universal. This video shows a polar bear tremoring after being darted. The bear is exercising its flight response when it’s darted. The dart freezes the polar bear. On waking, the polar bear discharges the chemicals by tremoring. At 1:50 in the video, the polar bear is tremoring. Then of camera, it gets up and leaves. Imagine you tremoring in your Doctor’s office. The prescription pad will be out so fast for a tranquilizer your head will spin. A good Doctor will let you tremor, in a safe place, and then put you where you can learn what your body is doing.
I grew up with 6 ACE’s. I have declared that in public presentations. I have an AB from an Ivy League college and a JD from a good law school. I should feel good about accomplishment. But they don’t prevent my fear response from activating. Carol Redding probably feels the same way, and she is working on her Ph.D. and that’s a rare accomplishment in our society. We all have behaviors that we can attribute to our fear response. Instead of tremoring, however, we find soothing and calming behaviors that might alleviate our fear response by promoting a response with positive chemicals. I will refer to this as Self Healing. Self Healing might hurt us in the long run, but it helps for the here and now. Self Healing response can include all of the negative behaviors mentioned in the ACE Study: obesity, smoking, alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, violence and a host of others. The Self Healing response doesn’t have to promote long term benefit. It only needs to get us through our fear response. Face it, the most we can do when our fear response is activated is freeze. And the chemicals remain in our body until we use them or counter them. If we counter them, they still do damage to our physical and emotional selves. How?
If we freeze, and do nothing to dissipate the fear response, the chemicals remain in our body and we experience fear. Our body believes something is going to happen to us. While the chemicals may dissipate naturally over time, the time they do spend in our body is damaging. The emotional distress they cause us is a familiar feeling we have all the time, so we may not suspect it's a fear response. We may have found, through experimentation, that certain behaviors help mediate the fear response. Or it may just happen. I suspect that flirtatious and promiscuous behaviors may come from the positive sensations that attention from the opposite sex brings you. If someone tells you they think you are handsome, or beautiful, you react chemically. It makes you feel good (in most cases). If someone compliments you, you get a similar feeling. Recognition makes you feel good. But so do smoking, drinking, drug use and a host of other negative behaviors. That’s why I believe we should be looking at Neutral and Positive behavior accumulation when looking for ACE’s impact in a life. I believe that accomplishment may well be fueled by the positive approvals one received, or by a fear of failure. By neutral behaviors, I usually cite gambling like bingo or pull-tabs. Almost winning gives you a chemical response, so you don’t even have to win to get approval chemicals.
What’s my point? It’s that we should not ignore assessing successful people for ACE’s. While their behaviors may not cause present damage, it may accumulate over time and erupt in a major episode during a period of intense stress, or in poor health. A friend of mine, a highly respected professional at the peak of his profession, committed suicide after a traumatic episode. When we recognize that successful appearing people have ACE’s, we can off them help that can keep their life on track and healthy forever.
Understanding this makes it hard for me to accept proposed remedies such as teaching resilience, talk therapy or going back to a cultural approach, like is proposed constantly among my Indian people. Why is that?
Think about this. When you pay attention to someone in a structured program, you are paying attention to him or her in a positive way. While they are in the program, they are likely to feel good. You are consciously trying to make them feel good. And they usually will. But when the program ends, does the positive consequence end. My experience tells me it does not. We tend to go on to the next experience that gives us relief from the relentless attack of our fear response. And eventually an anxiety response (prefrontal cortex initiated response).
I will post my explanation for what I believe works in another post.
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