This is the first in a series of blogs about what I believe to be some of the consequences – “negative” and “positive” – of positive and adverse childhood experiences (PACEs) across my lifespan. I share this as my healing journey takes another twisty turn for the better. I’d love to know if and how you believe your positive and adverse childhood experiences have affected your health.
I’ll post other installments as we at PACEs Connection continue to share the latest science, and stay focused on our work to connect and create healing communities. Subsequent topics may include insights on PACEs and finances, relationships, and parenting.
Please know my intention is not to offend anyone, or to make light of my own experiences, or to make light of the experiences of others. It is to share experiences in hopes of helping fellow travelers and wanting the world to know that the traumas being wrought upon us are in large part the results of broken values and systems in the collective that affect families and individuals. Physicians, policymakers, and business leaders need to know about the pain perpetuated and created by their reluctance to recognize and address childhood trauma as the root cause of most of our seemingly most intractable societal and personal challenges. We all live with collective “undigested trauma” and I believe that is why we are a nation and a people experiencing so much pain. The pain is trying to tell us all a lot. And I’ll say more about that in subsequent essays.
I do believe we are our own best healers, that laughter is some of the best medicine, and that being able to look back on adversity with curiosity, compassion, and grace adds years to our lives.
There is science to support those beliefs. Proof positive? I am still here, and look forward to sharing these and other findings with this “chosen family” of fellow members of PACEs Connection.
Happy 4th of July weekend. May it be truly liberating.
GUTS
Here’s the deal: I was born with gut issues. There are myriad reasons for it, probably, but the root cause of the root and sacral chakra block that keeps my guts twisted, turning, and sometimes frozen or burning, is likely trauma experienced when I was an itty-bitty fetus.
Adverse fetal experiences?
I say adverse birth experiences because my mother was the victim of horrific domestic violence while she carried me, and it sure didn’t get better when she had a baby girl instead of the hoped-for baby boy.
Anyway, that’s kind of root cause of why, at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I am AWAKE. Doing cat-cow yoga moves. Breathing deeply into my bowels. Drinking MORE hot water. Taking the fistful of probiotics I take in the morning to complement the fistful of probiotics I take mid-day and the fistfull I take at night.
This is a 24-7 operation, trying to regulate my dysregulated guts. And it has been for much of my life. Oddly, while I was pregnant and pumped full of progesterone, and then breastfeeding and high on my own oxytocin, I didn’t have these issues. But that was more than 30 years ago. Those were the sweetest of days, despite all manner of other challenges.
But now it is about 5:45 a.m. I’ve done more yoga moves. I am sitting on the john with my feet up on a box to replicate the effect of using a “Squatty Potty”, a plastic footstool like thing I’d bought years ago after seeing it on SharkTank. As part of the sales pitch, the successful inventor revealed that the way Americans sit while toileting actually prevents a healthy bowel movement.
Go figure. Not having our bodies in a squatting position – as our hunter-gatherer nomadic ancestors did – isn’t good for us for many reasons. But that’s another gut report.
How many different simultaneous actions are happening here to support this effort?
- All those probiotics are working in my frozen gut
- I am massaging my part of my lower abdomen in a way that is supposed to help facilitate movement
- I have been listening to the “Inner River” meditation in my “Flare Up Kit” on the Nerva app (I pay about $20 a month for it.) It is delightful. A lovely Australian lady hypnotizes me in 15 minutes to “relax my body” and calm my sympathetic nervous system the-heck -down so I can get to rest and digest and what I call DIVEST
- I’ve been rocking gently, as that, too, is supposed to help
- Prior to this magic moment, I sipped a cup of hot water
- I also drank a tall-boy cup of “Bio Coffee” that tastes great with some stevia in it, and was created to help customers “love what it does to your body” because it’s formulated to help support gut health
- Hours before this moment, I drank a few ounces of purified water into which I had dumped a scoop of “Calm” magnesium, which helps me sleep and has the side benefit of promoting “motility”
- Prior to bed, I had also exercised, eaten a meal of organic turkey, organic jicama tortillas, and papaya. (I eat about six papayas a week because they are supposed to be so good for your guts). I had laughed some by watching the most recent episode of “Ted Lasso.” Laughter is great for guts
- I had also had a long talk with a dear friend, which helped me have a sense of being supported and connected. (Relational health supports all health systems, but especially gut health. I think about this often as I eat dinner alone and don’t always relate to my food respectfully by taking time to savor it and thank the plant or creature whose energy I am consuming to stay alive. Note to self: ponder these things for a future essay!)
If I had a nickel for every dollar spent on different remedies for JUST my stomach issues over my lifetime, I might not be rich. But I’d be on the way.
A little bit of information (there is MUCH more) about PACEs science and gut health.
We know from the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study published in 1998 by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permenete, and written by personal heroes Vincent Felitte, MD, and Rob Anda, MD, that the more ACEs are stacked up in our history, the greater the likelihood of all manner of health issues. My score is eight out of the ten original ACEs.
Subsequent studies looking specifically at gut health show the correlation between gastrointestinal issues and ACEs. The dose-related response truths hold up. The more ACEs, the greater the likelihood of gut trouble. (I am also telling this story because I want to raise awareness of the connection between ACEs and all manner of issues, but also because I want to contribute to raising awareness of the correlation so maybe, just maybe, the next gut doctor I go to will know the rationale for asking patients to answer the ACE questionnaire!)
Baby and little kid guts. Opium?
As a child there were visits to the pediatrician. And the memories of being given paregoric – opium – which tasted like licorice (I cannot stand that taste) and which my mother kept above the refrigerator.
I have no idea how often she pulled out the dropper to knock me out when I was a colicky baby and whiny toddler. Or how many times the cleaning ladies who took care of me much of the time from the age of early infancy until I became a latchkey kid, slipped it to me so they could have a moment’s peace to do the work they were hired to do.
I have imagined, since doing exhausting rounds of inner child work and putting it together that my maternal grandmother died at the same time my mother went back to work – when I was just six weeks old – that the instructions to the cleaning ladies, who were paid $4 a day and not treated very well, must have been to “cook, clean, iron, and oh, by-the-way, there’s a baby in there”.
So that must have been part of the reason I have almost always felt an undercurrent of loneliness. Because I was left at home with the cleaning lady at least three or four days a week while my mother was working and or taking part in her myriad civic duties. And the person hired to clean the house and do all those other chores and take care of me? How could she have had a lot of enthusiasm for the role, given that she was being paid less than a dollar an hour, was expected to do an inordinate number of tasks, and was likely missing her own children? It was a no-win situation and when I was older and learned more about how Black people were treated, that, too, made my stomach hurt. Still does.
Where the nurturing came into the equation.
Thank God I also know that I sometimes stayed with my paternal grandmother. She loved me deeply and taught me, from an early age, about being kind to people. She also taught me about bugs, flowers, gardening, canning, pickling, cooking, and the joy of shelling peas. She was a living, breathing positive childhood experience (PCE) for me.
But in between those lovely visits to her farm, and wonderful times watching my next door neighbor, Miss Minnie Anne, cook and garden, I was a pretty sickly child who got carsick on the way to school. And who would throw up at the first whiff of certain odors. In fact, as a third grader, I contributed mightily to the Great Maple Street Elementary School Chain Reaction Barf of 1964.
The Great Maple Street Elementary School Chain Reaction Barf of 1964.
I remember it as if it were a minute ago: Someone threw up in the hallway on the way back from the lunchroom. We’d had fish sticks, mashed potatoes and maybe turnip greens or peas for lunch. Something green. Anyway, the scent of fishy vomit floated my way.
My friend Sally stood in line in front of me as I projectile vomited into her waist-length, shiny brown hair.
Several other kids chucked on the person in front of them.
The school janitor was shoveling that minty sawdust-like stuff all over the hallway to try and mask the scent. It was a feast for all the senses: sight, smell, sound, the touch of the teachers pushing us against the wall and away from each other, and the lingering taste of, well, you know.
We all got to go home for the rest of the day.
While I know Sally forgave me for upchucking on her, I once advocated for her so vociferously that I got paddled by the principal.
"A little Stokely Charmichael"
Perhaps I fought so hard on her behalf out of guilt for spewing bodily fluids onto her; perhaps it was because I started fighting for the underdog as a tiny child protecting my brother during my parent’s knock-down, drag-out, liquor-fueled (him, NOT her; thank God they weren’t both drinking!) fights.
Whatever the reason, later that year or the next, Sally had been out sick for a week or two, and was being forced to complete all of her homework in what other kids and I thought was an unre
asonably short period of time. I circulated a petition about this being unfair, resulting in the paddling and my being called “a little Stokely Carmichael” by the principal, as he whacked my fifty or so pound self three or four times with a long wooden paddle. It even had holes in it to enhance the pain.
Stokely Carmichael was a civil rights leader. In pre-integration small-town Georgia, comparing me to a Black man threatening this old white principal’s way of life was NOT a compliment. It was a comparison that earned me more punishment at home.
My beloved little paternal grandmother – she probably weighed eighty-five pounds soaking wet – was courageous as hell, herself a victim of domestic violence and an advocate for the Black tenants to whom my grandfather rented run-down shanties. I’d like to think she was secretly proud of the principal’s comparison, though I am certain it mortified the rest of the family, most of whom did not hold me in favor for my questioning of the hymn, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” with its key line “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I wondered why, if Jesus loved everyone, we weren’t supposed to too?
A thrilling diagnosis.
I could go on about my guts as a kid, but I’ll fast forward to being 20 and having an “ulcerated area in my duodenum.” Truly, I was thrilled with the diagnosis, tendered by our trusted family doctor when I stayed in the hospital for tests and rest on a Christmas vacation home from college. Finally I had proof that I wasn’t making it all up, or, as my mother loved to say, “It is all in your head.”
She claimed I was faking it despite the fact that she drank about three bottles of Maalox a week to wash down the Anacin she took to help the tension headaches caused by the stress of her job working for a man she was terrified of, and living with a man she was terrified of because he would yank her hair out, punch her, throw her down steps, and threaten us with myriad weapons. Guns. Knives. Belts.
To make sure she knew whatever she did was worthless, he’d also sometimes trash the nice furniture she bought by slashing the surface of bedside tables with a hunting knife, punching or shooting holes in the wall, breaking glass to get into the door at all hours of the night, and literally pissing on the flowers she planted.
Yep. I think I came by my tender guts honestly.
Sometimes my mother would be doubled over in pain as she put on her makeup to go to work. Oh. And THAT smell would get to me, too. Because she had a port wine birthmark over half of her face, she literally cooked her “pancake” makeup each morning before applying it. Pancake makeup does not smell good first thing in the morning. Or ever.
She looked beautiful. But underneath that layer of makeup, and the starched white uniform, seamed white hose, and white oxford shoes she wore as her dental hygienist’s uniform, there was a riot of rage as dark and jagged as that birthmark that must have caused ungodly teasing in Depression-era Georgia and Alabama. It was probably part of the reason she felt as if she’d better say yes to my father’s proposal. About him? When she married him he was a World War II veteran who’d experienced his own share of trauma as a child whose father beat the hell out of him, and as a 18-year-old on a submarine in the Pacific during World War II. One story was that his best friend died right in front of him. My father had “hatch duty”. But one day the friend asked to open the hatch instead, and was killed the instant his head popped out in open air.
Multi-generational ACEs; medicine combinations; the bitter end of dark chocolate.
I now understand why my father suffered bouts of depression and anxiety, though I wish he’d had healthier ways of coping than jigger upon jigger of Early Times bourbon mixed with Coca-Cola, tons of my grandmother’s carbohydrate and fat-filled home cooking, relentless skirt chasing, and pound-downs on my mother when she sniffled, cleaned, didn’t cook what he wanted, complained about his wild spending or carousing, or didn’t properly clean and freeze the dove and quail he killed and brought home and left for her to “dress” because he was too smashed to do it himself.
Yep. Dead birds, bird guts and feathers, frozen little bird bodies suspended in ice in plastic containers in a deep freezer full of all manner of ice-encased fish and fowl.
Those could get me gagging too.
But I digress.
Yes. I’ve had a lifetime of gut issues I medicated with combinations of allergy medicine – because seasonal allergies and the resulting post-nasal drip (Sorry, but for folks with lots of ACEs, there are often issues with hyper-responses to allergens) – and the latest prescription for stomach ulcers. Tagamet and Tavist? That was a great combination, I explained to my doctor when I was in my early twenties. I don’t think he’d made the connection, yet, between allergies, post-nasal drip, and the Spring and Fall flare ups with gut pain and nausea until I explained why I needed both prescriptions.
Over the years there were endoscopies. Colonoscopies.The self-medicating power of the bubbles in beer. The realization that dairy was off the table. The realization that nightshade vegetables were off the table. The realization that gluten, too, was off the table. And then the horrific and deeply painful grief when one of my most favorite foods of all times – dark chocolate – was literally off the table and pretty much out of my life unless I wanted to pay dearly for having savored a bite or two of what had been a staple: four or five bars of Green & Black’s 85% organic chocolate a week. Almost a bar a day. For YEARS.
That loss came when the Damdemic hit, and I suddenly regressed into a primal fear of feeling incredibly unsafe in my own home, and in my own body, where the fire in my belly burned as if I’d swallowed a molten bowling ball.
Next report: Damndemic guts, masked horror, "Better Normals", ACEs to PACEs, and the road to recovery being paved with many efforts.
Comments (8)