Halting Legacies of Trauma

there was my three-year-old son

crying inconsolably in the center isle

of grocery store

why you say all because his uncaring

father would not yield to his demand

to get him that shiny bottle of

champagne that he had seen two aisles

over

eager to end this cliched father-son

matinee i yelled

be quiet on no cuddles and stories

tonight

while these words do not rise to the

level of the atrocities that i will be

talking to you about

no sooner had they left my mouth like a

quiver of arrows intended to hurt their

prey did i remember

that legacies of trauma of neglect

and of abuse can and do

echo across generations

historical events data collected in the

aftermath of those events

and contemporary biology are providing

evidence that legacies of trauma

are deep they take root in the

population that is directly exposed to

the trauma

burdening not only the ancestral

generation

but also descendants

romanian children who were orphaned at

the fall of the

regime in 1989 some of them were placed

in institutionalized care

and in this institutionalized care there

were abysmal

social conditions overcrowded

and very little care bestowed upon these

children

studies on these children have shown

that maltreatment

stunted growth it derailed the

development of neural circuits in the

brain

and resulted in a whole host of

emotional disorders

exposure to the atrocities of the

holocaust

have burdened survivors of the holocaust

with visible and invisible scars

of trauma scars that include but are not

limited to

an increased incidence of post-traumatic

stress disorder

and anxiety

now if this burden was not grave enough

as is

we are now appreciating that children

of holocaust survivors even though they

did not

experience the holocaust directly

themselves

also present with a higher incidence of

ptsd

and anxiety-related disorders

and finally one of the most commonly

discussed examples of legacies of trauma

reverberating across generations

comes to us from world war ii

during the dutch hunger winter when food

was not allowed to go into the

netherlands

caloric consumption plummeted to about

400 calories a day

people resorted to eating grass and

tulip bulbs

children who were in neutral at the time

that their mothers experienced this

dutch hunger winter

developed cardiovascular disease obesity

diabetes and a higher incidence of

schizophrenia

again if this burden of trauma were not

grave enough as

is grandchildren who were not even

conceived at the time of the dutch

hunger winter

also presented with a higher incidence

of cardiovascular disease

diabetes and obesity

legacies of trauma legacies of stress

can and do echo across generations

how might this happen remember the story

i started my talk with

the one about my less than stellar

parenting

you can imagine how exposure to

atrocities like i’ve talked to you about

result in feelings of guilt of shame of

anger of despair or frustration and

those manifest themselves

in conversations across dinner tables

worldwide

or in the parental behavior that we

bestow upon our children

social transmission is one way by which

legacies of trauma

reverberate across generations

and mechanistic evidence for how

legacies of trauma

reverberate via social transmission come

to us

from studies of maternal behavior in

rats

rat mothers just like human ones will

exhibit

maternal behavior on a spectrum some rat

mothers will provide

high quality maternal care while other

ad mothers will provide

low quality maternal care except in the

wrath world

we call it high licking grooming arch

back nursing

and low licking grooming archback

nursing

what we now know is that pups that are

raised

with high quality maternal care go on to

become

well adjusted and less reactive to

stress

whereas pups that are raised by mothers

providing

low quality care go on to become more

reactive to stress

and more anxious and what is

fascinating is that if a pup

experienced high quality maternal care

it goes on to provide high quality

maternal care

to its own offspring and if a pup

was the recipient of low quality

maternal care

it goes on to provide low quality

maternal care

to its own offspring so social

transmission

is one way by which legacies of trauma

can echo across generations

and that might seem intuitive to you

what i also want to emphasize is that we

are now gaining

a novel biological perspective

on another way by which legacies of

trauma can reverberate

sperm and egg may bear imprints

of trauma let me repeat that

sperm and egg may bear imprints of

trauma

how do we know this there are many many

studies that are showing this

using animal models and i’d like to

share one of those studies that we’ve

been pursuing in my laboratory over the

past few years

we train male mice to become fearful of

a particular smell

we then take the sperm of these male

mice and perform in vitro fertilization

and even in the absence of any

traditional mating which would allow for

social transmission of information

now the offspring that are the results

of this in vitro fertilization

are most sensitive to the smell and

their brains have more cells

more neurons that process the smell

even though these offspring had no prior

exposure

to this particular smell and what we

find is that the sperm of these male

mice that we had been made

fearful of this particular smell

register

this stressful experience studies like

this

have been shown to occur in rats

flies worms and now are permeating into

the human literature as well

so there you have it two main mechanisms

social transmission and biological

inheritance

by which legacies of stress

perpetuate across generations but how do

they

do this they do this by becoming

embedded

under our skin they do this

by taking root in our biology

in our dna in our book of life

dna the set of instructions that

makes you and i edit this book of life

edit these instructions in this book of

life differently

and the message gleaned will be very

different

take for example this set of

instructions

on this billboard with a rather

frightening message

but edit that message with a

strategically placed

full stop and a much needed one and that

message takes on

a completely different meaning

embedded within you and i are molecules

called readers writers and erasers

and what these molecules do is they put

the equivalent of full stops

commas highlights white outs

on our books of life allowing for that

book of life to be read differently

and some of these punctuations take the

form of

metal marks that are put on dna called

dna methylation

they take the form of marks put on

histone proteins

which are proteins around which the dna

is wound

on our chromosomes and they take the

form of met off marks which are put on

rna

that allows the message read from these

books of life

to be extremely different

epigenetics is the phenomenon that

allows for

environmental events to edit the book of

life

take root in our dna become embedded

under our skin

and allow for legacies of stress to

perpetuate across generations

so here you have a ball at the top of a

hill

on we what we call waddington’s

landscape

this ball could be considered to be a

cell in your brain or a cell in the

brain of a rat

if that cell saw high quality maternal

care

maybe it rolls down the right hand side

of this hill

and you get an animal that is less

responsive to stress

well adjusted but if that same cell

so low quality maternal care it rolls

down another side of the hill

and now you have an animal that is more

responsive to stress

and more anxious or you can go one step

further back you can think of this ball

as an embryo formed after the fusion of

sperm and egg

ripe with the potential to make the

multi-cellular

you and i

but which uni develops

the embryo that sees ancestral strife

and rolls down one side of the hill and

goes down a downward spiral of substance

abuse and ptsd

or the embryo that sees ancestral

serenity

and loving caring environments and rolls

down the other side of the hill

and develops into an individual that is

protected from that downward spiral

of substance abuse and ptsd

thus far i’ve talked to you about

legacies of

trauma existing across generations

social transmission and biological

inheritance being ways

by which these legacies of trauma echo

across generations

using epigenetic methodology

so thus far all i’ve talked to you about

is gloom and doom

but might there be a silver lining and

i’m here to share with you that there is

a silver lining

the die is not cast

just as a book can be edited

so also it can be re-edited

and in this re-editing legacies of

trauma

can be halted they can be prevented

they can be reversed

let’s go back to that example of the

romanian children orphanages

what we now know is that if some of

those children escaped

institutionalized care and were instead

fostered in loving caring families

the stunted growth the derailment of

neuronal

circuits in the brain and the emotional

disorders abated

we know that if a rat pup that is born

to a mother

who would normally provide low quality

maternal care

is now instead fostered by a mother that

actually provides

high quality care that rat pup that was

destined

to become more responsive to stress more

anxious

actually becomes less responsive to

stress and well adjusted

and finally in our own work we were able

to show

that if you we took these animals these

male mice

who had been made fearful of a

particular odor and

extinguished their fear to that odor we

were able to reverse

the sensitivity of the offspring to that

smell

reverse the fact that those offspring

now had more cells or neurons

that process that smell and remarkably

we also found that this intervention

registered in the sperm of the animals

that was subjected to this particular

intervention

now you may be saying to yourself

all this is fine and dandy but i can’t

go out and be a foster parent

neither am i a rat mom nor am i a male

mouse

so what can i actually do

so here’s the call to action for myself

and for you

let’s build legacies of empathy of

kindness and of compassion

first for ourselves then our family and

friends

and finally our communities

and i’m not talking about empathy

kindness and compassion as esoteric

terms

they might be taking a walk in nature

every single day

seeing a therapist routinely they might

be

eating a healthy balanced diet engaging

in yoga and meditation routinely

they might be picking up that phone and

calling someone who we know

is having a tough time every single day

why am i advocating for legacies of

empathy kindness

and compassion to halt legacies of

trauma

because just as our biologists can

accrue

marx associated with negative

experiences

so also our biologies must be able to

accrue marks

associated with positive experiences

now some of you might be saying but

brian there’s a lot of trauma in this

world

i can’t possibly contribute

i’m just an insignificant

person and there’s a lot of trauma

so i want to leave you with words from

some people’s favorite philosopher

other people spiritual leader and

teacher his holiness the dalai lama

who said if you think you’re too small

to make a difference

try sleeping with a mosquito

let’s be mosquitos of empathy

of kindness and of compassion

i am enough you are enough

and we are enough let’s edit

our books of life the books of life of

our family and friends

and the books of life of our communities

with empathy

kindness and compassion thank you