Yes, Healing from Adverse Childhood Experiences and Their Lasting Effects Is Possible

By Donna Jackson Nakazawa, author of The Adverse Childhood Experiences Guided Journal

When I was twelve, I was coming home from swimming at my neighbor’s dock when I saw an ambulance’s flashing lights in our driveway. I still remember the asphalt burning my feet as I stood, paralyzed, and watched the paramedics take away my father. It was as if I knew those flashing lights were a harbinger that my childhood was over.

At the hospital, a surgeon performed “minor” elective bowel surgery on my young dad. The surgeon made an error, and instead of my father coming home to the “Welcome Home” banners we’d painted, he died.

We didn’t talk much about it as a family. We soldiered on. We put it behind us. My brothers and I got jobs to help my mother pay the bills. I stifled my loss as best I could. I was afraid to show my grief. My mother was struggling and it fell to me, as her only daughter, to tend to her needs, her moods, her loss, instead of my own.

The Link Between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Long-Term Health

At fourteen, I started fainting. The doctors implied I was trying to garner attention. In college I began having full seizures. I kept them to myself, fearful of seeming a modern Camille. I’d awaken on the floor drenched in sweat, with strangers standing quizzically over me. Then, I had a seizure in front of my aunt, a nurse, and forty-eight hours later I was in the hospital with a pacemaker in my chest.

In my early forties I developed Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological autoimmune disorder that causes paralysis from the neck down. I found myself in Johns Hopkins Hospital, on the exact anniversary of my father’s death, in the same hospital wing where he had died, unable to move. I was a few days shy of turning forty-two, the very age at which my dad had passed away.

I recovered, only to relapse, falling paralyzed again. Many of my children’s early memories revolve around my bed, where we played board games and read books. It wasn’t until I was in my late-forties that a physician sat me down and asked me the most important question of my life—one that would lead me to better health than I’d had for decades:

“Were there any childhood traumas or stressors that might have contributed to the extreme level of inflammation you’re experiencing as an adult?”

My physician explained that ongoing adversity in childhood leads to a chronic state of “fight, flight, flop, fawn, or freeze.” Yale researchers had recently shown that when inflammatory stress hormones flood a child’s body and brain, they alter the genes that oversee our stress reactivity, resetting the stress response to “high” for life. This increases the risk of inflammation, which can manifest later in heart disease, a greater likelihood of depression, and autoimmune diseases like mine.

Over 1,500 peer-reviewed studies have replicated these findings.

What are ACE’s?

Moreover, two-thirds of Americans report experiencing ACEs. These include obvious sexual and physical abuse, but also stressors that many consider to be normal:

· growing up with divorced parents;

· living with a depressed or alcoholic mom or dad;

· having a parent who belittled you, put you down, or humiliated you;

· or simply not feeling as if your family had your back.

People who’d experienced four such categories of childhood adversity were several times more likely to be diagnosed with mental and physical chronic conditions as adults.)

One statistic struck home with me: women who’d faced three types of childhood adversity had a 60 percent greater risk of being hospitalized with an autoimmune disease as an adult. Similar links existed between childhood stressors and adult heart disease, diabetes, migraines, and irritable bowel disease. Suffering six categories of early life stress shortened one’s lifespan by twenty years.

Healing from ACEs

All disease is multifactorial. Past adversity and trauma is one of those factors. What if, after my father’s sudden death, the emotional cost of that traumatic loss had been validated and addressed? What if I had been given the tools and adult support to understand what had happened to me, and how it shaped me?

I don’t know. What I do know, as a science reporter, is this: I’ve learned that it is never too late to start healing. After writing four award-winning books, including a best-selling book on how our life experiences shape our health, thirty years of reporting on science-proven insights for healing and resilience, and teaching at universities and think tanks around the country, I’ve learned that we all hold deep within us the internal resources to help us flourish. To love and care for ourselves.

You are not broken, you never were.

The key is right inside you: to understand your own story, and the connections between what happened to you then, and how you respond to stress and adversity in your life now.

Statistics tell us that two-thirds of you reading these words will recognize that experiences in their childhood still trail after you today, like small ghosts. Fortunately, science now recognizes many proven interventions for recovering from trauma, even decades after events have occurred.

In my own health journey, this has proven to be true again and again. Yes, I still manage an array of health conditions. At the same time, many of them have resolved. After being paralyzed twice, I can walk and hike again (though I have limitations; I can’t run or jump). And recently, in 2022, my heart surgeon told me that for reasons he could not explain, after thirty years of relying on a pacemaker so that I didn’t pass out or have seizures, my heart no longer needed it. My heart was beating normally, on its own, for the first time in decades. He couldn’t explain why, though his hunch was that, when I was a teenager, I might have suffered from sudden “broken heart syndrome,” which can occur after a severe trauma. Somehow, over thirty years, my heart had repaired itself.

I believe—after thirty years of research and interviewing thousands of individuals and neuroscientists—that you can always overcome and heal from the lingering effects of childhood adversity no matter what stage of life you’re in. This is what inspired my latest book, The Adverse Childhood Experiences Guided Journal. You can learn more about my new book on my website.

This article was originally published in Psychology Today.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is creator of Your Healing Narrative, the writing-to-heal program that uses the neural re-narrating process she pioneered. She is author of Girls on the Brink, and the best-selling Childhood Disrupted. She has lectured and taught at major universities and organizations, and is a frequent contributor to national news programs and publications.