Childhood Experiences & Adult Depression
By Heather Caldwell
The previous blog on Upper Limits & feeling good spoke to our national & family narratives that might have told us that our successes need to come through struggle and hard work, to be modest and tamp down feeling good, to not get too big for our britches so we don’t outgrow or outshine others ~ plus an array of other implicit and explicit messages to reinforce this. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. This post looks at the connection between childhood trauma and adult depression and how childhood trauma keeps us from feeling good.
There’s a lot of research connecting childhood adversities & traumas and adult depression, anxiety, addiction, and chronic illness. This post focuses on depression.
The ACES Study
Background & Relevance
Quick History: In the mid-’90s researchers at Kaiser put together a survey to study the impact of childhood experiences & present-day health status, called Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey (ACES). The study was conducted over several years and surveyed over 17,000 individuals. This is one of the largest studies on childhood experiences and their long-term impact on our mental and physical health.
The Test: ACES asks 10 questions under three categories: abuse, neglect, and household challenges*. Questions range from abuse in the household to having a family member jailed, to the death of a parent or a family member with an addiction. For each Yes, the person gets 1 point.
*There are some pretty big blind spots in the survey that ignore impacts of racism, classism, sexism, etc. Folks are now discussing how to integrate these experiences into the survey.
The Results: Overall, the results were astounding! Almost two-thirds of the respondents reported at least one ACE, and almost one-fifth reported 3 or more ACEs. Researchers found that adverse experiences create unpredictability in the home. As a child learns how to navigate the world and have their basic needs met, the unpredictability can create a trauma response in the body. The more ACEs a child experiences, the more unpredictability in the home, the more likely the child will be impacted.
Why does this matter: Researchers found that for each ACE a child experiences, the rate of developing adult depression increases. For example, with one ACE the rate of developing adult depression can go up by 50%, two ACEs up to 84%, and 5+ ACEs a 340% chance (Kuelker, 2019).
What does this have to do with upper limits and feeling good: Everything!
The Problem with Feeling Good: The Body/Brain Connection
The underpinning here is that it’s not just as simple as feeling good. Our bodies are literally shaped by our experiences and the impact of this follows us into adulthood.
During childhood, we learn how to be in the world, how to be in a relationship with others, how to get our needs met, and how to be in our bodies. When we experience childhood adversity in our homes & communities, it quite literally changes us.
Body/Brain Connection: Childhood (until our early 20s actually!) is a critical time in brain development and adverse experiences shape our brain. This happens in a variety of ways, two of which are flooding our systems with stress hormones and over activating our limbic system - the part of our brain responsible for our fight/flight systems. The flooding of stress hormones, such as cortisol, impacts the rest of our body systems. For example, it can weaken our immune system leading to higher rates of chronic illness. An over-activated limbic system keeps us in states of hypervigilance. And the impact on our hippocampus impacts our ability to regulate emotion.
In addition to impacting our brains, we also develop relational body patterns. For example, depending on the types of adversity we experience, we might get small, get quiet, and quite literally shut down in order to stay safe. We might cease to have boundaries. We might not feel good in our bodies & dissociate. We might put up walls and shut ourselves off from others.
As we become adults, these patterns come with us and impact our adult relationships, our world-view, our self-worth, and our physical health. We might develop an auto-immune illness or experience chronic pain. We might fall into addiction to numb out feeling bad or to search for feeling good.
But that was then. Why can’t I feel happy now?
How the Past Influences the Future
Feeling good might have been scary when we were young. Feeling good might have meant guards were down and therefore vulnerable to an adverse experience. Feeling good while others are not (typically caregivers) might mean punishment for feeling good. Feeling good after an adverse experience might create unpredictability in what to expect. Feeling good might also prompt guilt, with a caregiver making up for a transgression. We might have built a roadmap for how to feel bad, how to feel small, how to survive - but we didn’t build a roadmap for how to feel good.
Therefore, as an adult, feeling good can be scary.
But it doesn’t have to stay this way!
At the bottom of the previous blog post, Upper Limits and the Problem with Feeling Good, there are some reflective questions, tips for exploration, and ways to start expanding your capacity to experience joy, to sit with both/and (ex: BOTH feeling sad AND appreciating beauty), and to celebrate you. You are invited to go back to those prompts and see how you can start creating a new story.
Research shows that therapy can play a critical role in not only healing the psyche, but healing the body, too! Therapy can help us understand the link between our childhood wounds and the negative ways they show up in our adult lives. Body-centered psychotherapy can help connect the psyche wounds to how they’ve manifested in our bodies. Specifically, body-centered therapy can help unlock the patterns your body learned, rewire brain patterns, regulate the nervous system, in order to create a pathway for healing and a roadmap for how to feel good.
The therapists at Evolve in Nature are all body-centered, nature-based, trauma-informed therapists and we are here to help you on your healing journey.
Kuelker, E. (2019). Resurrecting Therapy. Psychotherapy Networker. September/October 2019 issue.