Article XXVII — The Biology of Trauma —  Gabor Mate

So people who are severely traumatized in childhood can measure the level of inflammatory particles in their bloodstream. They’ll be abnormally high, which makes them more at risk for cancer, more at risk for autoimmune disease, more at risk for depression, mental health problems, and so on.

Trauma can affect the way genes are turned on and off. There are very few conditions that are purely genetically determined. There are some; one runs in my family: muscular dystrophy.

But genes are turned on and off by the environment, so the wrong genes can be be turned on and the right genes can be turned off by trauma.

Then, trauma can dysregulate the body’s stress mechanism. So people are secreting more cortisol and adrenaline. These are the stress hormones which, in the short term, are life-saving. Because if I was threatened, or if you were, we would generate cortisol and adrenaline from the adrenal glands, and we would be stronger, faster, and better able to counter the threat, either to escape or to fight back.

But in the long term, those same stress hormones thin the bones, create more clotting in the blood, narrow the blood vessels, elevate the blood pressure, causing hypertension, suppress the immune system, put fat on your belly, creating risks for heart disease, and make you depressed.

I mentioned racism. So if you look at the chromosomal aging of Black people in the US, they age faster than Caucasians, and Black people already have higher blood pressure measurements than their Caucasian counterparts. It’s got nothing to do with genetics; it’s got to do with the stress of racism.

A Black woman in this country, the more episodes of racism they experience, the higher the risk for asthma. Then there are the emotional impacts. Like in my case, being given to a stranger gives me the sense of not being wanted or being important. Then I develop behaviors where I try to prove my importance, so I became a workaholic doctor, and I don’t pay so much attention to my family because I’m out there trying to prove my importance to the world.

Now that has an impact on my kids. That has an impact on my marriage. So there are these emotional impacts which result in certain behaviors. When people get the message that their emotions aren’t acceptable to the adults, children will push down their feelings in order to be accepted. They will try to fit into people’s expectations, which then means they’ll be stressed all the time, which then potentially causes all kinds of illness.