#childhood-trauma

#childhood-trauma

"It's so strange - all the memories are there. And it's not that I don't try and think about it, but going in such a linear manner, it becomes almost more clear when you talk about it this way."

The reason people use drugs of any kind is because they want to escape, Delaney says. I had suicidal ideations from a very, very young age because I assumed that, if I was dead, maybe my mum and dad wouldn't be arguing.

Nearly 90 percent of suicide attempts among high school students are attributable to ACEs, as are 80 percent of adult suicides, translating to 109 suicides per day.

From the minute she enters the world, she has a mother who hates her and strangers trying to kill her. I'm actually still trying to make sense of the episode's prologue: Set in 1997, a random Circuit City employee gets a cryptic message on his Windows 95 PC ordering him to kill Jane, who is less than a day old, before she grows up into a major threat.

I haven't lost those apprehensions...I mean, I used to get into fights when I was a kid in the locker room. They'd kid me about that. I'd say, 'Don't call me that!' and I'd fight them. It was a sore spot as a child. And then adults stopped doing it. But it lurks, and for them [the Kellogg commercial creative crew] to find it was, in itself, a kind of discovery.

Jesus usually came home from school to a raucous scene: the family TV blaring, his mom loudly cooking dinner and his two young sisters fighting about nothing in particular. When his dad came home from work, they'd all gather around the kitchen table for dinner. But this day was different. Everything was eerie and quiet and dark, he recalled. All of the lights in the home were off. The television was silent.

Research on parentification - the process where children are forced into adult emotional roles - shows that many of the people we admire for their composure developed it as a survival mechanism. They weren't born calm. They were made calm, usually by environments where someone's emotional dysregulation demanded that a child become the steady one.

They are known, as it were, from the neck up. The cellular memory of facts and experiences, however, connects mind and body: My body recalls that showing my true feelings in childhood led to a put-down. A slammed door meant that Dad was home and drunk. The specific fact/event may be forgotten, but the bodily reaction remains: Any slamming noise may induce terror.

Every time Elizabeth Lamphere looked at her daughter, all she saw was her late fiancé. Ian had died in an avalanche while skiing in the Colorado backcountry when Madelyn was just a baby. The tragedy had plunged Lamphere into single parenthood, changing diapers, making meals, doing the bedtime routine all by herself, all while trying to bring in what money she could as a massage therapist.