Q. You’ve said that your work on ACEs led you to your husband. What do you mean by that?
A. I won’t comment on any of my ex-boyfriends, but I was like — whoa — the type of relationship that I have has a profound impact on my life span and my health. Not just how I feel, but this could seriously shorten my life expectancy.
My husband is a person who I feel heals me from the inside out. He’s been really instrumental in what I’ve been able to accomplish in terms of starting my organization and galvanizing this movement, because it’s super stressful and he is such a buffer to my stress. Even if I come home and have had a really rough day in clinic, and had a patient with a really awful story that’s really heartbreaking, he just helps. He helps me to metabolize it and displaces those stress hormones with lovely nurturing, bonding hormones.
Q. So, should we all be checking our prospective spouses for ACEs?
A. It’s not that my husband doesn’t have any ACEs. Sometimes experiences of adversity do augment this empathic response. It’s really about how they’re responding to it, how they’re dealing with it on a day to day, and whether they are able to recognize and have healthy habits around their stress response, as opposed to having unhealthy coping habits.
Q. In your book, it was striking how hard you had to fight to get people to recognize that ACEs aren’t limited to poor neighborhoods — that children of all socioeconomic classes suffer adverse events.
A. I’ve said only half joking that the difference between Bayview [a low-income, diverse neighborhood] and Pacific Heights [an affluent, largely white community] is in Bayview, everybody knows who the molesting uncle is and in Pacific Heights they don’t. It’s really true. In low-income communities, they’re so under-resourced that it’s really difficult to hide this stuff, but in affluent communities people feel so much like reputations are at risk that they hide it and it just festers.
Q. Would the Dr. Larry Nassar case be an example of that? He apparently molested generations of female gymnasts, most of whom weren’t financially disadvantaged. And no one stopped it for years.
A. That’s the point. It happens to Olympic gold medal-winning women in the middle of Michigan. The tendency when it comes to trauma is to want to shy away from it. That’s part of the cycle of how trauma works, that we don’t like the way it feels to talk about it so we try to push it away. But I hope we’re at a different moment.