by Barbara Stahura
The first of Donna Jackson Nakazawa’s books I read was The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, and My Life. It’s a memoir of her discovery that “Adverse Childhood Experiences” led to her life-threatening chronic illness later in life and how she healed herself. Even though I have no chronic illness, I am fascinated by what we are learning about the seamlessly intricate web of our physical/emotional/mental selves. How could I not be intrigued by that title?
So when her new book was released, I bought it as soon as I could. In Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal, Nakazawa uses other people’s stories to broaden her scope into a thorough investigation of ACEs and how they “can lead to deep biophysical changes in a child that profoundly affect the developing brain and immunology in ways that also change the health of the adult he or she will become.”
For a variety of reasons, more women have higher ACE Scores than men (the ACE Experience Survey is in the book), and they also have far more chronic health disorders—so much so that mid-life women are often called the “walking wounded of our day.” Yet “the link between childhood pain and adult female ill health remains unrecognized in medical circles, contributing to what [one researcher] says is an ongoing ‘medical blindness’ to the social realities of the impact of a women’s gender on her health and lifelong well-being.”
Nakazawa clearly makes the case that ACEs and their aftermath need to be extensively explored by the medical world so that fewer people will suffer from chronic illnesses such as autoimmune disease, persistent depression, chronic bowel disorders, migraines, thyroid issues, and heart disease. (While she reminds us that other factors, such as lifestyle, diet, environment, and genetics also play a role, ACEs are a major contributor to disease.) She says that physical and emotional/mental medicine must come out of their separate silos and join together, so that everyone can be treated as a whole person, not just body, not just mind. The two cannot be separated, and the sooner we understand and work with that fact, the healthier we will become.
The healing agents she recommends are not drugs or medical procedures, but techniques such as yoga, writing to heal, mindfulness meditation, therapy, guided imagery, hypnosis, EMDR, and neurofeedback. “No matter how old you are, or how old your children may be, there are scientifically supported and relatively simple steps that you can take to reboot the brain, create new pathways that promote healing, and come back to who it is you were meant to be,” she writes.
Not everyone with an ACE Score later suffers from serious or chronic illness. Some people are more resilient for some reason, perhaps genetic, she says. And families need not be “perfect” to protect children. It’s enough to have a “good enough family,” which she explains in depth in the book. She also includes fourteen strategies parents can use to help their children avoid or recover from ACEs. “You may not be the perfect parent every second,” Nakazawa reassures us. “But you can nurture children and teens in ways that prevent chronic, unpredictable stress from taking a long-term toll.”
I highly recommend Childhood Disrupted, especially if you have a chronic illness—or love someone who does—and if you’re a parent who wants to help your children grow up resilient and healthy. And for those of you, like me, who are simply more interested in the ways we really function, this book will lift your understanding to a new level.
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Barbara Stahura, Certified Journal Facilitator, has since 2007 guided people with brain injury, family caregivers, and others in harnessing the power of therapeutic journaling for healing and well-being. Co-author of the acclaimed After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story, the first journaling book for people with brain injury, she also presents or has presented journaling events for state Brain Injury Alliances/Associations, trauma survivors, the National Guard, people with cancer, equine-facilitated therapeutic groups, and others. A member of the faculty of the Therapeutic Writing Institute, she lives in Indiana with her husband, a survivor of brain injury. http://www.barbarastahura.com
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