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Playboys
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took off their heads, and pasted their disembodied boobs, legs, butts, and
crotches on the walls of the kitchen. Andrea, one of Mary’s few friends, told her
parents about the “wallpaper.” “After that, Andrea wasn’t allowed at my house,”
Mary says. “I started to realize that other kids weren’t comfortable around me
because of my dad.”
When she was fifteen, her parents moved to a house in the country. “I think
they were trying to salvage their marriage.” One crisp winter night, when Mary
was coming out of the garage, one of her dad’s drunken friends was standing by
his car in the driveway. “As I walked by to go in the house he stared at me hard
and said, ‘You are so beautiful!’ Then he threw me into the backseat of his car
and got on top of me. He stuck his tongue down my throat and was groping me.”
Mary forced him off and ran in to tell her dad, who was also drunk. “He told
me to stop making such a big deal about it.”
And yet, at other times, Mary’s dad did show concern for her. Once, when
Mary was in a car accident, “he got in the ambulance with me and cried the
whole way to the hospital.” He was completely unpredictable.
By the time she was eighteen, Mary had developed “unwavering depression,”
which would progress over the next thirty years—getting worse after she
married and had her four children. She developed a severe lower back problem
that worsened every year. And her autoimmune vitiligo started to cover her arms
and neck.
“I fell into a postpartum depression after each birth, and after my fourth son, I
was suicidal. My physical and emotional pain had snowballed. If I was driving
without any of my kids in the car, I’d find myself thinking, ‘How can I crash this
car into a tree in such a way that no one will know it’s suicide, and so that I’m
not just impaired and a burden to my family afterward?’ ”
And that was when, says Mary, “I realized something potent was haunting me;
something was terribly wrong with how unsafe I felt in the world. I had these
beautiful sons and I just didn’t feel okay inside in any way, shape, or form.”
To the developing brain, knowing what’s coming next matters most. This makes
sense if you think back to how the stress response works optimally. You meet a
bear in the woods and your body floods with adrenaline and cortisol so that you
can decide quickly: do you run away or try to frighten away the bear? After you
deal with the crisis, you recover, your stress hormones abate, and you go home
with a great story.
McCarthy presents another situation. “What if that bear is circling the house
and you can’t get away from it and you never know if it’s going to strike, or
when, or what it will do next? There it is, threatening you every single day. You
can’t fight or flee.” Then, she says, “Your emergency response system is set into
overdrive over and over again. Your anxiety sensors are always going full blast.”
Even subtle, common forms of childhood stress—e.g., a hypercritical,
narcissistic, or manic-depressive parent—can cause just as much damage as a
parent who deals out angry, physical beatings or just disappears.
And in that sense, Kat’s story and Mary’s story are very similar to Laura’s,
John’s, Georgia’s, Michele’s, and Ellie’s. All of them, even in adult life, felt that
the bear was still out there, somewhere, circling in the woods, stalking, and
might strike again any day, anytime.
According to Vincent Felitti, the one area in which a “yes” answer on the
Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire has been correlated to a slightly
higher level of adult negative health outcomes is in response to ACE question
number 1, which addresses the issue of “chronic humiliation.” Would adults in
the home often swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you?
This strong correlation between adverse health problems and unpredictable,
chronic humiliation by a parent suggests that it is not knowing if you are safe
from the “bear” that matters most.
There are a lot of bears out there. Depression, bipolar disease, alcohol, and
other addictions are remarkably prevalent adult afflictions. According to the
National Institute of Mental Health, over 18 percent of adults, or nearly forty-
four million Americans, suffer from a diagnosable mental health disorder in any
given year. Twenty-three million adult Americans suffer from an alcohol or drug
addiction. Indeed, according to the original ACE Study, one in four people with
Adverse Childhood Experiences had a parent who was addicted to alcohol.
Often, alcoholism and depression go hand in hand—addiction can be an
unconscious effort to self-medicate a mood disorder. But even when they are not
working in tandem, mood disorders and alcoholism share one thing: both make
adults behave in emotionally undependable ways. The parent who hugs you one
day when picking you up from school might humiliate you in front of your
friends the next afternoon. The sense of not knowing what’s coming next never
goes away.
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