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The Power of Having Just One Reliable Adult
Children who are more resilient after facing early adversity often had an
important, reliable adult to turn to in their youth; a grown-up who stepped in and
helped them understand that what was happening wasn’t about them and wasn’t
their fault.
According to Jack Shonkoff’s Center on the Developing Child, the presence
or absence of adequate adult support, and the duration and nature of a stressor,
can make a profound difference in determining whether childhood stressors are
tolerable or toxic. Stress is tolerable when longer-lasting difficulties, even
serious stressors, such as the loss of a loved one, or a natural disaster, are
temporary, limited in duration—and are buffered by relationships with adults
who help a child learn to adapt. With someone to lean on, and with love, the
brain can recover from what might otherwise be damaging effects.
However, when stressors are strong, frequent, and prolonged—such as chronic
neglect, physical or emotional abuse, living with a caregiver who has an
addiction or mental illness, or coming of age in a violent environment—and this
happens without adequate adult support, stress becomes toxic. Having
supportive, responsive relationships with caring adults as early in life as possible
makes a profound difference.
Harriet’s story illustrates this. Now a forty-eight-year-old lawyer who lives in
Austin, Texas, Harriet was raised by a mom who “really didn’t know what it
meant to parent.” When Harriet was four years old, her mother began regularly
putting her on an airplane alone to visit her grandfather and her grandmother,
both of whom suffered from depression. Harriet’s grandfather—her mother’s
father—“would make me take off my clothes and force me into the bathtub to
‘bathe me.’ ” Harriet still has panic flashbacks to one day, recalling “being naked
and afraid, crying, fighting like crazy to get out of that tub; I didn’t like what he
was doing to me, the way he was bathing me.” When she was old enough to later
understand what had happened and the implications of it, she told her younger
female cousins to stay clear of their grandfather, to never be alone with him.
She’d learned to watch out for others, even if no one was watching out for her.
When she was twelve years old, Harriet fell while doing gymnastics; she
broke her lower back in two places and didn’t tell her mom about the accident,
or about how much pain she was in. By the time she was finally seen by a
doctor, he asked Harriet, “How are you even walking around?” Because she’d
gone untreated, her recovery was never complete, and she was in pain every day
of her life.
At the age of sixteen, having recovered from her injury but still living with
chronic pain, Harriet was date-raped. Once again, Harriet found herself “naked,
fighting, and clawing against a man who wouldn’t listen when I asked him to
stop.” The next day at school, Harriet’s “boyfriend” explained the scratches
across his face by telling everyone at their high school, “Harriet’s a real wildcat
in bed!”
Harriet didn’t tell her mom what happened then, either. Her mom “would have
said, if I’d come to her for help after any of these traumas, ‘How could you do
this to me, Harriet?’ It was always quite clear to me, even at a very young age,
that my mother was never going to be a source of comfort to me; I couldn’t trust
her to help me. If I was afraid, and told her, it quickly became a scene about how
I was hurting her with my problems.” Indeed, it seems incredible to Harriet now,
she says, “that my mom used to put me on that airplane, alone, to go stay with
her parents, knowing that they had mental health issues, without ever thinking
about what that might mean for me.”
When Harriet was nineteen, she told her parents that she thought she was a
lesbian, and they disowned her.
By the time Harriet turned thirty, “I was having little tremors all the time,” she
says. She started to develop a goiter on her neck. She went to see a doctor, who
took Harriet’s vitals. Harriet’s resting heart rate was 140, far higher than it
should be. Her doctor ran tests and told Harriet that her thyroid numbers were
through the roof—ten times higher than what was considered normal. Harriet
had a full-blown case of Graves’ disease—an autoimmune disease in which the
body’s own immune system mistakenly attacks the healthy tissue of the thyroid,
causing the thyroid gland to become hyperactive.
At forty-four, Harriet’s gynecologist found that she had “a giant, cohesive
fibroid located against the posterior side of my uterus, so far back that it was not
easily palpated. It had been developing for at least ten years—and it was the size
of a baby’s head. Only I had no idea, because I was already in so much back
pain.”
Harriet is not really surprised when I tell her about recent research that shows
that girls who are victims of sex abuse are as much as 36 percent more likely to
develop uterine fibroid tumors decades later in life.
Looking back, Harriet says, “I see my mother as the context against which
everything that was traumatic for me happened.” She can’t help but wonder how
“things might have been different if I’d had a mom to turn to when bad things
happened, if I’d felt her support through thick and thin.”
Clearly, when a child has a reliable parent or adult to turn to, she has a far better
chance of being able to make sense of the stress she faces, and, ideally, a smart,
stable, caring mentor-adult will intervene on her behalf. Researchers at Emory
University recently found that even when children experienced adversity, if they
also had a positive family environment, and someone to turn to, they showed
changes in an oxytocin receptor gene, which in turn wielded a protective
influence, helping those children to be more resilient and better at coping.
The good news in Seery’s research is that, “Just because something bad has
happened to someone, that doesn’t mean they’re doomed to be damaged from
that point on.” If we can learn precisely what’s giving some individuals who’ve
experienced moderate childhood adversity their resilience, and discern what
helps them to interpret their experiences in a way that leads to a greater sense of
security and an enhanced ability to cope with life’s difficulties, we may be able
to apply that understanding more broadly, even years down the road. “It should
be possible for people to derive benefits from even higher levels of past
adversity, if we know how to help them do so.”
When people who have suffered from Adverse Childhood Experiences search
out and find healing, they can achieve a beneficial perspective on their lives.
And even if we had traumatic experiences, our brains, which, again, are highly
malleable and plastic long into adulthood, can build the neural structure for
resilience. We can contextualize past trauma in ways that make us even better at
dealing with stressful challenges and emerge gracefully in the face of them.
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