Intergenerational Trauma and Exposure as a Driver of Health
Transcript
Karestan Koenen: We're going to have Jenn lead us in a grounding exercise to just bring us present in the room together. And then Lee is going to share his book and his story, and we'll talk more about that. And then I'll pose some questions to the panel. Now, you might have noticed the panel already is, we could talk to each other all day, but this is really an opportunity for you all to ask questions, so I hope you'll come with your questions. And then we'll close on time and go to the reception.
So with that, let me introduce our panelists. So we're really lucky today. We'll start with having Lee Hawkins, who I didn't really realize until I was doing his bio that he's a true Renaissance man. He's a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling author of his book, which is I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free, which was an Oprah Book Club book selection, among other things, and published by HarperCollins last year, and he'll talk about that. But he also spent two decades as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He's hosted award-winning podcasts, so we're really grateful to have him here today.
And then many of you may know my colleague, Jason Buenrostro. He is a core member at the Broad, and he's also a professor at Harvard University, where he's done pioneering work in single cell genomics and epigenetics, which has really transformed how scientists see gene regulation and human disease. And he's here today. He'll discuss the Biology Adversity Project, which uses molecular and cellular biology to better understand adversity and personalized approaches to healthcare. So, we're excited to have him.
And then Jenn Turner, who's executive director and co-founder of the Center for Trauma and Embodiment, an organization that trains mental health professionals, movement practitioners, and care providers, and embodied approaches to healing. And I became familiar with them because they develop and do research on trauma care approaches that center on the body, such as trauma-informed yoga. They published the groundbreaking studies comparing trauma-informed yoga to some of the more traditional psychotherapeutic practices for PTSD. She's also the host of the podcast On Trauma and Power, and a psychotherapist, teacher, and trainer in trauma-sensitive yoga. So, excited to have you all here today. So, Jenn, do you want to start by leading us?
Jenn Turner: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everyone, glad you're here. I thought I could lead us through an opportunity to drop into our bodies, and I'll talk us through some movement, awareness. You're so welcome to do whatever you might need to do. Maybe you got to catch up on some emails, maybe you just want to daydream. But the invitation is, if you're interested, you're welcome to begin to bring your awareness to your own body.
So, one way you could do that might be, unless you do have to check some emails, removing your laptop or putting your phone down. You could begin to make yourself comfortable in your chair, what that looks like for each one of us could be different. If you want to lean back, maybe you want to sit forward and sit up a little bit. And an invitation to quiet the external stimuli of being in this room together. You might close your eyes or maybe you cast your gaze downward as one way to begin to drop into your internal world.
Now another way that you could do that could be through some kind of movement. One way you might move and begin to notice your body could be moving your chin from side to side. Any range of movement is welcome. You could pause on one side or the other. Maybe you're exploring continuous movement. You might also lift and lower with your chin. As you're moving, or if you're moving, you might also notice that you're breathing. You could be breathing through your nose or your mouth, always your choice. And maybe even dropping your chin for a moment. You might invite your head to be heavy, pausing here if you'd like. And then maybe, shifting into some head circles. That could be a half circle, a full circle, and anywhere in between. Possibly exploring movement to notice that you have a body and to notice that you're here. You might be pausing somewhere along the way if you want to stay with a feeling or sensation.
Or you could be exploring continuous movement. It's your choice. And if you'd like, at some point you could find your way back to center. And here's where it may be useful to sort of sit forward on your seat so that you have a little room behind your back. The possibility to let your hands rest on your lap. And maybe if you're interested, you could notice your feet on the floor. You could tap your heels or wiggle your toes. You might even shuffle your feet a little. Possibly noticing any other contact points with your body and surfaces around you. Could be the backs of your legs, supported by the surface beneath you. Maybe your hands resting on the tops of your legs. And from here, if you're interested, you might explore some spinal movements. One way to do that could be to lengthen your spine. You might even lift your chin, slide your shoulders away from your ears, and possibly rounding your spine and dropping your chin. You're welcome to move between these two shapes, lengthening and rounding, or maybe you pause somewhere along the way. So maybe there's a shape that you'd like to stay with or another way that you're choosing to be embodied in this moment.
One more layer here is that you might link your breath to your movement. So possibly inhaling as you lengthen in one direction. Maybe exhaling in the other. Maybe continuing here. Movement, stillness, wherever you are, however you're choosing to be in your body. Maybe for a few more breaths or moments.
And then at some point we could meet back at center. You're welcome to continue to notice your body, tune into your body, move with your body as we shift back toward Lee and our talk today. Thank you.
Koenen: Thank you, Jenn. That was lovely. I always think if we could do that before every meeting, I would feel, I don't know. I feel so much better.
Turner: We actually started doing that.
Koenen: We should, I know, I should. So, we may have to introduce that. Well, thank you so much. That was a pleasure in itself.
And so now I'm going to invite Lee to talk about your [book], and I'll move over here...So maybe, should we go sit over there so we can see him? Yeah, we're going to go sit over here while you talk.
Lee Hawkins: Okay. I really needed that too, so thank you, Jenn. I think it's, you know, important, so many of us have text neck, always looking down. So, it's always good to lengthen that spine.
It's really a distinct honor as well as a great privilege to be here today, and especially with people who are interested in this topic, because I think that more and more we're starting to see that history affects the present and the future. And that's pretty much the work that I kind of delved into when I started on my book, I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free, sometime around 2014. And it coincided with what we saw with the explosion of ancestry.com and a lot of the different interests that were happening around genealogy.
You know, my whole life, I had always had questions about my father's upbringing in Alabama. I grew up in Minnesota as a kid, a Black kid in a 90% Scandinavian neighborhood. And we also had a strong foot firmly planted in the Black community as well. And in our Black community, there were many, many people. Most of the people in our community at our church and beyond that were people who were also from the South, who had roots there from Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, all of these places, and had moved as part of the Great Migration to the North, pursuing their version of the American dream. And we talk a lot about the Great Migration. I think Isabel Wilkerson has written just very authoritatively and beautifully about it. But a lot of times we don't realize that the Great Migration, a lot of people left for jobs, yes, but there were also people who left because of traumatic things that happened in their families.
This is a very sort of common story that goes beyond the Black community, but in particular, my family was affected by Jim Crow apartheid, and I call it apartheid. A lot of times we call it segregation. And I think that when I delved into my family's history, I figured out that it was something much more about apartheid, and very close to a crime against humanity. And so, I will explain that. But the key is, before I go into my story, I want you to think about your own families and how universal things such as Italian displacement, or Irish displacement, or Japanese incarceration, or [the] Armenian genocide, or all of these different things that have affected people that have been government atrocities. Tuskegee Syphilis Project was one. Henrietta Lacks and how her body was abused for the sake of research. And so, all of these different and misused, all of these different things can affect the generations that come behind. And so, I think a lot of the people who are in this room probably understand that.
If you think of this in the context of your own family, hopefully you'll be able to relate to I Am Nobody's Slave. And of course, I do encourage you to read it, not just because I want the sale, but also because I spent so much time trying my best to help people understand, through one American family, how trauma can ripple through the generations.
And so, when I was a kid, I was very close with my father. And when I was a kid, he would have nightmares sometimes, you know? Eight, nine years old, I would hear him in the room being calmed down by my mother. And she would be saying, Leroy, it's only a dream. You're OK, honey, you're only-- it's only a dream. And so on the days that I was able to muster the courage to ask him the next day what he was dreaming about, he would just say, Alabama, Alabama. But he would not go any further than that.
And that was sort of a common thing in my community, the children and the grandchildren of people who had lived through Jim Crow segregation and apartheid. We didn't understand it as apartheid because all we saw on television was the black and white grainy video of Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and all of them marching. And so, we knew a lot about how our family responded, how our families responded to the injustice, but not very much about the injustice itself.
But I knew that if it was something that was enough to give my father, this big, tall, strong man, nightmares that would turn him back into a little boy, then it must have been something more severe than segregation. And now that I really think about it, I know that there are 8 million Americans, more than 8 million Americans, who actually lived through that same period that gave my father nightmares who are alive today, but it's never really been acknowledged as apartheid, and they've never really been acknowledged as a group. I think a lot of us think of Jim Crow as something that was 100 years ago, not 60 years ago. Very few of us think about it in the terms that, even though when I did my research, I found that my family has been here since the 1600s, I'm part of the first generation in my family to be born with constitutional equal protections to a white American. And so, there's only been three generations of Black Americans who have had that. And so, when you think about that, when you think about the way that people can be stratified in that way, there is trauma that goes with it. And so, what I wanted to do was dig in and to find out exactly what happened in Alabama.
And that's actually the name of the podcast series that preceded I Am Nobody's Slave, where I actually dug in and started to do my family history and started to share some of the information that I was learning about my family in Alabama with my father. Because my father left Alabama when he was 12, and the reason he left was because there were 14 children, and there were four left who were under 18. His mother developed a kidney infection. When she developed the kidney infection, she wasn't able to go to the hospital, the state-of-the-art hospital where most people were treated in Alabama because of the color of her skin. She had to go to a house that was across the street. The name of the hospital was Stabler Memorial Hospital, and there were 12 beds in that hospital, and when her infection started to get severe, the doctor who had been treating her just told her, go home and I'll come out there and see you. And he showed up to her house the next day and he said, I'm going to give you a shot and if this doesn't work, there's nothing we can do. So, she died.
My father was the youngest of 12 and there was a sister who had a husband who had gotten employment in Minnesota. So before my grandmother had died, he didn't know it at the time, but she had already arranged for, in the event of her death, not to leave them with their father because they felt like my grandfather couldn't handle four kids under the age of 18. So it would be better for the older sister to take them. And so she took them. And she said, get my babies out of Alabama. And that's what they did. So, the day after her funeral, my father was in a car, a Ford Fairlane, on his way to St. Paul, Minnesota. And he never, ever looked back. He met my mother when he was 14, and he never looked back again. He did go back to visit for a summer. And in that summer, you'll see in the book, he was actually chased by the Ku Klux Klan when he was playing baseball in the field. And so, Alabama represented a lot of trauma that he wouldn't discuss. So, when I dug in, I started to find out more because there was another time that we went to Alabama when I was in college.
And at the time, you know, I was a journalist, but not a very good one. And so, I really didn't know the questions to be asking this uncle who was 93, but we, my father, was smart enough to run a tape. And so we did record the conversation. And at 93 years old, he was saying the biggest regret that I have in my life is that we never got, I couldn't bring myself to get the revenge against the white man who killed my father. And at that time, it was the first time that my father had ever learned that his mother's father was murdered because she had lied to him and told him that it was a hunting accident. And when I started my research, I actually asked my father to send me that tape. And we put the tape on a CD and improved the quality, and I was able to listen to it. And in that, hey, there was a lot of information that applied based on what I knew earlier.
But the key of all of it was that I also found out that not only was my grandmother's father murdered, but so was my grandfather's father. He was five and she was nine years old. Neither of them had told their son that their father was murdered. And neither-- my father didn't tell me that his father was eventually murdered. But it answered a lot of questions for me, because in my book, you'll see that the discipline in my house and the discipline that was used against most of the Black children, not all, but most of the Black children who I knew, was corporal punishment.
And so despite all of the love in our home, corporal punishment was viewed as a form of love. That meant over 150 belt beatings when I was a child. And so, a lot of my work now is dealing with the colonial inheritance of corporal punishment and how corporal punishment was used as a means of protection against Black children like me, which, I told you I was raised in a Scandinavian neighborhood, where my father pretty much, who had grown up in segregation, acted as if he was still in Alabama. And the idea was you can’t make a mistake. You can't make any mistakes. Because if you make a mistake, the whole family could be murdered. And that sounded crazy to me. It sounded really crazy because we were socialized into the district, my sister and I. I was class president all four years. My sister was the homecoming queen. And so, we didn't get why our father was that way.
And that's kind of like the intergenerational conflict that these government atrocities can make through the generations, is that the integration generation children, or that second generation that comes from the immigrant who came, they feel the responsibility to redeem the sacrifices of that previous generation. But the trauma can be crazy because they don't really understand why the parents are so hypervigilant. And so, it's important for me to say that my father opened up for all these interviews. He did four years of interviews. And what it did for me and what it did for him was it helped us put into context the way that these political experiences affected us later in life and how it was incumbent upon us to heal from the intergenerational effects, which I did and I do still, through a lot of different factors.
But when you look at the adverse childhood experiences study, the idea is that if you do not address trauma that you inherit as a child, you do have the possibility of dying early, developing chronic disease. But, as I hope that we can discuss now that I'm closing up, is it's not a death sentence if you take the proper steps. And understanding that benevolent experiences were the things that got me through the idea, even though I'm working a lot on corporal punishment now and the way that it affects because it is legal in 17 states. Still, it's still legal to beat children in schools, primarily the schools that are in the South where slavery was most present. So that legacy is still very much there. That's a part of my healing as well. But the big part is that I had a lot of people who loved me and including my parents and my village. So benevolent experiences are a very big part of the response to trauma. And it is not a death sentence.
And so, what I'm hoping that you can all do, and what I hope to do in my work going forward, is understand how science fits into all of this. We can't treat it as just a moral issue. We have to treat it as an issue that has a lot more to do with the parasympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight response to trauma, and how the buildup of toxins over the generations in people's bodies can end up dealing with chronic illness. And it's funny because in the Chinese culture, they talk about fear being stored in the kidneys. And it was my grandmother who actually died [of] complications of a kidney infection. And I have to think beyond the Western medicine understanding as to whether or not that really had anything to do with her father being killed when she was nine.
And so, this research adds a lot of opportunity for us to look at genealogy through the lens of, what I say in I Am Nobody's Slave, the “future method.” Family unity through understanding roots and experiences. You can bring your families together and study not just family history, but understand the implications that it has for health and well-being going forward. So, thank you very much and we'll talk more.
Koenen: Thank you.
Hawkins: Thank you.
Koenen: So I'll start by posing some questions, but before I just wanted to, I feel so moved every time I hear you speak about your history and also about how you talk about the effects of trauma, but also the hope and the importance of connection and the support and the love you received and all of those things. One of the reasons we're doing the panel like this today is because I believe it's so important to bring together people's lived experience with science and community action and community intervention. So, it sort of represents these different aspects of what I hope to bring together in conversation in ways that we often don't. So, thank you.
Hawkins: Thank you.
Koenen: So, I’ll start with a question to Jason, and think of your questions, because otherwise we’ll just start talking. When Lee was talking about the impact of trauma across generations in his family, and given we're at the Broad and the Broad is, you know, we focus on the impact of genetics and genetic studies can have on health and medicine, can you talk a little bit about the difference between genetics and epigenetics and how we might think about adversity and trauma?
Jason Buenrostro: Maybe before I even start there, just some reflection of the wonderful introduction you [Hawkins] just gave. Just as a moment to share just a small bit is that I'm a first generation, a child to an immigrant family. And it's like, I think there are kind of narratives that you see built in families that are transgenerational. Of course, the things I've learned from my parents greatly influenced my upbringing. Of course, they’re different experiences than your own. But, as we kind of think about that in the science side, I think epigenetics--this is the thing that I study, right? There's kind of the fixation with this idea that there is a transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, right? Where you can pass on through gametes, sperm, and oocytes, right, this information? There's also the very real reality of lived experience, right? And that can begin as early as conception and kind of continue on throughout life.
I'll mention, just because I know this is of sincere interest to you, is that it turns out in humans, the idea that there is transgenerational inheritance, despite all the interest there is in popular science, it's actually quite modest and quite much more robust in lower species like C. elegans. It's really clear. And mouse models, you can see evidence for it in the literature, but in humans, it's actually quite weak.
But what we do know from decades now of research is that development is really important, right? We begin as, during conception, as a, you know, during fertilization we develop or recreate all these amazing cells in our bodies that do things like pattern our brain, pattern our bodies. And development is a very sensitive process. It can be affected by the things that we consume, the things that we experience in utero, and of course continues postnatally into early adulthood. We all know that we have some form of neurogenesis up into early 20s, right?
So, all these processes of development and of course, lived experience will alter the developmental pace within an organism and could have an impact on neurons in the brain, perhaps even kidney cells in the kidney, and so on and so forth. So what we're trying to do in the Biology of Adversity Project, just to wrap it back up to what you were saying, is we're trying to understand how lived experiences translate into these epigenetic changes, not so focused on transgenerational, though we will welcome opportunities, but rather ask the question, does it live in the kidney? Does it live in the gut? You hear also people talk about feelings emerging from the gut. Does it live in other parts of organisms? And if so, how does that impact health going forward?
Koenen: Thank you. And then for Jenn, can you talk a bit about how the Center for Trauma and Embodiment thinks about this whole idea of trauma care and intervening on trauma in relation to the things you've heard?
Turner: I'll talk about the things, yeah. Yeah, I think, where do I start? You know, it's kind of been like the last 20 years of my life that I've been doing this work, and I think, it actually, as I sort of look backwards, it comes from my own experience in my family and community growing up where there was a lot of trauma, or what I would now call trauma, but growing up, we would just sort of call it like ‘life’ or ‘life is hard’ sometimes.
And it's really interesting to begin to think about how such a small percentage of the population will access mental health services and care for traumatic experience. But we know something like 70% of the world's population, probably much higher, have experienced at least one traumatic event. What the impact is of that is ranging. Not everyone is going to develop PTSD from that. But you don't have to have PTSD for there to be an impact that happens.
And so what we're really curious about at the Center for Trauma and Embodiment, and the work that we do, is around researching and creating original care models that center the whole self: our bodies, how we eat, how we move with each other, how we play with one another. And how we can develop those and then make them accessible in community. So rather than it being something that is relegated to a clinical space, a hospital, a therapist's office, for which there are so many barriers for people seeking care, myself included. I wouldn't have ever gotten into therapy if I didn't have like a really gung-ho friend who's like, “You gotta do therapy, it's so great.” I wouldn't have done it because I didn't think I needed it, I just, you know, I just lived a life, right? It was only over time that I started to understand that was actually trauma, and that was traumatic experience that I had been exposed to.
And so the idea being, can we have these really vetted, researched, high-quality approaches to trauma care that we can bring into yoga studios, and gyms, and physical therapy offices, and that we continue to scrutinize them and develop them within different cultural contexts so that they're accessible to a wider range of people, ultimately to just promote more healing. If we carry our trauma with us everywhere that we go, what if we could also access healing in those places too? It's kind of the core of what we do.
Koenen: I love that. Yeah, and I, one of the articles, one of the clinical trials that was done on trauma sensitive yoga versus cognitive processing therapy, which is one of the evidence-based gold standard treatments for PTSD. I was trained in something called prolonged exposure, which is another one, and very much trained in this view about a certain exposure to your trauma, talking about your trauma in the session, and the therapy that I was trained in [is] you sit back and you relive it in the session as the way to treat PTSD. And I think the evidence for trauma sensitive yoga has really blown that up. And that's not to say it isn't helpful to talk, but that's not the only way to heal, that talking is not the only way to heal.
Turner: And in fact, what we see is that when people talk about what's happened, a lot of people drop off from treatment because it's so activating to talk about what's happened.
Koenen: So, it's just very interesting, I think, and intriguing, and sort of challenges the very model that I was [trained in]. I was going to ask you [Lee Hawkins] a question, but you might have something you want to say.
Hawkins: Oh, no, no.
Koenen: My question for you is, you travel all over the country talking about your story in your book. So, what is on people's minds or what are the questions that people ask that kind of are most provocative to you? And also, I was thinking about the response you get 'cause you've spoken in so many different places.
Hawkins: Yeah, I think that people are grateful that someone is naming the normalization of American violence on children. Because I think that it's all, as Jenn said, it's not really thought of as abuse. It's thought of just as the way that we must, the problem in our society is that the kids aren't getting hit anymore, right? That is a very common perception. And it is universal, beyond the United States, but we particularly in our country have violence as a part of our origin story. And in the developed world, we are one of the leaders, especially in terms of gun violence.
And so, when you see so much violence, people understand that children are the most vulnerable in our society, but they have the least protection, right? And so, there are a lot of adults who I meet who feel that they are finally giving themselves permission to be able to confront the things from their childhood that had to do with violence. And so, there is a point in the book where I actually started having nightmares about the corporal punishment. And it wasn't something that, it has never really been something that it's okay to question, right? In particular, in the African American community, it's a very, very difficult thing because when you go back, I had to go back into my lineage and find out that my great-great-grandmother, and great-great-grandfather, who were the last generation of people to be enslaved, were whipped, repeatedly. And so, if they babysat my grandparents, which they did, I mean, we knew the last generation of people who went through slavery, then that is the socialization that you're talking about that's not necessarily you know, at the DNA level, but it's very much about socialization and environment and culture. And so, when I talk about American violence, people start to put together the pieces. And I think that that's a good thing.
And I'll say this last thing. I also get a lot of questions about how I in particular interact with that trauma, first being able to name that as trauma, having experienced that as a child and have it be so normalized, but also, understanding as I show in the book, that that can follow you and present in different ways as an adult, as brain fog, physical ways that you start to see it. And of course, for me, meditation, exercise, prayer. I belong to church. There are a lot of different things. And the sum of all of the parts have given me, put me in a position where I haven't had a nightmare in 20 years, right? And so, I think that when I say it's not a death sentence, people react to that, because there are people at various ways-- I mean, I don't believe in a hierarchy of pain. You know, when you think about, oh, well, that person experienced that and that person experienced that, and it's much worse over here. I think it's about how we each individually experience trauma and how we decide with our own free will that we're going to deal with it. And mine was about therapy.
I have a therapist who is a Jim Crow survivor who was actually the roommate of Congressman John Lewis in college. And so, he understood a lot of the different things that my father and grandparents went through and how that can present through the generations. And so, what it is in closing is really about giving people the tools to understand that they do not have to see this in a defeatist way, but to look at, how can I empower the previous generations for them to get healing? How can I inspire them through my own example when they pour into you, right? When your family as a first generation poured into you so that you could come here and work at Harvard, right? Now you're a source of education for them. And what you've been able to do is you've been able to break the cycle of trauma as a way it can present so that future generations in the bloodline won't have to experience it. And so, I think that that's the work that I do and that's where I get the strongest response, just the way that I approach it as understanding how we can heal as opposed to just be completely paralyzed by it.
Koenen: Right, thank you. I'm going to be asking folks for questions. I have another, I was wondering if, Jason, when you're talking about, when Lee was talking, I was thinking about how you talk about the Biology of Adversity Project and the potential, I mean, I know it'll take time, but for impact on healthcare and how we understand how this whole idea of how trauma gets in the body and causes disease.
Buenrostro: Yeah, I mean, just to throw some facts and some numbers, you were referencing this when we talked about this too. The ACEs studies, of course, have shown that there's about 18 years of loss of life associated with four or more adverse childhood events. That extends beyond, humans, you can say, these are challenging things to put numbers to. But in primate studies, you can actually see about 50% reduction of life span in response to adverse rearing in primates. So, and of course, you can model this in mice as well and see some of the same effects. And when you start looking at the causes, like the reasons why these experiences start to then drive lower mortality is it's all-cause mortality. So, you see higher incidence of all sorts of things like heart disease, of course, mental health disorders, autoimmune, and the list goes on, right? So, as we think about this, it's like, we think that--I guess we're at the Broad, so I'll do this unforgivingly, but genetics only gets us a piece of the way there, right? We can understand that we all, we're born with DNA and are destined to be a human, not a plant, right? Of course, genetics has its role in understanding and shaping our health.
But in reality, when you start looking at the advances in genetics, we really fall short of arriving at the promise that I was told as a first-year PhD student in genetics, that we'd get to this moment of personalized healthcare. We'd be able to say from your profile of your genetic code, we can now know that you'll be at risk for heart disease and that'll actually help a clinician make an informed decision. We're far from that promise that I was promised as a first-year PhD student. So, and why is that? You can name lots of reasons. Maybe we haven't done enough millions of people to really understand what's missing. But arguably, lived experience is quite important in figuring these things out.
So, one thing we're really excited about doing, and I think a reason why a lot of us have connected here at the Broad, is to take the kind of underpinnings of genetics, understanding how things are done at scale, right? Understanding how we can take that reach into the clinical realm and start to do epigenetics in the same way we approach genetics, start to understand how lived experience creates these effects and then start to think about human disease risk and try to drive towards personalized medicine at the interface of both nature and nurture, and epigenetics and genetics.
Koenen: Yeah, just, questions? Yeah, great.
Guest 1: Okay. Can you hear me? So, for all of you, but maybe a little bit more for Lee. I consistently mispronounce his name, but in one of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ books, he talked about how his father used to beat him. And he would contextualize this as saying his father was trying to protect him from the streets, joining gangs and things like that, as though he was justifying this. But as someone who's an expert on adversity, I read it as a child protection case. And to me, what he was experiencing was more than corporal punishment, but he was being beaten by his father. I go back and forth about this and I'm trying to be sensitive to his perspective, but I'm trying to protect kids. So how should I muddle through this problem?
Hawkins: Great question. We dealt with this when I was a fellow at the Carter Center. You know, Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter are some of the most hyper visible and effective liberals that we know today, and they've done wonderful work, but at the same time, they lived inside Jim Crow and knew very well what the Black people, not just under Jim Crow, but under slavery, also experienced.
I think that it takes a great deal of courage to name corporal punishment as abuse, particularly when you are a descendant of enslaved people, because if a person in the antebellum era was a child and their mother told them, stay here in the barn and do not leave, if that child left, they could be killed, they could be sold to another plantation. And so corporal punishment at the practice in those times was used to put fear into children because they really didn't have constitutional rights. They didn't have agency. They didn't have all of those things.
I think what's been hard among the Black families that use corporal punishment now is to accept that we're no longer in those times because we still see other forms of injustice, you know, through colonization's modern cousin, which is police brutality. And then we also have to worry about intra-racial violence. We're seeing right now another very sensitive topic is femicide in the black community. And since all crime tends to be, homicide tends to be more intra-racial, then it's impacting, it's mainly our people doing it to ourselves. And that's across the board for all races. And so, this is a very, very complicated subject. And I would say that the studies that we've seen in the medical community, including one at Harvard that showed that hospital residents still believe that Black people can endure higher amounts of pain, is something that we all have to reject.
And we all have to look at, understand the social and cultural implications, but also to begin to, not in a condescending way, but to certainly as experts, to advise and provide guidance, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, who have said children across the board, there’s no way that they actually benefit from corporal punishment. It impacts their parasympathetic nervous systems and can literally shorten life expectancy down the line. And Black children are the same. You know, they're not built any differently. They're not. The idea that we can endure more pain is something that is a holdover from the periods that I'm speaking of in which our people were literally enslaved and also went through apartheid.
And so, I am passionate, if not self-righteous, about explaining how important it is for us to be people in this community to educate and to help with some level of understanding and sympathy and empathy to the cultural nuances that drive people to think that corporal punishment is okay. I respect Ta-Nehisi Coates, but just to close, I'll say that freedom isn't free. And sometimes you have to be courageous, and confront your own people and your own family, in my case, because I wanted to break the cycle. I didn't want my nieces and nephews to have to go through what I went through. And was it hard? Yes, but I thought that I was going to have more opposition, but I found out that when my family members read the book, there were many people who were just like, oh my God, thank you so much, because we needed someone to be that person, to take that stand.
Turner: Thank you. If I can just add in.
Koenen: Yeah, go ahead, Jenn.
Turner: I think what's coming up for me is also this piece around, you know, when we put people into buckets of like perpetrator and victim and how, you know, sometimes we have to do that. Like, [the] legal system asks us to do that. But when we really start to understand that when someone is perpetuating harm, like they're suffering their own burden as well. And what I love about being able to do embodied work is that we don't have to litigate that, right? We get to actually just meet nervous system to nervous system and not sort of be in a position of like, well, do you have PTSD? But did you also perpetrate and who did you harm and what age?
We don't have to do any of that. We actually just get to speak to the human nervous system that we're with and wrangle with that and work with that. I think my training certainly was oriented to, victims are one sort of camp, and then perpetrators you have to address differently. But it's so true that there's so much innate suffering that then is just cascading down through someone who then goes on to cause harm. And I found it so helpful to shake that up in my own thinking, to kind of approach with compassion whatever body or nervous system is present to.
Koenen: I'll go, yeah, we'll take more questions, but along the lines there, there [are] two findings that I came across earlier in my career that have stuck with me. So one was working with, when I worked with the Vietnam Veterans, that 100% of veterans, and this is like a large epidemiologic study, who committed atrocities, which were defined as acts outside of the normal course of battle, developed post-traumatic stress disorder and had severe mental distress consequences. And then also later, I did studies in South Africa, and 100% of the people who in that case committed acts of apartheid against someone else had post-traumatic stress disorder. Committing those inhuman acts against other humans had this traumatic effect.
And that really shook, that's what shook up for me, this idea of, I also have had this very simplistic idea. It gave me more appreciation, like your story about the history someone brings and the complexity around that.
Hawkins: Yeah, I just really quickly wanted to add that a big part of my story is my white cousins. When I took the--one thing about DNA is it tells the truth. And so, when I took my DNA test, it was kind of like a ‘guess who's coming to dinner’ moment. And I found out that I was 80% from West Africa, but 20% from Wales. And when I reached out to my white cousins who matched me, they were the ones who opened up 400 years of their family history for me to find these answers. And a lot of the trauma that they had experienced from knowing that their family members participated in the slave trade was, this gave us an opportunity to start to discuss that and to interact from both sides. And I think, you know, not everybody, but there were, there were, there are people who I believe have gotten some healing out of that, working together on genealogy...
Koenen: That's very powerful
Hawkins: Yeah.
Koenen: More questions. Yeah, we still have time. Yeah.
Guest 2: Hi, thank you all for being here today. This has been really interesting and insightful, and Lee, your opening was really moving. Something that stood out to me was the focus on accountability, both at the level of thinking about what actors did what things, and also just calling Jim Crow apartheid, quite accurately. So kind of a question I have for the panel is, as we think about doing research into how trauma and adverse childhood experiences are embodied and about healing from those, what role does accountability play in guiding our research and also in bringing about that healing?
Koenen: Good question.
Hawkins: Well, I go back to what I said to him [Guest 1], is the accountability plays a huge role, a lot of it having to do with our responsibility to understand history, the history of the people who walk into our offices or the populations that we're going to be studying. And so that's accountability. If someone were to have asked me, if a doctor had asked me or if a doctor had asked my father, tell me a little bit about your background-- You know, when he was diagnosed with type two diabetes, for instance, they would have been able to get a really good understanding of the trauma, the intergenerational effects. You know, if even a statement like since 1837, I've had a family member murdered every generation, which is a true fact. And it was primarily over one of two things, land or livestock, right? Because my family was affluent and purchased land and under the apartheid situation, they were murdered for their land, literally.
And so, accountability, the accountability of it to me is understanding from a science perspective, from a medicine perspective, that we haven't done a great job along the lines of equity, and that sounds like wokeism or whatever. I worked for Rupert Murdoch for 20 years, so I'm the last person who is woke, but I am honest, right? And I refuse to look at data or anything like that through any kind of editorializing lens. The facts are the facts and we failed people. So, the first part as a scientist, or anybody, a social worker, or anybody, is to know the population you're dealing with and not run from the uncomfortable truth of our history.
Buenrostro: Just to add to that, because I felt like that was directed to me at some point, the question about research. Maybe one thing that's worth saying, because I imagine a lot of us here are scientists at the Broad, maybe not everybody. And as just coming from a pure biology perspective, I was trained as a molecular biologist, right? We all have this really strong interest in working on high impact problems, problems that we see as having a tremendous effect on populations and that could be addressed with the work that we're doing, right?
And as we began in this work, as a lot of you might know that I'm also kind of newer to this field, maybe in the last two or three years now. One thing that was made abundantly clear to me early on was the prevalence of this exposure, just like how, not just in America, but also globally, you see this effect, but also the inequities of it. I think we can all sympathize with that. But also, how little set up our clinical infrastructure is to measure this, either qualitatively or quantitatively. So, as we kind of look at just asking the basic question of like, what can we do in research to minimize suffering of individuals? We look at this and it's like, now we have an engine that finds rare mutations that cause rare disease. It's wonderful that we have that engine, but until we had the ability to measure quantitatively what gene and what mutation causes this rare neurodevelopmental disease, we couldn't do much. But now we have it, right?
So, as I think about the accountability question, it's just history, our perception of it, and ability to rewrite it of course colors the kinds of questions that biologists ask, and then where resources are put into place to actually improve the human health condition. So one thing I want to leave you with today, at least from my perspective, is just really appreciating how common this exposure is, how detrimental it is to health, and then how much it's not just in that person, but also generational, can have an impact on those yet to be born.
Turner: If I can weigh in also.
Koenen: Yes, absolutely Jenn.
Turner: Yeah, this to me is like such a passion point because I think from my vantage point, I think about people doing clinical work and the humanity of it all and how well-meaning providers, researchers can also perpetuate harm. And how many people enter in to seek care and relief and end up receiving harm because the structures aren't set up.
For us to look at our own relationship to power, our own relationship to being an expert versus listening to the people that we serve, I think that's really interesting, particularly when we're talking about hard science. When we also have a person in front of us who is living in their body and has intuition and knowing, and what is it like to wrangle that and reconcile that? How do we look at, you know, our own power and privilege that we carry and how that translates into the work that we do?
Oftentimes, I see well-meaning therapists, and I've been in those shoes too, that actually cause harm because we think we know what someone's path to healing should be, or we look at the ways that they're coping with trauma through drugs and alcohol, through high-risk behaviors, and we call them maladaptive rather than understanding they're actually part of the resilience. And when we can remove morality and when we can look at ourselves through that lens of, like, what part am I playing in it? There's so much potential for accountability in terms of not perpetuating trauma and not reenacting these systemic dynamics that Lee is speaking to.
Koenen: Well said. And I am so sorry, but I'm going to have to end it there, because we are at time, and I feel like we could go on for another hour, um, but I also want to respect the fact that people's time. So...Thank you so much. I believe this is just the beginning of a conversation. Thank you so much for all of you for joining.
Hawkins: Thank you everybody.
Turner: Yeah, thanks for being here.
Koenen: Thank you for coming. We'll do more of this.
