The Evolving Science Of How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adults | Butterfly Memories

The framework of Adverse Childhood Experiences started with an unexpected finding over 30 years ago. How is our approach changing? Plus, butterfly memories from our listeners.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Flora Lichtman?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman. Today on the podcast, how childhood trauma shows up in adulthood.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  This message that we hear, if you have a trauma, you're going to have all these poor health outcomes. And while that message can be true, it's not a guarantee.

• 0:26Flora Lichtman?

  Just a heads up that our next conversation covers a sensitive subject: trauma. We know that the experiences from our childhood, the good and the bad, shape who we become as adults. But understanding what kinds of early experiences have staying power into adulthood and the wide range of impacts they can have is an emerging science. Here to tell us more is Preeti Simran Sethi, a science writer and Rosalind Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow, who's been reporting on Asian mental health. Preeti, welcome to Science Friday.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Thank you, Flora.

• 1:01Flora Lichtman?

  So today, we're talking about studying the effects of negative childhood experiences, you know, basically trying to understand the impact of childhood trauma. When did people start digging into this question scientifically, like trying to understand it on a population level?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, back in the 19th century, scholars like Freud theorized about the impacts of childhood trauma on adults. But it wasn't studied in large groups of people until the 1980s. And the first researchers to do so didn't set out to study childhood trauma at all. They were actually studying obesity. Back in 1980, a doctor in San Diego named Vincent Folitti, who was chief of the Department of Preventative Medicine at one of America's biggest healthcare companies, started a clinic to help people lose weight. And it really took off. But then this strange thing kept happening. Patients would successfully lose weight and then...

• 1:57Speaker 01

  They were finding this really unusual trend where women who were losing a consistent amount of weight, and actually were doing really well in terms of the intervention, were often the ones who were dropping out of the study and were then gaining the weight back.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  That's Christine Fork, an assistant professor of family medicine and community health in the Perlman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. So Felidi dug in to try to understand what was going on. And as he was talking to patients, a few shared that they had been sexually abused. And they thought those experiences might be tied to their weight gain. So the clinic decided to ask all incoming patients if they'd had a history of sexual trauma. And the response was what Felidi describes as overwhelming.

• 2:43Flora Lichtman?

  What do you mean?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Over half of the nearly 300 patients he and his colleagues interviewed had experienced childhood sexual trauma. And for context, Flora, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the United States are estimated to have experienced childhood sexual abuse.

• 3:01Flora Lichtman?

  Those are staggering statistics.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Felidi started to think about what happened to his patients as kids and how it was still having an impact. And he shared those insights at an obesity conference in Atlanta in 1990. A scientist from the CDC who heard the presentation was like, "These findings are potentially groundbreaking, but you need to broaden the study. Not just obesity patients, do this with a broader population." And so Felidi and his colleagues did just that. Over the span of two years in the mid 90s, they interviewed thousands and thousands of patients going through health assessments at Kaiser Permanente, and they asked them 10 yes or no questions. Here's Christine again.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  And those items include things like sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, physical and emotional neglect, as well as items that we would consider household dysfunction, like living with a parent who has a mental illness or has been incarcerated, using substances, things like that.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  It's hard to conceive of this now, Flora, but up until the Felidi study, connections around how profoundly maltreatment when we're kids can impact us later in life hadn't been made in any systematic way.

• 4:11Flora Lichtman?

  So what did researchers take away from this study?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Well, first it showed childhood traumas, what the researchers called adverse childhood experiences, are correlated with a wide range of physical and mental health issues. And just as important, the study highlighted how many folks have experienced childhood trauma. The researchers had listed 10 adverse childhood experiences, and the majority of adults surveyed said they'd experienced at least one. About 17% of folks said they'd experienced four or more of the 10.

• 4:43Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, wow, so a lot of people have had these experiences. In this study, did they find these experiences correlated to any impacts in adulthood?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  They did. That initial analysis showed adults who experienced four or more of those traumas as kids were twice as likely to develop heart disease, three times more likely to have clinical depression, five times more likely to develop an addiction to alcohol, and 17 times more likely to attempt suicide. It's what researchers call a dose response. The more adverse experiences you have, the more likely you are to have a whole range of health issues.

• 5:21Flora Lichtman?

  Wow. I mean, that's, that's really shocking. And no one had ever measured this before?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 5:28Flora Lichtman?

  You know, to me, it's kind of crazy that an obesity doctor kind of randomly stumbled into this finding that opened up this new, you know, field of clinical study.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  It is. And what I shared just isn't even the full list. Later studies have shown a higher number of childhood traumas, increased chances of chronic lung and liver disease, and certain cancers, plus increased levels of PTSD, sexually transmitted infections, homelessness, incarceration, criminal behaviors, relationship challenges, and a shortened lifespan.

• 6:03Flora Lichtman?

  All right, so obviously, these are all just correlations. How well do scientists understand the how? The mechanism of how these childhood experiences might lead to these outcomes?

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Well, researchers are trying to build on that foundational research, first and foremost, to understand just that. What are the mechanisms? But the work is also being used to inform public policy and, somewhat controversially, as a diagnostic tool in clinical settings.

• 6:29Flora Lichtman?

  Wait, why is it controversial?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Well, doctors and therapists ask their patients to fill out the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey as part of intake. Some do. California has actually launched an initiative to encourage it. But Felitti's co-collaborator in the original study, Robert Anda and others, have argued that the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey isn't standardized and was never meant to be used to diagnose or screen folks for future risk. Leading researchers in childhood trauma told me that it doesn't make sense to overload the healthcare system by assessing a bunch of people for trauma without any way to alleviate it. Until psychologists can develop effective interventions for the childhood harms they identify and ensure the people who have experienced those traumas have proper support,

• 7:16Speaker 02

  they say it's better to focus on building up the data set to understand more clearly how traumatic events in childhood link to adverse impacts in adulthood and to develop policies and other interventions that hopefully will keep those traumas from happening in the first place.

• 7:31Flora Lichtman?

  So what do we still need to learn? What did we not get from the initial study?

• 7:36Speaker 02

  That first Felitti study was big and really was groundbreaking, but it drew from a pretty homogeneous group. Here's Christine again.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  This was done on the West Coast, and it was primarily white participants, middle-class, insured, highly educated. And they also were coming to seek medical care.

• 7:56Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, gotcha. I mean, we know that leaning on one demographic is a pervasive problem in science and medicine generally. Like, you know, women are underrepresented in clinical trials. And so dosing is, in many cases, based on male bodies.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. And beyond gender, the majority of psychological research is done within what are known as WEIRD populations. WEIRD is an acronym that stands for people who come from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries. One study showed that less than 3% of folks who participate in psychological studies are from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, or the Middle East. But, I mean, those are the people who make up the majority of the global population. And another stat that really stood out to me was that an American undergraduate student is 4,000 times more likely to be selected as a subject for research than a non-Westerner. And that's a problem because research done on Westerners is often assumed to be universal,

• 8:57Speaker 02

  which really overlooks important differences in cultures, histories, and life experiences.

• 9:01Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, and it seems like there are a ton of variables, you know, between person to person, including people's life experiences, which aren't easily captured on a 10-question survey.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna get personal for a minute here, if that's okay.

• 9:17Flora Lichtman?

  Please do.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  A couple of years ago, I was given the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey, that original one Felidia and his colleagues developed that's still used more than any other survey. Those 10 questions, remember, focus on physical and emotional neglect or harm, sexual violence, substance abuse, the incarceration of a family member, or the separation or divorce of a parent. Now, by that assessment, I looked pretty okay. But there were all these other things that had happened to me as a kid, being an immigrant, having to learn American culture, and dealing with racism and xenophobia, feeling the financial stressors that my parents were under. That did have an impact, but they weren't even named.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  And the population Felidia and his team were working with, mostly white, mostly well-off, insured, those issues didn't come up, but in other settings, it did. In other people, it does. Christine Fork and her colleague Peter Cronholm, who's a professor of family medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, headed up a research team that took a different, more expansive approach to assessing childhood traumas.

• 10:24Flora Lichtman?

  How do you mean?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Well, for starters, instead of interviewing adults, they surveyed a racially and socio-economically diverse group of young people. And they expanded the types of traumas included in the survey. Here's Peter.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  We had decided to try to measure things related to witnessing community violence living in unsafe neighborhoods, the experience of bullying or discrimination, and experience with the foster care system.

• 10:49Flora Lichtman?

  So what did they find?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  One big finding is that different kinds of traumas are linked to different kinds of health outcomes. For example, some of the additional challenging childhood experiences that they added tended to be associated with at-risk behaviors and mental health rather than physical health. The expanded list also offered new insights into the repercussions of experiences that weren't part of that original study, like bullying. Researchers now know bullying can have effects equivalent to maltreatment by a parent, but in the mid-1980s, they didn't know that. So, Flora, the questions that are asked matter, and when you're studying trauma, how the questions are asked also matters. Let me give you an example I heard from psychologist Shin Chin-Tong, who wrote the

• 11:35Speaker 02

  book Asian American Psychology and Psychotherapy. She uses the term "aces" to reference adverse childhood experiences.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Some aces, like child abuse and neglect, are incredibly high among Asian American communities. We're talking figures upwards of 80% of the population, and yet, the opposite message keeps getting repeated. So, this, to me, is a fascinating case study of racial bias in research and finding what we expect to see. So, what I mean is that there's this stereotype of Asian Americans as being successful, not having problems, like even despite the fact that we have large-scale studies that say rates of abuse and neglect are actually quite high among Asian Americans.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  I asked her why there was such a disconnect.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  So, it turns out, some of the few studies that indicate low rates of aces relied largely on cases of abuse being reported to authorities, like a medical provider or child protective services, or, in some cases, the research asked parents if their children have experienced abuse. But when it comes to Asian Americans relying on these kinds of reports, it's extremely faulty because Asian Americans are the least likely to report things to authorities and it ignores cultural values like the need to preserve space and a reluctance to disclose trouble in the family.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  If you don't ask appropriate questions in a culturally sensitive way, you get these pervasive misconceptions that distort the understanding of trauma in diverse populations. And that has larger ramifications from how healthcare providers approach and care for patients to the kinds of resources that are allocated to entire communities. That's why I really appreciate Peter's perspective and humility.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  For the field to evolve, I think we have to really have an open mind in terms of sort of thinking about what constitutes stressors in people's lives and recognize that it likely varies dramatically.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  And also, as Christine says, outcomes may vary.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  It comes across as gloom and doom, right? This message that we hear, if you have a trauma, you're going to have all these poor health outcomes. And while that message can be true, it's not a guarantee. So we see many people that have a number of ACE exposures, yet they go on to live healthy, happy, long lives.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Which researchers are now trying to understand. They're investigating the flip side of adversity.

• 14:07Flora Lichtman?

  So the flip side of adversity, say more.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  The way positive childhood experiences, the love and care we get when we're young, can help mitigate the traumatic experiences that we go through.

• 14:18Flora Lichtman?

  You can read all about it at sciencefriday.com/ childhood. That's sciencefriday.com/ childhood. Breezy, thank you.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Thank you, Flora.

• 14:28Flora Lichtman?

  Breezy Zimran-Sati is a science writer and Rosalynn Carter, mental health journalism fellow, who's been reporting on Asian mental health.

• 14:38Flora Lichtman?

  After the break, you shared some butterfly encounters with us that belong in the permanent collection.

• 14:45Speaker 05

  I got out of a long relationship and the fact that I have a butterfly, it really did feel incredibly special.

• 14:51Flora Lichtman?

  Stay with us.

• 14:58Speaker 06

  WNYC is supported by Bear. Every day in America, science delivers, not just in the headlines, but in the moments that matter most. Science is a journey, one of curiosity, persistence, and progress. It's about asking questions, testing, learning, and improving again and again. Science delivers harvests that feed families, tools that help farmers grow more with less, and new ways to protect land for generations to come. Let's keep asking, keep testing, keep discovering, so science can keep delivering. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 15:33Flora Lichtman?

  Support for Science Friday comes from the William K. Bose Junior Foundation.

• 15:42Flora Lichtman?

  So last week, we asked you to call and tell us about butterfly encounters that made your heart soar, or maybe even brought a little dew to your eyes. We loved hearing from you and wanted to share a few of our favorites.

• 15:57Flora Lichtman?

  Up first, Tim from Portland with a frightening close encounter.

• 16:02Speaker 07

  One day, I was heading home. In my commute, I did my bike, and it was a nice, beautiful sunny day. And there was something like big and white, like baseball-sized, about chest height. And my first thought was like somebody throwing a baseball right at me. So I freak out, and I'm like, ah, you know. And then the baseball flapped its wings and almost disappeared, and I realized it was a butterfly.

• 16:30Flora Lichtman?

  Next up is Hannah with a story from Prague in the middle of winter.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  So it's very cold. There's some snow even. And one day, there's this butterfly that appears in my new apartment. And it's plain white with yellowish color at the bottom of the wings, and it's got a few black spots. So a sort of fairly common butterfly if you're out in the country in the summer, but not in the middle of the winter in a flat. And she was just hanging around on the floor. Sometimes she was hanging on the window sill. And I was just feeding her sort of diluted agave nectar.

• 17:06Flora Lichtman?

  Classic roommate behavior, eating your food.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah.

• 17:10Flora Lichtman?

  How did you interpret the butterfly? Did you take it to be an auspicious sign?

• 17:14Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, because it was a really transformational period for me. I got out of a long relationship. This was my first apartment that was just me. And the fact that I have a butterfly, it really did feel incredibly special.

• 17:30Flora Lichtman?

  Next up is Rachel with a butterfly encounter from Arizona, where she was giving a talk at a conference while dealing with some heavy, personal stuff.

• 17:38Speaker 08

  It was pretty intense and overwhelming because I had recently lost my mother. I was honestly shredded. So I said to myself, I need to do something to find my peace, or I'm going to have a heart attack.

• 17:55Speaker 08

  And so I started looking around. And the second I saw it, Butterfly Wonderland, I was like, that's where I need to go.

• 18:01Flora Lichtman?

  Like a butterfly vivarium?

• 18:02Speaker 08

  Yes, I walked into the space and I was just like, oh, wow. My mom would really, really love this. And I wish she were here. I wish she was with me.

• 18:14Speaker 08

  And I was just standing there in this little corner tucked away. And this little tiny butterfly landed just about three inches from my nose. And I didn't even think, I just sort of reflexively said, hi, Mom.

• 18:32Speaker 08

  Which is, you know, slightly insane.

• 18:37Speaker 08

  And I just said, I miss you.

• 18:42Speaker 08

  I just felt like she was right there with me.

• 18:46Flora Lichtman?

  It's really a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing it.

• 18:49Speaker 08

  You're welcome.

• 18:50Flora Lichtman?

  And thanks to everyone for calling.

• 18:54Flora Lichtman?

  Want to keep fluttering your wings? Go to sciencefriday.com/butterflies to check out some butterfly photos our listeners shared. That's sciencefriday.com/butterflies.

• 19:07Flora Lichtman?

  And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including

• 19:13Speaker 08

  Danielle Johnson. Jason Rosenberg.

• 19:15Flora Lichtman?

  Rasha Uryidi. Shoshana Buckspahn. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.