The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

After the meeting, Marjorie, the hotel worker who cleaned the room during Burke Harris’s presentation, told Burke Harris that she recognized her own life in the story Burke Harris was telling about the effect of ACEs. This encounter energized Burke Harris: From then on, she actively sought out the people she hoped to serve by asking them questions about their reality and what they thought they needed. Burke Harris shifted her practice of medicine at the Bayview clinic even more in response to her ongoing research in scientific literature and what she saw happening in the lives of her patients.

Because she’d gained an understanding of the biology of the toxic stress response, Burke Harris began using an integrated behavioral health approach—adding direct access to therapists and counseling in her office. She added other mental health care services after reading research by Alicia Lieberman, a University of California-San Francisco child psychologist who pioneered therapeutic treatment of children and parents as a team when the child experienced early trauma. That approach helps children, who readily create self-blaming narratives to explain traumas if their adults don’t intervene. Parents may have their own traumas, so they need help to become buffers between their children and more trauma; the ability to help their children tell other stories comes once parents see the connection between their own responses in the past and their ability to be good advocates for their children in the present.