Many young children have experiences that are stressful or harmful. These experiences include physical, emotional and sexual abuse and neglect. They also include growing up in a home with substance abuse, mental illness, violence, and parental imprisonment known collectively as adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. These experiences set these children up for mental and physical illnesses like
Thank you very much. I was lucky enough to find a very good therapist early into my adult life, and I was able to fully reconcile with my mother a few years before she died. She had me read a number of books which helped to explain things. By far the very best help I found was in my 40’s in having a therapist who had me use DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy. Close akin to CBT. That was a life saver. I suggest it to anyone going through hard times.
I hadn’t made the connection between my adverse childhood experiences and obesity. Now I see how those events affected me. I turned my pain and shame inward and hurt myself by overeating. I’m now losing weight, but it really helps to understand the root cause. Thank you for your postings.
I felt the same way, that I was on my own and that everybody else had perfect parents and normal homes. We instinctively kept our family’s secret. I turned that shame and fear inward.
Bill: I had severe depressions as a teenager and into my college years. After college, like so many in our generation, I experienced a few quite amazing “trips” on LSD, perhaps three all together. They changed my life in a number of ways, one of which is that I never again had a severe depressive episode. Not one. For over 50 years. Have I had very painful and traumatic life experiences in that time? Yes. Have I felt intense sadness and loss of hope? Yes. But never any clinical depression, no falling into the abyss as I did as a teenager and young adult. Of course, this is just one anecdote, a very personal one. But I find it interesting in the extreme that we are now considering mind altering plant and synthetic substances as treatments for depression. Best wishes, David
Thank you very much. I was lucky enough to find a very good therapist early into my adult life, and I was able to fully reconcile with my mother a few years before she died. She had me read a number of books which helped to explain things. By far the very best help I found was in my 40’s in having a therapist who had me use DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy. Close akin to CBT. That was a life saver. I suggest it to anyone going through hard times.
I hadn’t made the connection between my adverse childhood experiences and obesity. Now I see how those events affected me. I turned my pain and shame inward and hurt myself by overeating. I’m now losing weight, but it really helps to understand the root cause. Thank you for your postings.
I felt the same way, that I was on my own and that everybody else had perfect parents and normal homes. We instinctively kept our family’s secret. I turned that shame and fear inward.
Bill: I had severe depressions as a teenager and into my college years. After college, like so many in our generation, I experienced a few quite amazing “trips” on LSD, perhaps three all together. They changed my life in a number of ways, one of which is that I never again had a severe depressive episode. Not one. For over 50 years. Have I had very painful and traumatic life experiences in that time? Yes. Have I felt intense sadness and loss of hope? Yes. But never any clinical depression, no falling into the abyss as I did as a teenager and young adult. Of course, this is just one anecdote, a very personal one. But I find it interesting in the extreme that we are now considering mind altering plant and synthetic substances as treatments for depression. Best wishes, David