Dr. Marc D. Hauser on the Harm of Childhood Trauma and the Hope of Resiliency

Debbie:

Hey Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Hi, Debbie. Nice to be here.

Debbie:

Nice to have you here. We’re going to be talking about your new book and your work in the world. And before we get into that, I would love it if you could tell us about yourself a little bit and the work that you do in the world. I know you have kind of an extensive background in research, lots of interesting things. So give us a little overview.

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Yeah, sure. So I think that I would say is I bring kind of an interesting combination of features to the work I do, which is that I trained as a scientist and specifically in the cognitive and neurosciences. So my research interests have always been about how the brain works, how it develops, you know, how it breaks down, how evolution has sculpted brains over centuries and millions of years. And I use those insights as an educator who has spent a lot of time teaching undergraduates and graduate students and postdocs and professors, as well as very young children down to four or five years of age in schools, both nationally and internationally with a specific emphasis over the last decade plus on children in special education with different kinds of disabilities. And that includes children with different kinds of traumatic experiences that have shaped their development in different and unique ways. In addition, and as you mentioned my book, I often have written books for the general public because I feel that often there’s an extraordinary amount of scientific evidence tucked away in academic journals that are not making their way into the hands of people who really ought to know and who would benefit from that knowledge, which includes teachers and parents and doctors and nurses and so forth. And so the whole goal for these books for the general public is not to dumb anything down, but to treat my audience with great respect and helpfully have them learn from what the scientists have done. So there are practical implications for what I do.

Debbie:

Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that because even when I heard about your book through your publisher, I think my first instinct was like, oh, this sounds like more of an academic book or and it’s not at all. The book is called Vulnerable Minds. The subtitle is the harm of childhood trauma and the hope of resilience. So I was instantly intrigued. And then when I started reading it, it does feel very accessible. You share a lot of anecdotes and you really bring the research alive in a way that as a reader is very compelling and allowed me and I imagine any reader to really understand what are sometimes very difficult and emerging science topics that you’re covering in the book. So I’d love it if you could talk a little bit about this book specifically, your personal interest in trauma. So what kind of led you down the road of writing this book?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

So I think my interest, and thank you for the compliment, I’m glad it was digestible to you. That’s always a good sign. I think, you know, I think you mentioned this, and I think part of the reason for that is that I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of children, you know, largely in a school setting, but also internationally, work I do, for example, in Kenya, in East Africa with children who are orphans, Kenya itself is a country, a wonderful country that I’ve lived in for several years and worked in, has approximately three million orphans. Sub -Saharan Africa has 54 million orphans. So there’s the magnitude of the impact of children who have lost parents for whatever reason and now are in a situation where they’re having to fend for themselves, in many cases or be taken in by foster care adopted or in children’s homes or orphanages. So I’ve been exposed to many, many, many children who have had different kinds of traumatic experiences. And I’ve been struck over the years by, you know, again, this kind of mismatch between what the sciences have revealed over decades of research. But is not in the hands of the practitioners, which in the case of schools includes teachers, nurses, doctors in case of special education schools, administrators, counselors, therapists, and so forth. And this should not be taken as a criticism. If anything, it’s a criticism of the sciences for keeping this tucked in in a way which is not necessarily accessible. So I really felt there was a real great urgency and need to get some of these ideas out to a much broader audience, both to make people aware of the magnitude of impact of adversity on children globally and to bring hope to the issue by shining a light on many of the discoveries that have been made over now several decades that can really help children both recover from traumatic experiences and build resilience against future adversities. And I think, you know, many people may think, especially those who are in the therapeutic area, that therapy, you know, is an important part of that story. And it certainly is. But what I try to do in the book is this idea of a trauma toolkit that because of massive individual differences that we see, and the differences both in the experiences but in terms of responses that we need not just therapy because for some people therapy doesn’t work. For some people medication doesn’t work. So there are other strategies and techniques that can be brought to bear that people really ought to know about so that we can be as great a help as we can to children.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. I appreciated so many of the examples and stories that you shared in the book. And I will share that one of my very first jobs, I worked for UNICEF for a number of years. I spent time in Somalia in the civil war there in the nineties. And I think about the children that I engaged with back then and, and just think about what the resiliency that they were demonstrating, some of the kids that I interacted with. And, you know, of course, what’s happening in the world right now, it’s hard to not think about the trauma that a whole other generation of kids are undergoing. So let’s talk about trauma then. You know, you said the term traumatic experience. What is a traumatic experience? Do you have a definition for that?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Yeah, so this is actually an important piece of the book. And as you know, as having listeners who are educators and parents, several of your listeners may be aware of this idea of adverse childhood experiences or ACEs because that short term has been certainly floated around a good deal without going into details of the history. You know, it really came to the fore in about 1998 based on work by a preventative medicine doctor, Dr. Vincent Felitti, who with his colleagues really put that concept on the map. That was an important piece because what it really showed to sort of abbreviate the result is that adverse childhood experiences like neglect and abuse, parents who may be divorced or have mental health issues themselves or domestic violence and so forth, that those experiences can greatly impact the physical and mental health risks of children. And the results really were staggering at the time. And now, of course, many years later, what we’ve learned is that those adverse childhood experiences are not specific to Southern California where they were first discovered, but are really global phenomenon. The World Health Organization, notes that approximately a billion children each year globally are maltreated. So these are staggering numbers. But aces are about experience. They aren’t about the response to experience. So saying that, you know, Jane has two aces, neglect and physical abuse. That’s her experience. But John may have exactly the same aces, neglect and physical abuse. 

But John may not respond with any trauma at all and Jane may. The trauma is really kind of the scarring of the body and brain that as a result of having kind of a negative, vulnerable response to that adversity. And the reason why that Jane and John example is so important, and this is what I really focus on in the book in some sense, is that some people have traumatic responses to those ACEs and some have resilient responses. And we need to understand both because we need to understand what leads to greater vulnerability and what leads to greater resilience. And the answer, as in so much of human life, is a combination of nature and nurture. Some people are born with a biological architecture that puts them more on the vulnerable side, and some are born with an architecture that puts them more on the resilient side. And then depending on the experiences, you can shift up and down that scale from vulnerable to resilience. And the sciences has brought a great deal to bear on that dimensionality. And that’s why we need to get away in some sense from just saying this is a child with trauma because different aspects of the experience can shape what I call traumatic signatures. For example, neglect or deprivation results in different signatures of brain function and body function than does abuse. And that’s really important because for teachers, parents, clinicians, doctors, recognizing those signatures is the key to designing interventions that are going to help with recovery.

Debbie:

Wow, okay, there’s so much in what you just shared. So I just want to ask this question about aces, because there were so many things I read in your book that I found really interesting about the way that not all aces are created equal. So I think the way that I used to think about aces, and I am not an expert on them by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought of it just like there are these 10 or whatever key ACEs, I don’t know how many there are, but you check and the more you have, you know, if you have this many ACEs, you’re more at risk for this. And so it felt very data -driven statistics, but all of those ACEs can be responded to differently. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Yeah, very good question. So I think that’s exactly right. That is the most common understanding of ACEs by the general public, but I include health workers and so forth, is that you have an ACE score. And the higher the ACE score, which is the number of different types of ACEs, the more at risk you are to these health problems. There are two problems with that conclusion. One is that the ACE survey, which originally, as you pointed out, had a total of 10 different types, that survey was never intended as a screening device for individuals. It was meant to look at populations, that populations with a higher number of ACEs will, on average, let’s say, have a higher health risk of certain kinds of physical and mental health problems.

But it’s often been used as, oh, if I’ve got four ACEs, I, Mark, am more vulnerable to these health risks. And that’s not what the intention was. That’s important because in certain parts of this country and elsewhere, the ACE score is often being used in health insurance and health policy to determine treatment. And I think that’s potentially a very dangerous and risky conclusion. So that’s the first point. The second is, and, this is a framework that I use in the book that I’ve developed is that the science leads us to think about different dimensions of adversity that shape potentially the response, both traumatic and potentially resilient. So I use this framework that I call the adverse tease. And one can think of it as kind of the fingers of your hand because there are five dimensions. The first one we’ve already mentioned – typology. And as I note in the book, and you kind of alluded to this a little bit, the typology has grown since the original 10. Because when Feliti and his colleagues developed it, they were really thinking about what happens within the family. But we of course know that many different types of adversity happen outside the family. War, community violence, poverty, discrimination, oppression, and so forth. So it’s important to broaden that typology. That’s the first one.

The second, and this is fundamental, is timing. When does it occur during development? The originators of the survey define childhood as birth to 18. But we know that there is a lot of potential exposure to adversity prenatally, and that development doesn’t stop at 18. The frontal lobes of our brain, which is kind of the housing of this key set of functions called the executive functions, which are things like attention, working memory, self -regulation, and planning, that system continues to develop until the age of about 23 to 25. So development doesn’t stop in childhood at 18, it continues. But even maybe more importantly, birth to 18 is a huge developmental period. And we know there are little windows of opportunity where if certain experiences don’t happen, you can either delay or completely derail certain kinds of developmental processes. So timing is critical. Third T is tenure. How long does it last? Some types of adversity may be very acute, short -lived. Others may be very long -lived. A child, you mentioned Somalia, a child living in a poor area.

I work in areas like in Kenya where there’s extreme poverty in certain places. Those children are living in poverty for maybe their entire childhood, long lived. Whereas take something like COVID, which for some people in some parts of the world causes a loss of income. And for a two year period, they may have been suffering because they didn’t have resources they were normally having. Two years is still relatively long for a child, but it’s shorter than the entire childhood. The fourth is what I call turbulence, and that’s really kind of the predictability or controllability of the adversity. A child who’s got a father who sometimes is drunk and comes home and is abusive, that’s kind of unpredictable and uncontrollable. Whereas a child living in sustained poverty, they can’t control it, but it’s predictable. Day after day, I may not have any kind of access to food or shelter and so forth. And then the last one is toxicity. And that’s kind of the severity of the adversity. So one of the scientific studies that I point to in the book is children who were living in the Romanian orphanages in the 80s and 90s who were truly deprived of all the basic ingredients of survival. That’s an extreme form of neglect and deprivation.

Other children may be in situations where they’ve lost a father, so they have less caretaking than they would if they had both parents there. May have less access to books, so cognitive enrichment is declined. So there’s different severity of these adversities. To put it all together, these dimensions of adversity can potentially shape the outcome when you have a traumatic response. And for example, relevant to your initial comment about neurodivergence and so forth. We know, for example, that children with disabilities like autism or Down syndrome are more susceptible to different kinds of adversity, including things like neglect and abuse. We know that children who are younger, birth to five, are more susceptible to adversity than older children. And so these dimensions play into potential vulnerabilities and how that shapes the response of the child.

Debbie:

Thank you so much for walking us through the adverse T’s framework. I found that really fascinating in the book and I was going to ask you about that and I so appreciate how you broke that down for us. I’d love to talk a little bit more about neurodivergent kids. So you said that neurodivergent kids are more susceptible. What can you share about the way being neurodivergent might impact the way a child responds to an ACE meaning whether it is embedded as a trauma or it is something they respond to with resiliency. How does their neural divergence impact that?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Yeah, so take for example the nature of attachment as kind of an example to think about the developing child. One way that many developmental scientists like to think about the nature of attachment is that, sort of the analogy to a tennis match. Child serves up a need, parent returns the serve. Now, when that’s working efficiently or effectively for the child and the parent through attachment, there’s a timeliness to the serve and return. That doesn’t mean that every serve a child hits should be returned or can be returned. But when there’s a good synchrony to that relationship, then things seem to develop well. Okay, so let’s think about a situation with a parent with a neurodivergent child where the communication system may not necessarily be recognized by the parent. That the needs that that child is communicating in his or her own way may not be recognized by the parent for a while until they understand that the child is neurodivergent and therefore, their communication is just different.

What that means is there may have been a fairly significant period of neglect, not necessarily intentionally, right? Where a parent is just, I’m not gonna invest in this child, as opposed to, I just am not recognizing the cues, right? And that goes both ways. When those cues aren’t being recognized, that child potentially is now developing a sense of helplessness because the communication of I need something is not being recognized. Here’s a parallel. We know from studies that I actually discussed in the book that when mothers are exposed to war, as is happening right now in the Ukraine and in Gaza, one of the systems that seems to be knocked out or greatly blunted is the system of empathy. Empathy being, I know what it’s like to be you. And that’s kind of often an unconscious affective response. So I see you Debbie crying or I see you Debbie laughing and I immediately have this intuitive sense of happy versus sad.

Empathy is really almost at the root of that serve and return relationship. Oh, I see you crying. Okay, I’m going to pick you up, right? I don’t think about should I go pick you up? No, I just do it but if those cues aren’t being meshed then that synchrony can happen and therefore that child is gonna be neglected and because of that serve and return relationship being broken the confidence about the safety of the environment and the ability to explore is gonna be reduced. A child who’s got a strong attachment feels the world is safe because they know that if I raise my hands or cry, someone’s going to respond to me. If that doesn’t happen, why would I go explore an unsafe world? So curiosity begins to be buffered. And so that’s the kind of feedback that can happen when those communicative signals aren’t interpreted in a way that meets the child’s needs. So I think that’s just an example of that. And that’s all the reason why when a parent has a child who’s neurodivergent, who may be sending signals that are unfamiliar, unrecognizable, that those early interventions can happen to recognize them so that that neglect piece doesn’t take hold.

Debbie:

Yeah, wow. It’s fascinating. I want to talk a little bit about the cost of unprocessed trauma or what trauma does to a child or a person’s brain and body. So I’d love it if you could spend a few minutes talking about the cost of trauma on a person. I know that it’s not uniform in the way that it impacts, and it’s not just one part of a human’s experience. So could you kind of talk about how it might show up and linger in people’s life and bodies?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Yeah, so, you know, many of the books that have been written about trauma, many, maybe, you know, the majority, I would say that’s the only ones that people are familiar with, often speak to what happens to adult survivors of childhood traumatic experiences and how those can really derail functioning in life, including things like leading to PTSD syndromes or complex PTSD. And this is Harvard, I mean, so people may be familiar with Bessel van der Kolk’s book on the body keeps the score, the idea that there’s these kind of signatures that can keep with the individual, that can include things like complete dyslexic regulation, distortions, dissociation, you know haunted by memories that can interfere with sleep patterns and so forth My focus on the book of course is on the children who are living with these things now Rather than the adults who continue to live with those but I think you know and part of the reason for that is because With children, they’re both more vulnerable to the adversity and the trauma.   

But because there are still children, there’s greater plasticity and possibility of hope for recovery. So I think that’s the piece that I think is really important is that we have opportunities with children that are less available, not available, but less available when it comes to adults because the brain just loses its plasticity to change more. So one of the things that I do, in the book as I talk about a wide variety of things that can be done to help children, but there are many of these are actually things that can at this point only be done with adults because the techniques have only been tried out on adults. So some of your listeners may be familiar with a kind of a current revolution that’s happening with the use of therapy -assisted psychedelics. These are strategies that at this point are only available to some extent with adult populations because we certainly have no idea about the long -term consequences or effects on children. But the hope there is that for people who have suffered long sufferers of things like depression, major depression, and complex PTSD, that despite treatment with medication and therapy, they’ve been resistant. Certain psychedelics with therapy have opened the door to those people to recover often from childhood traumatic experiences that have affected them to this day. When it comes to children, there are many techniques that have been used to help, for example, with emotional dysregulation. So one of the ways in which, for example, different kinds of abuse, like emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, often show up in children, is very significant emotional dysregulation because for that child, what the abuse has done is it’s made the world seem very unsafe and therefore they are on high alert and vigilant to any kind of threat that’s going to continue what’s going on. That’s an adaptive response. And so there are now a whole suite of techniques that can help the child calm that system down, including aspects of biofeedback, certain kinds of breathing.

For example, that can help basically regulate the biggest nerve in our body called the vagal nerve, which controls our heart rates. Some of your listeners may be familiar with Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory. And the basic idea is to gain greater control over heart rate, the autonomic system, so that when things seem unsafe, they have a way of tamping that system down in a better way. There are a variety of other strategies that really focus on that emotional dysregulation piece, including things like gaining greater awareness of what one’s body is doing at the time. Many of the children that I work with, they’re sitting there and they’re hyperventilating. Their fists have gotten all tied up. They’re sweating and they have no idea that’s going on. So body scans and check -ins to what the body is doing can help bring greater awareness to that, which can then help as a conduit to greater emotional regulation rather than dysregulation.

Just to close that gap, because I mentioned this distinction between types, neglect really can undermine that executive system. And so, for example, for children who have been severely neglected or deprived, just simply forming an association between action and consequence can be very difficult. Think of what happens in school all day long. Follow the direction, line up, go to recess.That simple rule following is difficult for them. So there again, you’ve got to break down into much smaller little steps, actions and consequences so they can track the association. So again, different kinds of solutions for different types and timing of different kinds of adversity.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s great. We have discussed on the show, you know, multiple times Stephen Porges’s work and polyvagal theory. So that is really helpful to hear. And also, we’ve been talking, I did an episode recently on interoception, which is, you know, that awareness of what’s happening in your body. So it’s, it’s, I love hearing that those can be really useful tools with this. Any other thoughts in terms of if we know as adults in these kids lives, whether we’re teachers or we’re therapists or we’re caregivers, if we know a child has experienced ACEs, for example, are there things we can do to help kind of prevent that being embedded as a trauma or to make the chances of a more resilient response to that ACE possible?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Yeah, I think some of the strategies that we’ve talked about are ones that can help the child to kind of build up that resilience. I mean, one of the things that’s coming out more and more clearly, and anybody who works in schools knows this, a child, for example, who has been exposed to abuse from a parent or relative, that is the most fundamental break in trust that one can have. You’re a baby, you’re born, and your biology expects you to attach to a caretaker, your parents. When that is violated, why would you trust anybody else? And so of course, from the child’s perspective, they do the adaptive thing, which is, I don’t trust anybody. The analogy for your listeners is something like the following.

If I’m a gazelle walking around on the savanna in Africa and I see a lion who attacks my pride, I don’t conclude that lion is dangerous, but all other lions are okay. I conclude all lions are dangerous. That is precisely the right response for that child. The problem of course, is that now you’ve got a child who doesn’t trust anyone. And so what schools will do when they’re working effectively is help that child tamp down that generalization and learn, hey, I’m here every day. So this is an experience I have very often in schools. Sometimes with children like that, they’re both violent to themselves and to others. And we may have to physically restrain them so they don’t hurt themselves or others. They need to learn that even though they hit me yesterday, I’m back the next day and I’m their friend and I want to play with them and I want to teach them and I want to interact with them and sometimes you’re like I just hit you. How could you do that? I said because I want to help you and then they slowly begin to trust others but that trust is key that is why by the way just to add because I work internationally and a lot of the book is designed to help people think internationally because What can be done within the United States is not necessarily what would work in other countries. But even for those of us who work within the United States, we have a wealthy immigrant population coming from different cultures where the expectations for care and so forth are often wildly different. So we need to understand that cross -cultural variation. So I mentioned that because how we respond has got to be sensitive to that kind of difference. But the key is that when we are working in schools, we need to support the people who are working in support so that they have year after year the same staff that can work with those kids. Because these are kids who have lost trust and you can only gain trust if you’re there over and over and over again. I know you, you’re always here for me and I trust you. And that’s how that generalization basically fades away. So they began to trust a much larger group of people.

Debbie:

Yeah, that is such important work. I’m thinking of a conversation I had with Dr. Lori Desautels, who is doing a lot of work in her most recent book is called I think Intentional Neuroplasticity and it’s about trauma informed schools. How would you I mean, I think what you just shared is so important, just the importance of an educator consistently showing up for this child and helping to build perhaps a secure attachment if the child hasn’t had that. What other ways can a school be trauma informed? Are there any other things that could make a hallmark for that?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Yeah, I mean, the, you know, the common kind of framework for thinking about this is what’s often called the four R’s, trauma -informed organization. So recognizing or sort of realizing that traumatic experiences are common. And this is an important thing for the sort of, you know, the victims. Often, you know, I certainly interact with adults who think they must be weird and different that they were the ones who were abused as children. And when they understand that sadly, deeply sadly, this is not a rare experience, but a relatively common experience, that can often be helpful that it’s, that is a common experience. So we need to realize that. The second R is recognizing that there are these different kinds of traumatic responses because by recognizing these different traumatic responses and not just focusing on the experience, right? Not conclude that just because you had an experience, you’re gonna have a traumatic response, but there are some who do. That’s gonna let us help basically intervene, right? To build resilience in individuals. That’s the third R. And then the fourth is resisting, resisting re -traumatization. And that’s important both for the children where we’re working in schools and for the practitioners. I really want to emphasize here that in many schools where I work, and I think this is probably very common across the globe, that many teachers are individuals who themselves were traumatized as children. And working with children who have traumatic experiences can be re -traumatizing. And that means that we need to build schools where the health of the teachers is taken care of. Because if they’re not healthy, they can’t help children who are not well. And so that re -traumatization is both avoiding ways that we can re -traumatize children who are living with traumatic experiences, as well as helping the practitioners who may see a child who’s neglected, and be reminded of their own neglect. And now you’ve got a loop between the teacher and the child, and that’s not healthy for anyone. So that suite of those four R’s is a very broad framework. Now, of course, as I say, the details are what matters: how you recognize, how you respond, and how you avoid re -traumatizing. But that’s a framework that’s useful for any organization, but it’s particularly important for schools. I would just add one piece, because I think it’s important as well.

Many, I think, have commented on the fact that we’ve gone into a space now which, you know, has often been a kind of a really heavy, heavy nurturing attitude towards children that may have not done justice to children because it’s not allowed them to build up grit and character and their own kind of internal ability to resist. And so I think we also have to avoid having too many direct conversations about, oh, you experienced this kind of trauma or are you thinking about suicide or that that may be doing more harm. We have to avoid being too overbearing on that nurturing side and thinking about ways in which we can help children on their own build resistance. And so I think there’s a balance here. I think many recently have commented on teaching children about social emotional or what are often called soft skills. It’s an important piece, but it can tilt the other way that we are so protective that the child’s not developing their own ability to fight back against certain kinds of experiences that may be adverse.

Debbie:

A lot of adults in my community are discovering their own neurodivergence, as they, you know, parent a neurodivergent child. And that has been really fascinating to observe, and how they’re internalizing and making sense of their childhood and their experiences. And so we have this whole generation of neurodivergent kids growing up, hopefully with a stronger sense of self and self awareness of who they are and their strengths and their relative weaknesses. And, you know, I see that hopefully as part of a sea change and how we’re responding to and understanding neurodivergence. So that’s my long winded way of asking, is something similar happening with trauma, you know, because I imagine there’s a lot of adults who have trauma that they’ve never even known was there. And now that there’s, you know, we have Bruce Perry’s book, What Happened to You? And you know, there’s just much more, awareness of trauma is something that a lot of people have experience with or aces have experience with. So do you see a sea change or a shift happening in the way that trauma is? I don’t even know the rest of my question, but just just in terms of how we as a society as a whole will be experiencing and engaging with trauma.

Dr. Marc Hauser:

I do. I mean, I think there is a change and, you know, as in any change, there’s some positive aspects of it and I think there are some negative aspects of it. On the positive side, the stigma that’s often attached to mental health issues, I think has greatly diminished at least in this country and some other countries, it’s still the case that in many countries, some of the ones that I work in, like in Kenya, that mental health issues are still stigmatized as are certain experiences like having been sexually abused, or there’s still strong stigmas in many places in the world about that. So that’s the positive that there’s brought greater awareness. I think in some ways, as many of course are aware, because of what happened during COVID, and that the lid of mental health crises across the globe was lifted and we were brought in direct contact with it. That awareness has been a positive in that we now know that it’s a common experience and we can better treat it. The downside of it is that the word trauma has become part of the colloquial language as have many of the mental health disability terms like autism, like bipolar, like anxiety. These terms are now used like the color green. They’re just part of the common language and that’s unfortunate I think. We are certainly seeing this in schools where kids are coming in self -diagnosing because they saw something on TikTok. That is really unhealthy and it makes the job of the experts who are trained to do these things much more difficult because the term has gotten used in a very generic colloquial way. Trauma has been used that way, resilience has been used that way, and a lot of the clinically used disabilities are now used in the colloquial language. So I think that’s very negative, very toxic actually to treatment. Anybody who thinks they have difficulty with certain social interactions now self labels as I’m autistic. That is a harm to the general issues of clinical treatment. So I think we’ve got the positive that the awareness is there. People now realize that these are serious issues that can really undermine human flourishing in children and adults. We need ways to help people recover and build resilience. But when we use it in a colloquial way, that’s harming that word.

Debbie:

Yeah, that makes total sense. Thank you. Thank you for following my brain wherever it went with that question. I appreciate that. So as a way of wrapping up, I mean, there’s so much more that we could have gotten into in your book. And it’s, it’s, I really encourage listeners, if you are intrigued by this conversation, it is fascinating. And I really, we didn’t really even get into so much of what you talk about in the science of alternative ways to process and recover. I thought that was really interesting too. But is there one kind of last thought or something you’d want listeners to take away from this who are kind of intrigued by your work?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Yeah, I think in some ways the book is really an invitation to collaborate. And that I see this as a collaboration among many, many people. This book did not have a specific audience in mind in some ways, right? I see this as a book that was written for victims of childhood adversity and a traumatic response. I see this as targeting parents who may have children who’ve had such experiences, certainly teachers, doctors, nurses, and policymakers, because a lot of this work bears directly on policy in terms of insurance and treatment and so forth. And so it’s really an invitation for a collaboration so that we all can be better aware of what’s going on and ultimately work together. Because I think one of the take home messages of the book is that we have many different organizational structures that often don’t collaborate and this really requires collaboration. When a child has been abandoned, we not only need child and protective services, we need law enforcement, we need judges, we need teachers, we need parents and communities to come together to know what to do for an abandoned child as opposed to an abused child. And I think that’s the message is that this is a collaborative initiative that really, really needs people to work together.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. Thank you. So listeners, again, the book is called Vulnerable Minds, The Harm of Childhood Trauma and the Hope of Resilience. And Marc, where can people learn more about you and your work?

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Probably the best place is my author website, which is Marc D Hauser. It’s Marc with a C, D as in dog, and then Hauser, H -A -U -S -E -R dot com. And on that site are, you know, my book, Vulnerable Minds, and papers I’ve written, and, you know, various kinds of social media posts and things. I think that’s the best place to find that work and engage and people can reach out.

Debbie:

Awesome, thank you. And listeners, as always, I will have links in the show notes pages, show notes page for where you can connect with Mark and some of the other resources that came up in our conversation today. So thank you so much. I really appreciate everything you shared today and congratulations on Vulnerable Minds.

Dr. Marc Hauser:

Thank you, Debbie. It’s been a fun conversation.