How Childhood Trauma Affects the Brain and Body - The ACES Study
Therapy in a Nutshell
Therapy in a Nutshell -Emma McAdam
4.8 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to another episode of the Therapy in a Nutshell podcast. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm Emma McAdam and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. |
| 0:08.0 | And this podcast is all about taking the life-changing, but usually kind of complicated topics of therapy |
| 0:14.0 | and boiling them down into simple, easy-to-understand concepts that you can use in your daily life. |
| 0:20.0 | If you find today's episode is helpful |
| 0:21.5 | to you, please pass it on to someone else who could benefit from it as well. Each podcast |
| 0:25.5 | episode comes from a corresponding video you can find on the Therapy in a Nutshell YouTube channel. |
| 0:30.3 | Also, these podcasts are educational and don't replace the advice or direction you may be receiving |
| 0:35.1 | from a therapist or other health professionals. Now please, enjoy the episode. |
| 0:39.3 | Childhood trauma can have a direct, lasting impact on physical health, mental health, and the ability to function in society. |
| 0:47.3 | But we didn't have any idea how much impact it had until the late 1990s when a curious doctor made a groundbreaking discovery. |
| 0:55.1 | Dr. Felitti led an obesity clinic at Kaiser Permanente. In the late 1980s, he observed a strange |
| 1:01.2 | phenomenon where many patients who successfully lost weight quickly regained it. Some even dropped |
| 1:07.6 | out of the program even though they were successful. So he was curious about this pattern, so Dr. Felitti started interviewing patients to understand why they regained the weight. |
| 1:16.6 | And during these interviews, he uncovered that a significant number of these patients had a history of childhood trauma and abuse. |
| 1:24.6 | So he started to wonder if obesity might be a coping mechanism for dealing with the unresolved trauma. |
| 1:29.8 | So Dr. Felitti collaborated with the CDC to ask over 17,000 adults about their exposure to various types of childhood trauma, and these are called adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs for short. |
| 1:41.3 | The original ACEs study identified 10 categories of these experiences, |
| 1:45.7 | which can be grouped into three broad categories. Abuse, which includes physical and emotional |
| 1:51.0 | and sexual abuse, neglect, which is physical and emotional neglect, and household dysfunction, |
| 1:56.5 | which includes domestic violence, substance abuse, untreated mental illness, parental |
| 2:00.4 | separation or divorce, or parental incarceration. Now, the original study did includes domestic violence, substance abuse, untreated mental illness, parental separation, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Therapy in a Nutshell -Emma McAdam, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Therapy in a Nutshell -Emma McAdam and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

