But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin. Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala-a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. “Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from people who haven’t. What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

And studies have shown that people who suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres.” Because of this tendency, telomeres are linked to human lifespan.

When they’ve finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline surging through our bodies are healthy in moderation-you wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. They were seven and a half times more likely to become alcoholics, four and a half times more likely to suffer from depression, and a whopping twelve times more likely to attempt suicide. People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema. And their risk for contracting diseases didn’t go up just a few percentage points. “The results of the study were astoundingly clear: The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood.

What my bones know by stephanie foo