Adverse Childhood Experiences w/ Dr. Nadine Burke Harris

are sicker, or because they're low income they're sicker. I'm like, what if we're all the same and these kids are not fundamentally broken, but they're showing a normal biological response to a harmful experience. Hello, Hello, Hello everyone, and welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox. Today I am really excited and nervous to be talking to the

Surgeon General of California. And the reason I'm so nervous but also excited is because this person's work has really illuminated and helped explain a lot of what has been going on with me my whole life. A few years ago, my therapist said to me, you should go to this website and take this quiz and find out your asist scored. I'm like, ACES, what are you talking about? And she said,

ACES is an acronym for adverse childhood experiences. Adverse childhood experiences can have effects on us throughout our lives, not only in terms of our mental health and our behavioral capacities, but also our physical health. Toxic stress PTSD has health consequences. People with high ASIS scores have a higher rate of

heart disease, diabetes, and more. The person who has brought the this research to the masses arguably is Surgeon General of California, doctor Nadine Burke Harris Nading Burke Harris is an award winning physician, researcher, and California's first ever Surgeon General.

After graduating from Stanford, she turned down multiple job offers to work in the most underserved part of San Francisco, where she found at the Center for Youth Wellness, an organization leading the effort to advance pediatric medicine, raise public awareness, and transform the way society responds to children exposed to adverse childhood experiences, aces and toxic stress. Dr Burke Harris is ted talk how childhood trauma affects health across the

lifetime has been viewed more than seven million times. Her book The Deepest Dwell Healing the long term effects of childhood adversity was called indispensable by The New York Times. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr Nadine Burke Harris. Hello, Dr Nadine Burke Harris, Welcome to the podcast. How are you feeling today? I'm feeling very well. Thank you, Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm so excited

to have you here. Can you for those folks out there who don't who aren't familiar with you and your work, can you, dispersed of all, tell them what ACES is and then then we can get some background on who you are. But can you tell them what ACES stands for and why it's important. Yeah. So, the term ACES, they stand for Adverse Childhood Experiences and they refer to ten categories of experiences of adversity that folks can have

during their childhood. And it actually comes from this groundbreaking research study that was done by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente now over two decades ago, when they asked adults about their history of exposure to ten categories of adversity, and those included physical, emotional or sexual abuse, physical or emotional neglect, were growing up in a household where parent was mentally ill, substance dependent, incarcerated, where there was parental

separation or divorce, or domestic violence. And what they found in this research study was number one, these aces were super common, right, and I think for for so many people who have had these experiences, they feel like they're the only one. And it turns out that two thirds of Americans have experienced at least one of these ten

categories of average childhood experiences. But the second thing that they found was that the more of these that a person has exp varience, the more likely they are to have not just the things that I think many of us intuitively associate with child too trauma, so you know, things like depression or anxiety, mental health conditions or behavioral health conditions, substance dependence, suicidality, right, all of those things, but also heart disease, right, that's the number one killer

in America. And the more aces a person has, the more likely they are to have heart disease, stroke, asthma, diabetes, all of these different health conditions. And what we now understand from the science and the research that has happened is that when we experience adversity and trauma as children,

because children's brains and bodies are just developing. All of those stress hormones that are released during that adversity and trauma actually changes the way our brains and bodies are wired and can lead to an increased risk of different types of health conditions later on down the line. Yeah, and that is the piece that that that hits me so hard. I was deeply triggered after I took the

ACES test. I was deeply triggered afterwards. For folks out there, I encourage you to go to the website just google um number story dot org, thank you, and take the test, and I love the website has resources to just in case you are triggered, which is great, and we can talk about some of those. But for me taking the test, I was like, well, my was my mother really mentally ill when I think she had O c D And so there was just sort of hedging on some of

the questions. Right when I've spoken about my mother and I have my mother was emotionally abusive, and I've spoken about this on the podcast before and we were in a great place now and we reconciled and healed together and it's beautiful. But they even when like no one's watching. I feel like I'm sort of betraying my mother by like telling the truth to myself on an ASIS test. Right.

So I think that's one of the things that gets in the way because you you know, when your TED Talk, you say that this is a public health crisis, and I still don't feel like there's a big conversation about adverse childhood experiences that I think a lot of it has to do with shame. It has to do with how difficult it is to confront this stuff. What do you think about that piece of it? Oh, there's so much in what you just said. I've been talking about

this for a long time. Obviously the TED Talk I recorded in and it wasn't until when I wrote my book in ten did I ever publicly say anything about my own experience of growing up with a mom with a chronic mental health condition and talk about being worried about betraying your parents. Right, who my mom and I My mom is defined as by so many things, right, and she was very loving in many ways, but then

also there were a lot of scary moments. And the piece of it that I find to be really important and related to your point of what you're saying about feeling triggered, which I think it's so good to recognize that because when when we are triggered, there's something there, right, like, there's something there where. We got to figure out what that's about. But for me, ultimately, this work, this information is all about healing. It's all about interrupting that intergenerational cycle.

Because I one of the most profound experiences that I ever had was speaking at an onfrience for a bunch of young women who rushed up to me and they, you know, one young woman said to me, Dr Burke Harris, my ACE score is a nine, but my kids are three, and I'm going to make sure it stays that way, right, And what makes that possible is our ability to have a much broader national conversation about these topics, which requires us to feel safe in doing that, right, It requires

some kind of normalizing and understanding that actually, you know, you can go back and look at the experience you had with whoever was the source of your ass But then you go back and say, well, what was the source of their aces? And you recognize there's no bad

guy here, right, There's there's no bad guy. You just have a bunch of people who we're doing their best, their best with what they can and now what we're doing is opening up a conversation, having a dialogue and arming people with resources so that we can maybe do something different with what we've experienced. Right, And that's what

number story is all about. It's about raising awareness and it's about arming people with resources to understand what does their aces mean for them and how do they find a path to healing. Absolutely, I love that. I gotta take a tea easy break here, but I'll be fast alright. Now that's all taken care of. That's get back to our chat. So what do you think is getting in

the way of us having more protocols in place? You talk about best practices with children, and you introduce some of those at your clinic, and now you're a certain in general, what is getting in the way of us basically integrating mental health into you know, all of our healthcare practices and measuring these kinds of things so that we so we're doing asist test whenever people are going in for a physical or whatever. Girl, do you know

that's what we're doing in California? Talk to me, tell me, tell me I didn't know this so here in California, we've launched an initiative. It's a hundred and fifty million dollar initiative to train our healthcare clinicians on how to screen for advertge childhood experiences, how to assess for that toxic stress response, and how to respond with evidence based interventions. And we have given over fifty million dollars in grants

to communities all over California to implement these practices. And I will tell you we have trained almost nineteen thousand health care clinician so far in California. Very exciting. This is world leading stuff. We are the first in the nation, first in the world to be doing something of this

scope and scale. And I will tell you some of the difficulties that we have right Like, besides the fact that you and I can look at each other right now and know that there is not some amazing barrier in the neck, right that separates the head from the rest of the body, but somehow in medicine and in healthcare, we are like, Okay, there's mental health and there's the rest of traditional medicine, right, and they're totally separate, and

they're financed differently. It's just very very separate and that doesn't make any sense because that's not actually the way the body works. Right. The way the body works is that this is all integrated our mood, our mental health impacts our immune system. Think about our stress response and the way our stress response develops. Two of the main stress hormones that we have been most studied our adrenaline, which is a short term stress hormone, and that is

the heart pounding. And then cortisol is thought of as more of a long term stress hormone. So you can imagine famine as something that was like a big stressor back in the day. What cortisol does. It increases your blood pressure, It increases your blood sugar. It tends to make people more aggressive. It affects your sleep, so it makes it hard to sleep. Right, All of these things to help you stay awake at night so you can

hunt and eat any critters. And it um helps you conserve fat and store belly fat, right because it's a famine, right, you need need belly fat. And so all of these things are adaptive in an evolutionary standpoint, but in our day to day world, it's no longer a famine. Or for example, I give the example of your walking in a forest and you see a bear. It's not a bear in the woods that you have to fight and get away from. It's the bear coming home every night.

So you can imagine the way the stress response works. It's supposed to be that almost like a thermostat, where you have a set point, you experience a threat, you activate your stress response. It goes up, up, up, up up. When it's done its job, it turns itself off and you go back to normal. And that is the fight or flight response, and that's what we were designed to do.

The problem is when we experience high doses of adversity, as specially in childhood, that stress thermostat can get a little haywire, right, and so we activate our stress response and it goes up, up, up, up up, and then it stays there right. It doesn't turn itself off, or or it gets triggered for teeny tiny things. So it's either being activated much more frequently, or it has a very hard time turning itself off. I think I'm the ladder, well, the ladder, it doesn't turn it doesn't turn off, So

I'm just it's always heightened. I never feel safe, and then I just and I give out and I'm fatigued that I'm like, of course, I'm exhausted. That's but that's right because that actually it takes a ton of energy to do that, And if you were in an environment of constant threat, that would be adaptive. But now your body is wired that way, right, and it keeps going even if there isn't an immediate threat. And this is actually something that's really really important to me and toxic stress,

this prolonged activation of the stress response. And when I first started talking about this, honestly, the place I got them a lot of flak, like a surprising amount of pushback was from mental health clinicians and they were like, stay in your lane. You're a pediatrician, why are you talking about this? What do you think that was about? Oh? You know, I think honestly, I think a lot of

people didn't fully know and understand the science. So when I learned about this, because what really brought me into this work was I was running a clinic in Bay View Hunters Point in San Francisco. This is one of the hardest neighborhoods in the city, and I was seeing child after child after child. Most of my patients were experiencing high doses of adversity and it was impacting their health. I was seeing it in asthma, but I was seeing kids come in with chess pain. I was seeing kids

with autoimmune disease just off the charts. And you know, most of these kids were black and brown kids. And I just didn't believe the myth that somehow these people are sicker or because their low income they're sicker. I'm like, what if we're all the same, and what's happening is that these children are being poisoned by what's happening to them, right, Like, what if these kids are not fundamentally broken, but they're

showing a normal biological response to a harmful experience. I started researching that, and then I started looking into okay, so if we understand this and we see the a science and we know all of this, what do we do about it. I didn't learn this in medical school. I didn't learn this in residency. I never learned how to treat this. And so I'm like, well, good thing, this is medicine, right, Because if doctors were like, oh, well, we did learned it before, so we're never gonna do

anything about it, it's unsolvable. Where would we be right now with COVID, where would we be right now with HIV? Like we can respond to new challenges for stuff we didn't know before. So that was the whole thing. I started an organization to really do this research and find this out this information, the Center for Youth Wellness, And that was really how I approached this was just like, Okay, so what is the biology behind it? Because if we

know the biology, we can treat that. And that's what we started doing in my clinic and we learned a lot.

We learned a lot from other experts around the world, and then we developed some clinical protocols for how to screen for adverse childhood experiences and how to respond look at the best evidence of how do you calm down an overactive stress response, and a lot of the things that you've been talking about meditation, regular exercise, nutrition and even more like getting even more point like anti inflammatory diet.

You know, so certain pieces are really key. Now we're seeing data coming out about experiencing nature, right like they put e e g s on people and had them walk through the city and then had them walk through nature, and they see that being in like dense urban environments activates the fight or flight response more and being in beautiful, calm nature actually stimulates more the parasympathetic and it calms down the fight or flight response. All of these things.

And my thing because I'm a hardcore science nerd, Like science is mine. The story you tell about your father is just it's so fantastic, and like Dr Nadieberg Harris is definitely a nerd. Yeah, so I'll say my my for those who don't know, So my dad's my dad's a biochemist and my mom is a nurse. And even though I have four brothers, none of the other of them went into science. But when we were kids, man, my dad, if there was something going on, my dad

would break it down into science. Like he'd see us throwing paper airplanes at each other. And instead of your standard parent being like stop that, you'll poke an eye out, my dad, you know, measure the timing of the flight and the wind resistance and gravity's nine point eight meters per second squared, like what's the lift under the wings? Like that was Basil Burke. So I definitely learned to see everything in the world through a scientific lens. And

then when I became Surgeon General of California. When Governor Newsom appointed me, one of the things that he said is that we are looking for someone who can take an upstream approach, someone who can tackle aces and toxic stress. Like he said it specifically. And I just have to tell you this because it means so much to me. When I started, I got a ton of heat. People were saying, you can't screen for aces, and you can't do it because if there's not a therapist for every

single person who screams positive, it's irresponsible. It's all of the above. And why were they did they say was irresponsible? What was the logic there? People said, you shouldn't screen for something that you cannot treat, right. People assume like, well, aces happened in the past, and you can't fix what

happened in the past, So what are you doing? And I said, okay, But the point of doing an a screen is to understand whether that patient likely has that prolonged activation of the stress response, because that is imminently treatable, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is science. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine release the consensus report in

saying that toxic stress is treatable. The point is to find out how their body is reacting and whether or not that may put them at risk for a health conditions that if we intervene and help to regulate that stress response, we can prevent those health conditions. Right, And the whole notion that this is not treatable is just ridiculous.

It's just ridiculous. And that is why I'm so excited to bring evidence and medicine and science to bear against something that, by the way, two thirds of Americans have experienced at least one ACE. This has to be a national priority, absolutely, and so what I'm so exciting about what you're doing here in California is giving everyone access to a level of care that we all deserve because we all are thort of dealing with this toxic stress

in one way or another. And then I wonder if there is because when I think about public health, and I think about where we are with COVID, what's happened over the past year with mask and vaccines, and you're saying your tip talk, we know how to treat a public health is right, and we identify it and we know what to do. You know, people don't smoke on

airplanes anymore. But like right now people are fighting mask on airplanes, like you know, so do you feel I mean like there's a resistance and what would that resistance be about? I feel like underneath it is a shame around mental health. And then I wonder if there is in the health care industry, if we are dealing with people's stress, with with mindfulness, with meditation, with better nutrition, than the sort of profit motives of medicating everything are diminished.

And you know that, I'm not a conspiracy theorists, but like, I think about what gets in the way often, right, Yeah, I have two answers to that. So Number one, some of the biggest resistance doesn't come from patients, right Doctors say, oh, I can't screen my patients will not you know, won't like it. And the truth is, the patients all by and large, vastly appreciate it. It's the doctors who are

terrified because they're afraid of opening Pandora's box. They're afraid they don't know what to do with the information when it comes out. And I think that's an understandable fear and the way that we respond in medicine, and this is why we stood up such a robust initiative in California is because we trained doctors to do everything that they do. We trained doctors to cut people open, take out their organs, and then sew them back up again.

We can't train doctors to ask them questions safely, right we can. We can. People are right in saying, hey, if I'm going to do this as part of my as part of screening in physical exams, which is what we are doing in California, I need to have the training. I need to have the resources, I need to have the guidance. I need to have people who know what they're doing, who have done this before, who tell me how to do it safely. And that's what we're doing

in California. So for example, we are going to do it really rigorously and provide trade and provide guidance and all of that. So that's one piece that's important. I think the other piece around the pharmacological treatment. I'm going to say something that is going to surprise a lot of people, which is that when it comes to treating HIV, for example, we know how HIV spread, we know all that stuff, and so we know, like, oh, hey, if

you want to prevent it use a conduct. Okay, so we know that, but we still developed anti retrovirals and that made a really big difference for a lot of people. And those were drugs, right. So I don't have any interest in saying that there's no room for pharmacotherapy here, because if there was a medication that helped to regulate the stress response for someone who had a disregulated stress response,

I would commit if it was healing. From my patients, the problem that we have was what I was seeing in my clinic, which is that we weren't accurately diagnosing the problem. We'd see all these kids and be like, you've got a d h D. Here's some rittlin. Rittlin is a stimulant. If you have an overactive stress response, Rittlin is likely to not help you. Okay, Okay, well your behavior still didn't get better, so we put you

on antipsychotic. This, Charlotte is not psychotic. I'd see kids on five different psychotropic medications, and my problem was, as a field, we did not have the training to know what we're treating, which is this disregulation of the stress response. And the treatment is several fold. Number one is to reduce the dose of adversity and stress. Right, when a kid has lead poisoning, first thing is figure out where the lead is coming from and get rid of it

right mitigated. So what are you gonna have some specific things that parents can do? Oh my god, my child has a high ASIS score? What can I do to reduce that level of toxic stress for parents out there? A couple of things I saw all the time in my clinical practice. Mom's bringing in a child, right, and you've got a person who maybe dad's been laying hands on for quite some time, and mom thinks, oh, he's hurting me, but he's not hurting my child. So I'm

not gonna separate. And I have seen so many parents who have been willing, once they understand the harm that it actually is physically damaging their child's brain and body to witness that domestic violence, are willing to do for their child what they were not able to do for themselves. For example, man, I had a dad who took care of his kids, and this dad had issues with substance dependence, he had PTSD, he had, you know, a bunch of

stuff going on. And he said, you know what, I am realizing now how all this stuff is affecting my kids, because obviously I was this doctor, so I'm saying, hey, listen, these things it's not you're doing your stuff and you're it doesn't harm your kids because your your children witnessing it. And I saw this dad go to rehab, go to therapy, do his stuff, and bring his kids in for their

appointment every week. So this one of the most important things for parents is if you're concerned about your child, one of the first things is to look at your own aces, look at your own mental health issues. And I will tell you my you know, my own experience was that my mom's mental health condition was untreated for many, many, many many years. And I will tell you schizophrenia is a treatable health condition. There is no reason she should

have gone untreated for so many years. And she finally did get treatment, and again it was such a game changer. But I think for so long the shame and the stigma, yes, right, means that we don't acknowledge what's going on, we don't deal with it for ourselves, and we kind of try to sweep it under the rug. And we have to let go of the shame and stigma. We have to let go of the shaman sama around. Mental health issues is the health issue just like anything else that is crucial, crucial, crucial.

It's time for a short break when we come back more with our guest. Alrighty, then let's just dive right back in. I want to stay it for myself as an adult, even though I don't have a child that I need to be there for and get myself healthy for. How do I, as as an adult look at the inner child inside me and say, you deserve to have fewer adverse experiences. So for the people I think who don't have kids, who are struggling, but this is an adult, Like,

what is that self compassion look like? Yeah? So one of the pieces that I saw over and over again when I was taking treating my patients and especially my teenagers, I would say, oh, because of what you've experienced, your body maybe releasing more stress mormones than it should and it can look and feel like being quick to anger, or having trouble controlling your impulses all that stuff, And like almost every time the response I would get is, oh,

you mean I'm not crazy? And so that first step of that self compassion is to recognize, like, oh, you know what there's nothing wrong with me, Like, my body is responding in the way that our bodies were actually designed to respond to the types of things that I experienced, and there's something that I couldn't do about it. Right, So the meditation, the exercise. One of the things that I talk a lot about is having like a green, yellow, red chart. So green is like, hey, how do I

feel when I'm in the green? Right, Green is I'm doing well, everything's going fine. And then yellow? What does yellow look like for me? I'm having trouble sleeping, my heart is racing, my thoughts become obsessive, my asthma is acting up, my blood sugar seems high, and I can't I'm having a hard time with managing my diet. Eaties, you figure out what that is, and then you say, okay, well, what's the plan. Okay, I'm gonna step up. I'm going to go from my meditation once a day to twice

a day. I'm going to reach out to these trusted folks in my life who I know are there and be like, girl, let's get together, it's time, you know, and get extra good on the nutrition. Cut out the inflammatory foods. Right, We're gonna really keep it tight to tune us back in. What if you do that and you still go into the red? What does red look like? Red might look like thoughts of self harm. Red might look like, you know, really really bad asthma and being hospitalized,

And then what do you do with the red? Talk to your doctor, talk to your therapist. We're hearing more and more about people like Naomi Osaka, right tennis star, who said, you know what, I don't know if she was in the red or not, but she was like, this rex my mental health. I'm not going to do it for me, just like I'm actually doing everything I've chosen everything in my life. I'm not doing something I don't want to do. So like why am I sis stressed?

And I think for me, a lot of it is just so hardwired, and it's just it's a habit for forty nine years. This is how I've responded, you know, And I've been talking about this for years as a as a trans person, as a as a black person, as a black trans person, Like I've never felt safe walking down the street. I feel like constantly under attack. Right, So that like that heightened you know, toxic stress thing is the habit in my nervous system that my body

has to unlearn. So what I would say to that is that and this is why public health is so important and I'm so grateful to be in the role of California Surgeon General, is that you can do that individual work to unlearn that, and it's really really important for you to do that. But this is where public health comes in. We actually have to make it safe

for you to walk down the street. There is a certain amount of when it comes to public health where you can't just ask the individual to do better, be better, do differently. Individual overcoming the situation, you have to change the structure of the society. Because if we didn't sanitize our water, and every time you turn on the tap came a whole pile of E. Coli telling you to like, oh well, just you know, see if you can get

better from another bout of Cholorado is not okay. We as a society have an obligation to sanitize the watermen. We have an obligation to reduce the sources of adversity, and that is a PubL look health thing. No individual is going to do that, and that's why public policy matters. Amen, Thank you, so much for saying that, because I I'm sitting here in all the beautiful privilege of my life, just working my ass off to be psychologically and emotionally well.

But then there's still a world where it's not safe for me, even as a celebrity, as a black trans woman, to walk down the street and know that I can get home safely. We have to have those public policies. And I'm so grateful you said, And I think that's the point of this podcast for everyone out there who's listening, who is struggling, because a lot of us are struggling.

Racism is an adverse experience, adversity, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, being poor in America, that's living in a world where people are anti immigrants. These are adversities that affect our mental health, that make people hyper vision and release cortisol. And injustice is stressful as fuck. In justice, it's stressful as fun, it's post stressing, it's killing keeps killing us. So so that is actually right, And that is why I am a science warrior, because our ability to make public policy

is determined by the strength of the science. When we figured out that lead was neurotoxic, right, and caused irreversible neurologic damage. The basis of that science was the basis of removing lead out of gasoline, out of paint, out of pipes. And I'll tell you none of those industries liked it. No one was like, oh yeah, I'm thrilled to spend more money to do something different. What for

public health and public safety? And this is why one of my still to this day proudest moments was reading the ruling from the federal court that enjoined the Trump administration against their policy of separating children from their parents at the border, when they said, you know what, that policy is illegal. On page thirteen of that ruling, it says, the science shows that this leads to toxic stress. And

I'm like, that's what we're talking about, right. This is why the way that we do this, the rigor with which we do this, the science that we bring to it matters, because on the basis of science, we can make policy. And what the science tells us is exactly what you just said, is that trauma is damaging to our brains and bodies, and it leads to health problems, physical and mental and behavioral. And you know what, for the people who really don't care about whether you feel

included and safe in our environment. Maybe they will care about the trillions of dollars that we are spending on healthcare for treating trauma related health conditions. I published a paper last year to show for the state of California alone, the cost of adverse childhood experiences from just eight health conditions is a hundred and twelve billion dollars per year. So this is a public health imperative and creating safe and inclusive communities and environments. It's not just a matter

of liberal values or conservative values or anything. It is a matter of public health. It is a matter of life or death, and it is a matter of economic viability for our nation. Um. I thank you so much for your work. I probably get talk to you all day, But do you have anything else you want to say? Before I asked my last question just for anyone who wants to learn more about their own aces. The powerful thing about the number story website is that you know,

no two people have the same response, right. No two people who have experienced three aces experienced it the same way. And that's why the story is equally as important as the number, right, And so that that's the piece that is so beautiful. And I think that now that we are armed with this information, we have the power to write how our story turns out. I believe fundamentally that we have the power to transform this world, and we do it one conversation at a time. I love that

so much. The last question I was ask all my guests is what else is true for you? And this comes from my therapeutic practice community resiliency model and the idea of both. And even though there may be anxiety and one part of our body, another part of our body might be neutral and positive, and we can focus on that, then we can exist in a place of both. And so when you know when you are struggling and things are rough for you, Dr Nadine Vick Harris, what

helps you get through? What else is true for you? I would say what else is true for me is I think a recognition of my own vulnerability is what

makes me strong and resilience. Because then I put into place very mindfully the scaffolding, the infrastructure, the supports that will keep me going and doing this for a really long time, which was I think a big way that this this research and this science was very helpful in my own life, because I think before that I was like, I'm strong, I don't need blah blah blah, and it's it was exacting, it was exactly the opposite. I love that.

As a burnet brown stand Bernet says that vulnerability is can scarce, but it's our greatest source of strength, and it is our The best measure of courage is our ability to be vulnerable. Thank you so much, Dr Nadine burg Harris. I'm deeply honored. You don't even know how honored I am to be having this conversation with you. I'm deeply moved by your work. Your work has really

changed my life in really important ways. Even though I'm still struggling, knowing that there is a way out because of your work, it's it gives me a lot of hope. It's I guess my. What else is true in this moment is that there are brilliant, incredible, empathetic, compassionate healthcare workers who are Actually you're a certain general of our state and you are making a difference in a beautiful way. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. Oh it's my joy. Thank you, Oh my god. Dr

Nating burg Harris. There is a sense of purpose to the work that she does that is beyond her, which I think is just all of what we should all be, you know, working towards and if we invite in the information and then do the work to reduce toxic stress in our lives. This feels game changing to me because it feels like it's deeply connected to For me personally, I don't ever feel safe, and there has been incredible

improvement in my life. But the heart wiring of safety, the heart wiring of trauma responses in my body, that's starting when I was a child. When Dr nadin Burg Harres said that this starts in childhood and affects the way our brains developed, affects the ways our immune system to develop, it's like I can be a lot easier all myself. I think I'm so emotional lized with that conversation because it's like I think I should have it figured out, and it's okay that I don't. Oh number story,

Google number story, go to the website. It's okay to go and take the test, and you're not crazy when it feels overwhelming, like it's too much, that's just a biological response to what's happened to you and you can survive it. M Thank you so much for listening to Laverne Cox Show. Please rate reviews, subscribe and share with everyone you know. Join me next week for my conversation with New York Times bestselling author, researcher, and lecturer Dr

Joe Dispenser. He uses the latest scientific studies to learn how meditation affects the brain and body. Dr Joe has developed a way for people to heal their bodies, make significant changes in their lives, and manifest their dreams. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real. Until next time, stay in the Last. The Laverne Cox Show is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.

For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.