Transcript
WEBVTT
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A listener production.
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Hello, and welcome to another solo episode of Crappy to Hay.
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I have just come back from a trip to Amsterdam
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where I went and ran some workshops.
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On stress resilience.
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I talked about the window of tolerance, like I've talked
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to you about here on this podcast.
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It was great.
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I had really great feedback from the workshops that I ran.
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One souvenir that I brought back which I wasn't intending
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to was.
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This heavy head could so I apologize. The show must
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go on. I feel fine.
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I've taken cold tablets, but I do sound very nasally,
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so I apologize for that. Today, what I want to
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talk to you about is this study that I recently
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heard of which I found so fascinating. I know that
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you were going to find it fascinating as well. It's
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to do with epigenetics. So epigenetics is the study of
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changes in gene expression in response to behavior, vieral and
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environmental factors that don't change the underlying DNA sequence. All
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that means is you will have genes for certain things.
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You have the DNA of both of your parents, and
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you may have genes for certain diseases, for certain conditions
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for cancer, diabetes, all sorts of things, and whether or
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not those genes are turned on or off can be
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influenced by environmental factors and those changes. Though the impact
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of the environment on your DNA on your genes can
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be passed down through your genetics, hence EPI genetics. So
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I guess to put this really bluntly, and what we're
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going to talk about today is that your grandmother may
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have experienced something and you, your physiology is affected by
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that because of the change in your grandmother's gene expression,
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which is past down to your parents and one of
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your parents and then ultimately passed down to you. Now,
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the study that I heard about, which actually isn't that new,
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It was about twenty fourteen, twenty thirteen, but I only
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recently heard about it, and it involved mice who were
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exposed to the scent of I'm going to say, cherry blossoms.
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It's often referred to as the cherry blossom experiment. To
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be technical, it wasn't actual cherry blossoms. It's a particular chemical.
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It's an artificial scent that has been likened to the
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scent of cherry blossoms for the sake of simplicity, let's
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just call it cherry blossoms. So what they did was
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they took these mice and they exposed them to the
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scent of cherry blossoms at the same time that they
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administered shocks to their feet. I know, I can't stand
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the things that they do to animals for these experiments,
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but obviously we all benefit from what they find. So
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mice were exposed to shocks to their feet at the
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same time they were exposed to the scent of cherry blossoms,
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which meant that they eventually came to associate the scent
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of cherry blossoms to pain, physical pain distress. So then
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what would happen is every time they were exposed to
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the scent of cherry blossoms, even in the absence of
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any sort of electrical shock or any sort of pain
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or distress, their fight or flight response was activated. The
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amygdala in their brain lit up, they produced cortisol adrenaline. Essentially,
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that whole threat response, which is instinctive we all have
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that in us, was activated just by the scent.
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Of cherry blossoms.
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Okay, so we understand how that works. Then what they
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found was that when they got pregnant or when they
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impregnated female mouse and they had babies, those baby mice
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also displayed an increased threat response, ammigual activation, all of
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those things in response to the scent of cherry blossoms,
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even though those baby mice had never been exposed to
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the foot shocks or to the smell of cherry blossoms before.
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To control for the fact that often babies, and this
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goes for human children as well, often are pick up
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fear from their parents.
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If your parents, you know, we're often what little kids
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learn is modeled by their parents.
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If your parents demonstrate fear or avoidance of things.
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Then children will pick up that that is something scary.
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So to control for that possibility, what they also did
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was they took some of those baby mice and they
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adopted them out and had them raised by other mice
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that who had never been exposed to the scent of
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cherry blossoms. And they found that even those baby mice
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still had the same reaction, they had the same heightened
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stress response when exposed to the scent of cherry blossoms.
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Then what they did was they took the sperm from
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the male mice who had been exposed to the shocks
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and who had experienced that heightened threat response, and they
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used IVF to impregnate other female mice, again who had
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never been exposed to the shocks or to the cherry blossoms,
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so it was purely biological, purely genetic. Than those baby
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mice also demonstrated the same threat response, the same reaction
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to the scent of cherry blossoms, demonstrating that this fear,
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that this sensitivity to this particular smell, this environmental factor
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that was associated with something scary, something painful, was transmitted
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by the parent's DNA even when there was no environmental factor,
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no modeling of the parent's behavior that accounted for that response.
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Those baby mice still demonstrated that same heightened threat response,
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that fear response to the sin of cherry blossoms. And
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they even found that the next generation experienced some of
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that same response in the face of the sense of
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cherry blossoms. So what does this mean for us? I
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guess the reason that I find they're so fascinating. And
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if you did listen to my earlier episode on the
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window of tolerance, I talked about the fact that we
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all have a range, like a range within which we
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can comfortably tolerate distress. Our nervous system is reacting all
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of the time to our environment and also to our
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internal you know, our thoughts and our feelings and the
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things that we do internally. And I said that everybody's
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window is unique, like everybody's window of tolerance is a
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different width.
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And we talked about the fact.
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That sometimes the width of your window can be affected,
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like your window might be narrower than somebody else's because
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of your early childhood experiences, because of early trauma, because
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of chronic stress that you've been exposed to, because of
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a recent trauma, like a single major impact kind of
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trauma that temporarily narrows your window of tolerance. But I
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guess what this mice study demonstrates, this cherry blossom study
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demonstrates is that sometimes your window of tolerance might be
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a little narrower for reasons that have nothing to do
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with your own experience.
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There might be something that occurred in.
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One of your parents' lives or even in one of
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your grandparents' lives that has been transmitted through your DNA.
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And this is very early research, Like I don't claim
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to have all of the answers about this.
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This is not necessarily definitive.
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This is just one example of a study, and there
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have been many studies that are happening at the moment
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in this area. It is relatively new research. But there
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might be factors that you can't account for. There might
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be things that you don't know. You can't put your
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finger on why a particular sand or why a particular
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site or something in your environment triggers a stress response
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in you and our human brains, we want to analyze everything,
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We want a reason for everything. The other thing that
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we want is to fix and solve every problem, of course,
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and so we can sometimes get a little obsessive about
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looking for why is this happening? Or why am I
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reacting on this? And we get very self critical as well,
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What's wrong with me? Why do I react like that
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in these situations? And the answer is maybe sometimes you
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just don't know. So the key here is simply to
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recognize that sometimes there is things going on that you
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may not be aware of, and the important thing is
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simply to acknowledge and to validate your response. I guess
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to honor your own feelings. Of course, it is our
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responsibility to start to try to widen that window to
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take care of ourselves, to support ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally,
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to be able to widen that wind of tolerance, to
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increase the range of stress that we can comfortably cope with.
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But if you notice that you sometimes are a little
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more sensitive to things than somebody else might be, then
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it could be that you will never know what that
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answer is.
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Unless you have got.
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A full detailed personal history of everything that your parents
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and your grandparents have ever experienced in their lives, you
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may not ever know. I think this is really important
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also when we talk about the transmission of trauma, which
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is what we are talking about when we talk about
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intergenerational trauma, when we're talking about major traumatic experiences, the
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implications for that for collective trauma, racial trauma. They first
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started to notice these effects with the children and grandchildren
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of Holocaust survivors. We've also seen effects in terms of
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physical changes, higher risk of obesity and diabetes when a
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grandmother or a mother was exposed to malnutrition during a
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famine while she was pregnant. So if your grandmother was
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exposed to a famine was undernourished during pregnancy.
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Then her babies are.
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At a significantly higher risk of obesity and diabetes and
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higher levels of bad cholesterol because essentially they've been programmed
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to operate with less calories, less caloric intake, So when
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they actually consume a normal, healthy diet, they're actually more
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likely to experience overweight, obesity and diabetes because they're genetically
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kind of not equipped to handle that.
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So there are very.
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Real physical effects, physiological changes that also can occur as
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a result of this transmission of changes in our DNA
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and how our DNA is expressed, and that effect may
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remain even for subsequent generations, at least to the grand
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children level. So getting back to trauma and the effect
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of trauma on subsequent generations, intergenerational trauma was first identified
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among children of Holocaust survivors, with children of Holocaust survivors
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being three hundred percent more likely to seek a psychiatric referral.
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It's since been identified in indigenous populations in Australia and
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in Canada. And I guess the point of this is that,
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so this is not a new phenomenon, but I think
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in the past we probably assumed that some of that
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psychological and emotional vulnerability that was experienced by children of
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trauma survivors and grandchildren of trauma survivors was behavioral. If
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you've experienced significant trauma, then it is likely that you
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probably have difficulty bonding with your children. You might have
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very low tolerance for stimulus in the environment. You might
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be depressed, withdrawn, emotionally disconnected. There's all sorts of effects
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that we know can be experienced as a result of trauma.
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Might be hypervigilant, very anxious, and that that's going to
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significantly affect your children. Children who have a traumatized parent
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are at an increased risk of experiencing their own psychological
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issues because of all of these reasons, because of issues
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with how you are parented. And I think what this
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more recent epigenetic studies is demonstrating that it is not
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just behavioral. It is not just what you're exposed to
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in your day to day relationship with your parent and
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the quality of that relationship, but there can actually be
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effects that are transmitted via DNA and that you can't
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see those things, you can't explain them, and that there
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might be trauma that is nowhere near at the same
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level as a holocaust or you know, those sorts of genocides.
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But as we saw with the mice and the cherry blossoms,
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electric shocks to the feet, just exposure to something distressing
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that created a stress response that ultimately was passed down
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to children and grandchildren. Now I know this is all
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probably sounding very depressing, so I feel like I need
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to wrap this up with something that is a little
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more positive and optimistic. So to that end, I did
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also read a recent research article to do with this
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whole epigenetics thing which found that these effects, this transmission
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of changes to DNA, actually resolved after two generations, so
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this is interesting. This was actually quite controversial because some
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people thought that this was going to have assumed that
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these changes will continue to be passed down through generations.
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So what this one study found was that actually that
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wasn't the case. That at the second generation the effects
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had pretty much resolved.
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And I think that this.
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Makes sense because what we're seeing really is a short
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term adaptive response to a particular environmental situation. So it
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kind of makes sense that there would be a short
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term adaptive effect something to help protect the offspring in
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you know, during a famine or whatever the case is,
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or during something stressful or difficult, so that that effect
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would be passed down to the offspring to equip them
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to deal with that present environmental situation, whatever that may be.
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But then beyond that it is no longer required or
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relevant as long as the situation is resolved, as long
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as that stress or whatever that situation is is no
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longer applicable. The other thing I want to share with
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you is that we can use this in a really
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positive way as well. So let me share with you