I was four years old when my parents
SATs my siblings and me down and told us
that they were getting a divorce in time
I learned that it wasn’t an easy one or
an amicable one it was a damaging one I
didn’t understand then that this moment
this decision was going to change who I
was and define who I was going to become
and until very recently I hadn’t
understood the extent to which I had
affected me but this year at 18 years
old I started doing a lot of thinking
and a lot of researching and now that I
have understood a lot about my
experience I want to show you because
this journey of self-discovery
opened my eyes up to the fact that my
story is not a rare one and there are
way worse ones out there it made me
realize how distortedly
we perceive mental illness and trauma it
made me realize how little we talk about
it and how much we need to talk about it
more and I’ll tell you why traumatized
individuals are two times more likely to
have developed pulmonary disease there
are three times more likely to have
depression they are four times more
likely to have alcoholism or a drug
addiction and they are 15 times more
likely to have attempted self-harm it is
no wonder that trauma has become a
hallmark of psychological study and
especially complex trauma now I want you
to think of trauma as a stab to the lung
immediately debilitating you have to be
sent to the emergency room for an
immediate fix and think of complex
trauma as a dozen little cuts to your
skin applied daily not in immediately
debilitating but over time those
band-aids that you applied will prove
insufficient and over time they can have
even worse
long-term effects than regular trauma
and the thing about complex trauma is
that unlike trauma which is a singular
event it is multiple traumatic events
occurring over a period of time and it
can have devastating effects some of
which include emotional constriction
emotional dysregulation emotional
dissociation the deformation of oneself
in which the patient feels chronic
feelings of guilt and of shame it is a
lack of self-esteem and an inability to
form relationships and to have trust in
adulthood and among many other effects
and complex trauma commonly occurs
during childhood because trauma is not
black-and-white it depends on each
person’s individual threshold for
emotional pain and as a child a child’s
emotional vulnerability is incomparable
to that of an adult’s so your emotional
threshold for emotional pain is going to
be much smaller as a result children are
always much more susceptible to perceive
a threat as traumatic and I want to take
a very common example nowadays broken
homes and these many times propagates
complex trauma being raised in a broken
home can emotionally rip you apart and I
can attest to that I had five years old
I was forced to see my heroes my parents
insult each other fight with each other
emotionally abuse each other at six
years olds I was forced to choose sides
to believe a parent over the other to
love a parent over the other does that
seem like an easy choice it was an
unconscious one at the time but having
to live with that choice that’s a whole
different story
at eight years old my family began
struggling financially a lot and it only
exacerbated the constant tension in our
family
at nine years old I was forced to sit
through family fights where the holy
thing that was ever achieved was a
growing resent it was a competition of
who screamed the loudest who banged the
door the hardest playing the blame game
until who ended up losing it was neither
parent it was the children having to sit
and watch that ugliness ensue at ten
years old I witnessed my mother
struggling with depression I didn’t
really know what it was I just knew that
she was hurting every day and even
though I knew why I didn’t really know
how to stop it
just like she didn’t know how to stop
taking it out on us on me my sisters and
my brother at ten years old I overheard
my mother saying in the heat of the
moment that having children made her
give up her life afterwards she took it
back and she apologized she denied the
truth in that but to this day I still
wonder if there was ever kernel of truth
to that how would you feel if the person
that gave you life the one person that
is supposed to love you unconditionally
no matter what tells you that they blame
you for a life that they now partially
resent or a life for not having a life
beyond you at 12 years old I began
writing a book titled living under the
roof of my own bully now don’t get me
wrong I never ever hated my mother and
she never intentionally harmed me but
her depression did cause her to
emotionally abuse and neglect me at
times and the hardest part was that I
loved her so very much she’s my mother
and she was the best mother on her good
at 15 years old my sister was diagnosed
with depression much as a result of her
own childhood trauma and that 18 years
old
I myself realized that I had suffered
psychological effects as a result of
childhood trauma today my parents have a
good relationship but those wounds never
really healed and I think it’s time that
we start accepting that our childhood
the way we were raised our nurturing it
has a deep effect on us one that can no
longer be ignored or cast aside and the
adverse childhood experiences study
proved just that or provided evidence
for just that the adverse childhood
experiences study the ACE study was
conducted between 1995 and 1997 in the
United States he had over 17,000
participants of different ages ethnicity
ethnicity and educational backgrounds
and what this study did was it
correlated adverse childhood experiences
such as emotional sexual or physical
abuse emotional neglect parental illness
and parental separation against health
outcomes liver disease heart disease
hepatitis lung cancer and this study
found a clear trend the higher your ace
score the higher your risk of negative
health outcomes how does this happen
how do you go from childhood trauma
affecting your actual physiology or
Anatomy the answer to that lies in the
leap between adverse childhood
experiences and disrupted neuro
development that disrupted neuro
development leads you to adopt health
risk behaviors which leads to that early
death now how do you get disrupted neuro
development as a result of childhood
trauma and that answer lies in your
stress response your body has a
biologically instinctual responses to
threats and what happens is your
hypothalamus recognizes this threat and
it sends signals to the pituitary gland
which in turn sends signals to the
adrenal gland that releases adrenaline
and that adrenaline is what helps you
either fight this threat or flee this
threat and this system is helpful except
for when the threat is continuous when
the adversity is constant such as with
complex trauma what happens then is your
stress response is triggered over and
over and over again and that leads you
to become in an adrenaline state in fact
studies have shown that certain synapse
is in your brain can actually be
overexcited when they shouldn’t be all
of this leads to a hormonal imbalance
and this hormonal imbalance is what
effects a child’s brain that is still
development developing and causes the
Snerd of this neuro development now this
is what causes the physiology to
actually change as a result of adverse
childhood experiences but I want to
focus on another part of the stress
response that is not so commonly
referred to and that is the freeze
stress response the free stress response
occurs when you can either flee the
threat or fight the threats be this
whether you’re physically restrained or
if the emotional pain is so severe that
your body protects you from it and what
happens then is that adrenalin that was
secreted actually functions as an
analgesic and you dissociate from that
moment now dissociation can be compared
to a long-term process of daydreaming it
is when you respond to internal stimuli
instead of external stimuli thus
enabling you to face the enormity of the
situation which you are facing and
protect you the thing about the free
stress response however is that it can
damage your hippocampus studies have
shown that chronic stress and traumatic
events can damage the hippocampus which
is the area of your brain for learning
and for memory it is essential for
binding new cortical regions that encode
experiences including those traumatic
ones so what happens is this can
actually be impaired this binding an
integration function which can lead to a
disorder
known as dissociative amnesia
dissociative amnesia is the disruption
of the regular integration of memory and
what happens is your brain actually
blocks out a lot of your memory you have
chunks of memory blocked out whether
this be an hour a day a month or even a
year depending on your own traumatic
event if you ask me about my family life
before the age of 10 I will have a very
hard time coming up with a concrete
memory it’s not that I don’t remember
anything there are obviously things that
I do remember but the family part of it
the negative experiences that I went
through as a child I do not remember
it’s a blank what I do know is what my
siblings or my parents have told me or
pictures that have triggered things and
at this point you might think of this as
a silver lining if I went through these
traumatic experiences as a child and I
cannot remember them they can’t hurt me
but that’s not necessarily true because
dissociative amnesia does not mean that
the memories aren’t there they just have
not been processed properly by your
brain which means that these memories
can still come out and hurt you and more
importantly the emotions that you felt
were processed and they can be
associated even in the present if I have
moments of acute stress that remind me
of my childhood in my traumatic
instances I will block out and I will
forget hours of that moment I will find
myself having random bouts of sadness
and not know where they come from and I
realized that this might be the answer
but the truly crazy thing about this is
that until this year I had never
questioned it I never questioned why I
could not remember concrete memories of
my childhood life because I never wanted
to talk about it I thought it was
shameful
I wanted to block it out and try to
forget its existence and I not only did
this with myself but with my sister too
when she was diagnosed with depression
she was taking antidepressants for a
while and at first I found it I didn’t
really know what to think about it
because as a society we associate taking
antidepressants as being embarrassing
one of her closest friends was even
asking you know is there anything else
that she can do and I now realize that
is the wrong way to look at this mental
illness is physiological depression is
caused by an absence of
neurotransmitters in the brain and
antidepressants produce more and that is
all it is purely scientific and yet
there’s so much stigma around it the way
that us as a society perceive mental
illness has caused so many to refuse to
acknowledge their illness or to refuse
treatment we often associate those that
are mentally ill with being crazy don’t
you see how wrong that is by associating
the adjective crazy to those that are
mentally ill you are blaming attributing
the blame to the person and not the
disorder if someone broke there like
would you blame them for not being able
to walk of course not and it goes
exactly the same way for mental illness
if someone is depressed you cannot blame
them for having mood swings or for
having a negative perception of things
at time we need to radically change the
way that we look at mental illness and
more importantly we need to stop blaming
people for things that they have zero
control over because we are causing
people that are hurting that are
suffering to refuse and to be ashamed to
seek help instead we need to start
working together to remove the stigma
that there exists on mental illness my
experiences are far from unique and as
I’ve said there are way worse ones out
there we need to start accepting that
mental illness is real that it is common
we marginalize the issue not because it
is uncommon but because it is so common
we would rather claim that it is not our
problem instead of realizing that it
should be every single person’s
we need to start empathizing with those
that are mentally ill and recognize that
the one thing that separates your fate
from theirs is luck and this process of
removing stigma and of working together
and empathizing begins with a simple
thing talking
it begins with talking openly about
trauma and about mental illness without
shame and without embarrassment so let’s
talk
I only hope that by showing you the
debilitating psychological and
physiological effects of trauma and of
mental illness and by opening up by
laying myself bare before friends but
strangers alike that I can encourage
others to do so as well to open up about
their story and their experiences with
trauma or mental illness because without
cooperation without openness and
communication without acceptance and
empathy mental illness will remain a
taboo complex trauma and mental
illnesses will remain undiagnosed and
healing healing will remain unlikely so
let’s talk thank you [Applause]
SATs my siblings and me down and told us
that they were getting a divorce in time
I learned that it wasn’t an easy one or
an amicable one it was a damaging one I
didn’t understand then that this moment
this decision was going to change who I
was and define who I was going to become
and until very recently I hadn’t
understood the extent to which I had
affected me but this year at 18 years
old I started doing a lot of thinking
and a lot of researching and now that I
have understood a lot about my
experience I want to show you because
this journey of self-discovery
opened my eyes up to the fact that my
story is not a rare one and there are
way worse ones out there it made me
realize how distortedly
we perceive mental illness and trauma it
made me realize how little we talk about
it and how much we need to talk about it
more and I’ll tell you why traumatized
individuals are two times more likely to
have developed pulmonary disease there
are three times more likely to have
depression they are four times more
likely to have alcoholism or a drug
addiction and they are 15 times more
likely to have attempted self-harm it is
no wonder that trauma has become a
hallmark of psychological study and
especially complex trauma now I want you
to think of trauma as a stab to the lung
immediately debilitating you have to be
sent to the emergency room for an
immediate fix and think of complex
trauma as a dozen little cuts to your
skin applied daily not in immediately
debilitating but over time those
band-aids that you applied will prove
insufficient and over time they can have
even worse
long-term effects than regular trauma
and the thing about complex trauma is
that unlike trauma which is a singular
event it is multiple traumatic events
occurring over a period of time and it
can have devastating effects some of
which include emotional constriction
emotional dysregulation emotional
dissociation the deformation of oneself
in which the patient feels chronic
feelings of guilt and of shame it is a
lack of self-esteem and an inability to
form relationships and to have trust in
adulthood and among many other effects
and complex trauma commonly occurs
during childhood because trauma is not
black-and-white it depends on each
person’s individual threshold for
emotional pain and as a child a child’s
emotional vulnerability is incomparable
to that of an adult’s so your emotional
threshold for emotional pain is going to
be much smaller as a result children are
always much more susceptible to perceive
a threat as traumatic and I want to take
a very common example nowadays broken
homes and these many times propagates
complex trauma being raised in a broken
home can emotionally rip you apart and I
can attest to that I had five years old
I was forced to see my heroes my parents
insult each other fight with each other
emotionally abuse each other at six
years olds I was forced to choose sides
to believe a parent over the other to
love a parent over the other does that
seem like an easy choice it was an
unconscious one at the time but having
to live with that choice that’s a whole
different story
at eight years old my family began
struggling financially a lot and it only
exacerbated the constant tension in our
family
at nine years old I was forced to sit
through family fights where the holy
thing that was ever achieved was a
growing resent it was a competition of
who screamed the loudest who banged the
door the hardest playing the blame game
until who ended up losing it was neither
parent it was the children having to sit
and watch that ugliness ensue at ten
years old I witnessed my mother
struggling with depression I didn’t
really know what it was I just knew that
she was hurting every day and even
though I knew why I didn’t really know
how to stop it
just like she didn’t know how to stop
taking it out on us on me my sisters and
my brother at ten years old I overheard
my mother saying in the heat of the
moment that having children made her
give up her life afterwards she took it
back and she apologized she denied the
truth in that but to this day I still
wonder if there was ever kernel of truth
to that how would you feel if the person
that gave you life the one person that
is supposed to love you unconditionally
no matter what tells you that they blame
you for a life that they now partially
resent or a life for not having a life
beyond you at 12 years old I began
writing a book titled living under the
roof of my own bully now don’t get me
wrong I never ever hated my mother and
she never intentionally harmed me but
her depression did cause her to
emotionally abuse and neglect me at
times and the hardest part was that I
loved her so very much she’s my mother
and she was the best mother on her good
at 15 years old my sister was diagnosed
with depression much as a result of her
own childhood trauma and that 18 years
old
I myself realized that I had suffered
psychological effects as a result of
childhood trauma today my parents have a
good relationship but those wounds never
really healed and I think it’s time that
we start accepting that our childhood
the way we were raised our nurturing it
has a deep effect on us one that can no
longer be ignored or cast aside and the
adverse childhood experiences study
proved just that or provided evidence
for just that the adverse childhood
experiences study the ACE study was
conducted between 1995 and 1997 in the
United States he had over 17,000
participants of different ages ethnicity
ethnicity and educational backgrounds
and what this study did was it
correlated adverse childhood experiences
such as emotional sexual or physical
abuse emotional neglect parental illness
and parental separation against health
outcomes liver disease heart disease
hepatitis lung cancer and this study
found a clear trend the higher your ace
score the higher your risk of negative
health outcomes how does this happen
how do you go from childhood trauma
affecting your actual physiology or
Anatomy the answer to that lies in the
leap between adverse childhood
experiences and disrupted neuro
development that disrupted neuro
development leads you to adopt health
risk behaviors which leads to that early
death now how do you get disrupted neuro
development as a result of childhood
trauma and that answer lies in your
stress response your body has a
biologically instinctual responses to
threats and what happens is your
hypothalamus recognizes this threat and
it sends signals to the pituitary gland
which in turn sends signals to the
adrenal gland that releases adrenaline
and that adrenaline is what helps you
either fight this threat or flee this
threat and this system is helpful except
for when the threat is continuous when
the adversity is constant such as with
complex trauma what happens then is your
stress response is triggered over and
over and over again and that leads you
to become in an adrenaline state in fact
studies have shown that certain synapse
is in your brain can actually be
overexcited when they shouldn’t be all
of this leads to a hormonal imbalance
and this hormonal imbalance is what
effects a child’s brain that is still
development developing and causes the
Snerd of this neuro development now this
is what causes the physiology to
actually change as a result of adverse
childhood experiences but I want to
focus on another part of the stress
response that is not so commonly
referred to and that is the freeze
stress response the free stress response
occurs when you can either flee the
threat or fight the threats be this
whether you’re physically restrained or
if the emotional pain is so severe that
your body protects you from it and what
happens then is that adrenalin that was
secreted actually functions as an
analgesic and you dissociate from that
moment now dissociation can be compared
to a long-term process of daydreaming it
is when you respond to internal stimuli
instead of external stimuli thus
enabling you to face the enormity of the
situation which you are facing and
protect you the thing about the free
stress response however is that it can
damage your hippocampus studies have
shown that chronic stress and traumatic
events can damage the hippocampus which
is the area of your brain for learning
and for memory it is essential for
binding new cortical regions that encode
experiences including those traumatic
ones so what happens is this can
actually be impaired this binding an
integration function which can lead to a
disorder
known as dissociative amnesia
dissociative amnesia is the disruption
of the regular integration of memory and
what happens is your brain actually
blocks out a lot of your memory you have
chunks of memory blocked out whether
this be an hour a day a month or even a
year depending on your own traumatic
event if you ask me about my family life
before the age of 10 I will have a very
hard time coming up with a concrete
memory it’s not that I don’t remember
anything there are obviously things that
I do remember but the family part of it
the negative experiences that I went
through as a child I do not remember
it’s a blank what I do know is what my
siblings or my parents have told me or
pictures that have triggered things and
at this point you might think of this as
a silver lining if I went through these
traumatic experiences as a child and I
cannot remember them they can’t hurt me
but that’s not necessarily true because
dissociative amnesia does not mean that
the memories aren’t there they just have
not been processed properly by your
brain which means that these memories
can still come out and hurt you and more
importantly the emotions that you felt
were processed and they can be
associated even in the present if I have
moments of acute stress that remind me
of my childhood in my traumatic
instances I will block out and I will
forget hours of that moment I will find
myself having random bouts of sadness
and not know where they come from and I
realized that this might be the answer
but the truly crazy thing about this is
that until this year I had never
questioned it I never questioned why I
could not remember concrete memories of
my childhood life because I never wanted
to talk about it I thought it was
shameful
I wanted to block it out and try to
forget its existence and I not only did
this with myself but with my sister too
when she was diagnosed with depression
she was taking antidepressants for a
while and at first I found it I didn’t
really know what to think about it
because as a society we associate taking
antidepressants as being embarrassing
one of her closest friends was even
asking you know is there anything else
that she can do and I now realize that
is the wrong way to look at this mental
illness is physiological depression is
caused by an absence of
neurotransmitters in the brain and
antidepressants produce more and that is
all it is purely scientific and yet
there’s so much stigma around it the way
that us as a society perceive mental
illness has caused so many to refuse to
acknowledge their illness or to refuse
treatment we often associate those that
are mentally ill with being crazy don’t
you see how wrong that is by associating
the adjective crazy to those that are
mentally ill you are blaming attributing
the blame to the person and not the
disorder if someone broke there like
would you blame them for not being able
to walk of course not and it goes
exactly the same way for mental illness
if someone is depressed you cannot blame
them for having mood swings or for
having a negative perception of things
at time we need to radically change the
way that we look at mental illness and
more importantly we need to stop blaming
people for things that they have zero
control over because we are causing
people that are hurting that are
suffering to refuse and to be ashamed to
seek help instead we need to start
working together to remove the stigma
that there exists on mental illness my
experiences are far from unique and as
I’ve said there are way worse ones out
there we need to start accepting that
mental illness is real that it is common
we marginalize the issue not because it
is uncommon but because it is so common
we would rather claim that it is not our
problem instead of realizing that it
should be every single person’s
we need to start empathizing with those
that are mentally ill and recognize that
the one thing that separates your fate
from theirs is luck and this process of
removing stigma and of working together
and empathizing begins with a simple
thing talking
it begins with talking openly about
trauma and about mental illness without
shame and without embarrassment so let’s
talk
I only hope that by showing you the
debilitating psychological and
physiological effects of trauma and of
mental illness and by opening up by
laying myself bare before friends but
strangers alike that I can encourage
others to do so as well to open up about
their story and their experiences with
trauma or mental illness because without
cooperation without openness and
communication without acceptance and
empathy mental illness will remain a
taboo complex trauma and mental
illnesses will remain undiagnosed and
healing healing will remain unlikely so
let’s talk thank you [Applause]
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