Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. It
Speaker 1: is my honor and pleasure to present the special bonus
Speaker 1: episode of Family Secrets, the first in a two part
Speaker 1: conversation with Dr Rachel Yehuda, Professor of psychiatry and Neuroscience
Speaker 1: and Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the
Speaker 1: Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Dr
Speaker 1: Yehuda is one of our nation's foremost experts on the
Speaker 1: intergenerational effects of trauma. This is one of my favorite
Speaker 1: conversations ever. Could you begin by telling me how you
Speaker 1: ended up studying trauma and its effects At the beginning, yes,
Speaker 1: it was a little bit of an accident. Um. I
Speaker 1: was a graduate student in the late nineteen eighties and
Speaker 1: I was studying the effects of stress on beIN development.
Speaker 1: I was doing so in laboratory RAPS. I was a
Speaker 1: student of neuroscience, and I found the idea that stress
Speaker 1: can affect brain development really very fascinating. But I did
Speaker 1: not find RAPS very fascinating, and I really the whole
Speaker 1: time I was in graduate school wondered if there would
Speaker 1: be any way that I could possibly pivot towards working
Speaker 1: with people, and I ended up meeting somebody in my
Speaker 1: graduate school who was very interested in studying psychosis proneness,
Speaker 1: which is really the idea of being able to look
Speaker 1: to see if college students are at risk for the
Speaker 1: later development of mental illness. And he had developed a
Speaker 1: screening tool. But this was the emerging era of biological psychiatry,
Speaker 1: and so we met casually one time, and I was
Speaker 1: a student of neuroscides. He said, I wonder if there
Speaker 1: is a test that could be used to biologically validate
Speaker 1: my UM questionnaire. And I looked in the literature and
Speaker 1: I found that indeed, people were starting to talk about
Speaker 1: UM risk for developing psychosis in terms of a biological
Speaker 1: alteration in a in an enzyme called monoamine oxidase. And
Speaker 1: so I thought to myself, I wonder if this could
Speaker 1: be measured, and learned that it can be measured in
Speaker 1: plate lists. So it was so organic. I said to him,
Speaker 1: you know what, I bet I could figure out how
Speaker 1: to measure this enzyme in plate lits. And my advisor
Speaker 1: wasn't that happy about this whole new development, but I
Speaker 1: promised him I would finish my dissertation in the rats um.
Speaker 1: And this is such a challenge for me to figure
Speaker 1: this out. But I did figure it out, and we
Speaker 1: did find UM that the enzyme levels were associated with
Speaker 1: his test. And after that, I just really wanted to
Speaker 1: do clinical work and it wasn't necessarily important for me
Speaker 1: to do it in trauma. About what happened was this
Speaker 1: professor's name was Dr William Addell, moved to Yale and
Speaker 1: UM asked me to come with him, and I ended
Speaker 1: up doing a post doctoral fellowship at Yale Medical School
Speaker 1: UM starting looking for people that knew about this enzyme,
Speaker 1: monoman oxidase, and ending up at the v A UM
Speaker 1: at the West Haven v A where UM somebody had
Speaker 1: actually done work with this enzyme but had now moved
Speaker 1: towards studying post traumatic stress disorder. And I thought that
Speaker 1: was magnificent. I hadn't heard of it before, but I've
Speaker 1: been studying the effects of stress in rats for so
Speaker 1: long that I thought, oh, this is perfect. So how
Speaker 1: long had post traumatic stress disorder had a name and
Speaker 1: been been something that was in maybe not the popular
Speaker 1: lexicon but the medical Yeah, that's a really good question.
Speaker 1: It had only been a diagnosis for seven years by
Speaker 1: the time that I began my post doc um which
Speaker 1: is seven and PTSD was first described in the d
Speaker 1: s M three in Night, so there was very little
Speaker 1: known about the disorder. That disorder itself was kind of
Speaker 1: controversial when it first came out, and in fact, my
Speaker 1: mentors at Yale that I ended up working with, doctors
Speaker 1: Earl Giller and Dr John Mason Um had just published
Speaker 1: what was the first biologic study in PTSD, and they
Speaker 1: showed very counterintuitive findings. One paper they published showed that
Speaker 1: adrenaline levels were higher in Vietnam veterans compared to other
Speaker 1: veterans with other psychiatric conditions. But another paper that they
Speaker 1: published showed that levels of the stress hormone cortisol or
Speaker 1: lower in Vietnam veterans with post traumatic stress disorder compared
Speaker 1: the patients with depression and schizophrenia and other conditions. And
Speaker 1: this lower cortisol level than a stress disorder had everybody
Speaker 1: really baffled. And when I heard about it had just
Speaker 1: been published, it had me baffled because everybody knew that
Speaker 1: stress related conditions were associated with elevated stress hormone levels,
Speaker 1: and against the backdrop of the fact that people were
Speaker 1: having a hard time in the field of psychiatry wrapping
Speaker 1: their heads around post traumatic stress disorder. You know, this
Speaker 1: was sort of an inconvenient truth in a way, because
Speaker 1: it would have been better had the initial study found
Speaker 1: high stress formal levels. Then you could say, see, I
Speaker 1: told you they still are under stress. But this seemed
Speaker 1: to be a very challenging initial observation. So the first
Speaker 1: study that I ever did in the field of PTSD
Speaker 1: was to try to replicate this observation, and I was
Speaker 1: astonished when I actually found the same thing, low cortisal
Speaker 1: levels in combat Vietnam veterans with PTSD compared to combat
Speaker 1: veterans without PTSD. And what did you make of that?
Speaker 1: I mean, what what? And over time? What have you
Speaker 1: made of that? It must be you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: a scientist. It must be so sort of provocative in
Speaker 1: a way as a scientist when you know the results
Speaker 1: are there and they're irrefutable, and yet they're not. They're
Speaker 1: frustrating because they're complicated or confusing or not not what
Speaker 1: was expected or creates I guess, create new challenges. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so irrefutable is a big word, because um, no stud
Speaker 1: these a refutable. What what people like me do when
Speaker 1: when we do a study is we try very hard
Speaker 1: to minimize the kind of confounds that might contribute to
Speaker 1: having false results UM. And so you always wonder when
Speaker 1: you do a study, is this really right? Did I
Speaker 1: minimize all the things that could contribute to something that
Speaker 1: might give me a distorted readout? And so what most
Speaker 1: people do is think I better retreat the study. And
Speaker 1: since the results really were so counterintuitive, but by this
Speaker 1: time it was the second finding, because I was replicating
Speaker 1: a finding already. But still the results are so counterintuitive
Speaker 1: that I thought I had to replicate them. And then
Speaker 1: I wondered if there had been something special about Vietnam
Speaker 1: veterans who were at the v a UM that might
Speaker 1: not be prototypic of other kinds of trauma survivors. And
Speaker 1: for my replication I chose to study Holocaust survivors UM
Speaker 1: because I thought, well, you know, Holocaust survivors have also
Speaker 1: suffered extreme trauma. I grew up in a Jewish community
Speaker 1: where there were a lot of Holocaust survivors, and to me,
Speaker 1: they seemed initially like they might be different from Vietnam
Speaker 1: veterans who were at the v a UM. But that
Speaker 1: was a false first impression. But in any event, I thought, look,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go and find out if cortisol levels
Speaker 1: are lower in Holocaust survivors and adrenaline levels are higher
Speaker 1: also in Holocaust survivors within without PTSD, And in kind
Speaker 1: of putting that study together, UM, I learned that first
Speaker 1: of all, yes, we were able to replicate the finding
Speaker 1: of lower cortisol levels and increased levels of adrenaline in
Speaker 1: Holocaust survivors PTSD. But the thing that gave me the
Speaker 1: biggest jolt was how many Holocaust survivors had PTSD even
Speaker 1: fifty years after the Holocaust, and how infrequently this has
Speaker 1: been talked about, how they didn't have a name for it,
Speaker 1: how they hadn't sought treatment for it, and how how
Speaker 1: many of them were people that I had grown up
Speaker 1: with and never suspected we're suffering. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: I think it would be so helpful um to listeners,
Speaker 1: even though it's really so basic for you to actually
Speaker 1: define PTSD in regard to its symptoms, because I know
Speaker 1: it can take on many different shapes and forms, but
Speaker 1: it is it is diagnosable in terms of symptoms as
Speaker 1: well as in terms of the science of the cortisol levels.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a good point PTSD, as as it
Speaker 1: was defined then, was a condition that occurs following exposure
Speaker 1: to an extremely traumatic event, generally a life threatening event
Speaker 1: UM and at that time there were three symptom clusters
Speaker 1: associated with PTSD. There are now four, but they are
Speaker 1: UM having intrusive distressing recollections of the trauma, either because um,
Speaker 1: you get reminded of what happened, or just out of
Speaker 1: the blue, you know, you're just minding your own business
Speaker 1: and you have an intrusive recollection of something horrible, or
Speaker 1: the memory comes to you in the form of a nightmare.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that happens when you do
Speaker 1: get triggered or you do have a memory, is you
Speaker 1: become very, very distressed. So it's easy enough to ask
Speaker 1: people about whether they have UM distressing recollections of a
Speaker 1: trauma that they've been exposed to you. And the second
Speaker 1: category of symptoms have to do with avoidance. That is
Speaker 1: that trauma survivors with PTSD tried desperately to do whatever
Speaker 1: they can do to not think about the trauma or
Speaker 1: not get triggered by the trauma. And this involves not
Speaker 1: dealing with people that might remind them of what happened
Speaker 1: or going to places where the trauma occurred, and it
Speaker 1: could be a real barrier in therapy because if you
Speaker 1: have an illness or condition where you one of the
Speaker 1: symptoms is that you want to avoid thinking about what happened.
Speaker 1: You're reluctant to talk about what happened, and healing from
Speaker 1: trauma often involves that. But you can ask people about
Speaker 1: their avoidance behavior. And the third UM symptom cluster with
Speaker 1: hyper arousal, and these are the real physiological symptoms that
Speaker 1: are probably a function of the higher address all levels.
Speaker 1: But there's a difficulty sleeping and difficulty concentrating UM. There's
Speaker 1: something we call hyper vigilance, which is scanning the environment
Speaker 1: just sort of sort of being in a new place
Speaker 1: and feeling like it might be unsafe, looking for the exits,
Speaker 1: making sure that um, you know where the doors are UM,
Speaker 1: and having a startle response um uh to loud noises.
Speaker 1: One of the one of the hyperreusal symptoms are also
Speaker 1: being very irritable and angry. And this is something that
Speaker 1: many trauma survivors just cannot understand why they're so irritable
Speaker 1: and why little things make them so angry. But it's
Speaker 1: part of a physiological complex, and now in the d
Speaker 1: s M five there's a new symptom cluster that is
Speaker 1: really reflecting changes in mood and changes in cognition, which
Speaker 1: simply means that you think about the world differently. You
Speaker 1: just don't see the world the same way as a
Speaker 1: result of trauma as you used to see it. And
Speaker 1: for people who have been exposed to trauma early on,
Speaker 1: so it's really confusing because they don't remember there before.
Speaker 1: They just know that they don't feel safe and that
Speaker 1: the world is a dangerous place and that you can't
Speaker 1: trust strangers, or they may feel that they are incompetent
Speaker 1: to deal with what life has to offer them. And
Speaker 1: the mood disturbances are such that you feel pretty sad
Speaker 1: most of the time, sometimes anxious, sometimes hopeless. In that sense,
Speaker 1: um PTSD can often be confused with depression, or sometimes
Speaker 1: it just can co occur with it. It's so interesting
Speaker 1: too and complex that the person suffering may and I
Speaker 1: guess that goes to the fourth cluster, may not actually
Speaker 1: consciously be able to identify what the source of the
Speaker 1: suffering is. That there's a kind of dissociative way of
Speaker 1: sort of distancing avoiding. Does that make sense? Completely and
Speaker 1: that and that that's what I found in the Holocaust
Speaker 1: survivor is that they knew they were distressed. They thought
Speaker 1: it was their lot in life. Um. They never gave
Speaker 1: their own symptoms that much consideration because they were, after all,
Speaker 1: the survivors, and compared to the fact that so many
Speaker 1: people had died. Um, they didn't even feel perhaps entitled
Speaker 1: to complain about the symptoms that they did have. And
Speaker 1: certainly there wasn't this idea that anyone could do anything
Speaker 1: for them. Um. As one woman put it to me,
Speaker 1: what is somebody going to do take back the Holocaust?
Speaker 1: Make it like I didn't go through what I went through.
Speaker 1: So there there really was this feeling that they were
Speaker 1: as marked as the tattoo on their arm, that this
Speaker 1: is something that they were going to just have to
Speaker 1: live with. Um. And they didn't think about it as
Speaker 1: a cluster of symptoms that might be able to be treated,
Speaker 1: or that even the things that they now thought as
Speaker 1: a result of the trauma might be revisited or contemplated
Speaker 1: or discussed in therapy so that you could get a
Speaker 1: different idea about them, which is actually one of the
Speaker 1: main purposes of psychotherapy. So to me, it was just
Speaker 1: striking to see what something looks like when you don't
Speaker 1: deal with it for so long. Now, of course, many
Speaker 1: Holocaust survivors had primary care doctors, and many primary care
Speaker 1: doctors saw the anxiety and prescribe things for insomnia and
Speaker 1: for anxiety. But that's not really the same thing as
Speaker 1: naming something that happened as a result of a terrible
Speaker 1: traumatic experience, and maybe even something that UM might not
Speaker 1: need to exist in its current form. If you can
Speaker 1: work yourself around what has happened and what it means,
Speaker 1: some of those symptoms will go away. I mean that
Speaker 1: that's so much what the you know, thematic material of
Speaker 1: this podcast has been over the course of four seasons, UM,
Speaker 1: because you know, we talk about my you know, my guests,
Speaker 1: and I talked about secrets, all different kinds of secrets.
Speaker 1: I mean that the tagline is the secrets that are
Speaker 1: kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and
Speaker 1: the secrets we keep from ourselves. And UM, I find
Speaker 1: most poignant and distressing in a way the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from ourselves. But there's you know, where they're like
Speaker 1: if I were going to draw a Van diagram, like
Speaker 1: where there is the intersection between secrecy and silence, UM,
Speaker 1: silence and shame UM the places where those three sort
Speaker 1: of states intersect. And you know, you're you're talking about
Speaker 1: UM studying the Holocaust survivors in Cleveland, where you grew up,
Speaker 1: and and I remember that that is when you came
Speaker 1: across my radar for the first time. UM was when
Speaker 1: I was deep, deep, deep into the research and the
Speaker 1: experience of having discovered a family secret that was so
Speaker 1: deep and so powerful that I could never have actually
Speaker 1: consciously imagined it, which was that I was the family
Speaker 1: secret that my dad had not been my biological father.
Speaker 1: And I had never consciously entertained that thought consciously being
Speaker 1: you know the key word. And and I had grown
Speaker 1: up in New Jersey, in a neighborhood that was filled
Speaker 1: with Holocaust survivors, and I felt like I knew the
Speaker 1: people you were talking about. And for the most part,
Speaker 1: because I you know, I can't say it to the person.
Speaker 1: But wouldn't have sought therapy. I mean, it would have
Speaker 1: been like the last thing that they would have And
Speaker 1: they very often didn't speak of it UM or it
Speaker 1: would leak out sideways, or they wouldn't speak of it
Speaker 1: with their children or there. You know, it was like
Speaker 1: you shouldn't know from that, and so they carried it.
Speaker 1: But carrying something without speaking it has such a profound cost,
Speaker 1: which I think is what I've been learning in a
Speaker 1: way as a student of all this um for the
Speaker 1: last number of years, is what the cost of that is.
Speaker 1: It doesn't go away because you wanted to. It doesn't
Speaker 1: go away because you wanted to, And keeping and not
Speaker 1: using your words to talk about it doesn't mean you're
Speaker 1: not conveying the narrative in some nonverbal way, and that
Speaker 1: I think is a lot of the information that we
Speaker 1: do get sometimes from our parents is nonverbal. I mean
Speaker 1: we internalize the information even if it isn't spoken in words.
Speaker 1: Um So, but that trilogy of silence, change, secrecy, I
Speaker 1: think is something that really unites many trauma survivors because
Speaker 1: I think you're exactly right about those three aspects of
Speaker 1: the problem. And also, when you seek treatment UM you
Speaker 1: have to feel in some way that you're entitled to it,
Speaker 1: which many trauma survivors don't. And in fact that many
Speaker 1: trauma survivors end up in therapy because someone that they
Speaker 1: live with or someone that they love tells them that
Speaker 1: they should go to therapy because they're not able to
Speaker 1: tolerate some of the manifestations of trauma UM that either
Speaker 1: they do or don't recognize as manifestations of trauma. But
Speaker 1: sometimes trauma survivors go for therapy without even understanding that
Speaker 1: they're there to process the trauma UM, which is very
Speaker 1: interesting but is not at all unusual. No, that doesn't
Speaker 1: that doesn't surprise me. I but why the sense of
Speaker 1: undeserving or and I'm sure that there are many different
Speaker 1: reasons for different individuals. But is it because um, because
Speaker 1: it's really a sense of minimizing the trauma or kind
Speaker 1: of erasing the trauma, or is it the shame or
Speaker 1: sort of shame based feeling of like I don't deserve
Speaker 1: to feel better or I don't deserve to be better.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it is shame based UM,
Speaker 1: certainly depending on the trauma of a lot of people
Speaker 1: that are exposed to sexual violence or sexual trauma, particularly
Speaker 1: early on, are convinced that they somehow provoked it, and
Speaker 1: they feel very ashamed about that. And even if they
Speaker 1: don't feel that they provoked it, many people feel very
Speaker 1: ashamed that they couldn't stop it. UM. And I heard
Speaker 1: this also from Holocaust survivors, just the they could really
Speaker 1: do nothing, and yet there was the shame of being
Speaker 1: so degraded and so humiliated by the circumstance. So I
Speaker 1: think that that shame is connected to feeling undeserving in
Speaker 1: some way. And it's very complicated for combat veterans. We
Speaker 1: talked now a lot about moral injury and people being
Speaker 1: very ashamed of some of the things that might have
Speaker 1: happened in combat. So again, combat is an pretty uncontrollable
Speaker 1: situation most of it, and um, people are going to
Speaker 1: often second guess themselves. Even after nine eleven, so many
Speaker 1: people talked about what they could have done, what they
Speaker 1: didn't do. Kind of a lot of recriminations of running
Speaker 1: down the stairs instead of helping other people down the stairs.
Speaker 1: Anywhere you go in a traumatic situation, there's room to
Speaker 1: second guess yourself. We refer to it in the field
Speaker 1: as the basis of developing negative cognition. So you start
Speaker 1: to wonder why you didn't do this, that or the
Speaker 1: other thing, and then you develop an answer for that, Well,
Speaker 1: it must be I'm a bad person, it must be
Speaker 1: I'm incompetent, alright, So it feeds into the same thing.
Speaker 1: The reality is that when you're under a fight or
Speaker 1: flight response, you're not really thinking that much. Your body
Speaker 1: is doing what it is evolutionarily designed to do, which
Speaker 1: is save those genes that they can be cassed. And
Speaker 1: so you don't go into an entire analysis of what
Speaker 1: should I be doing at this moment. You just do
Speaker 1: it at this moment what your genes are programmed to
Speaker 1: help you do, which is survived by any means necessary.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: Are certain people's genes programmed more toward one of those
Speaker 1: evolutionary responses In other words, I mean I recently came
Speaker 1: to be aware that you know that the freeze response
Speaker 1: is part of that like it's it's and so it's
Speaker 1: like this trio of I came to realize it because
Speaker 1: I'm a freezer. I'm not a fighter, I'm not a
Speaker 1: flear I'm a freezer. I go into like just I'm
Speaker 1: going to be as still as possible and maybe this
Speaker 1: will pass. UM. I'm just wondering whether that's is that
Speaker 1: genetic or is that circumstantial. It's probably got features of both. Um,
Speaker 1: but sometimes the body makes different decisions based on what's happening,
Speaker 1: So freeze might be exactly the right response under some circumstances.
Speaker 1: Don't move over, else something bad will happen. Sometimes fleeing
Speaker 1: is the best and wisest response, and sometimes fighting is.
Speaker 1: You know, So I think that I actually think that
Speaker 1: we might have I think we have the capacity to
Speaker 1: do all of those things under different circumstances. But that
Speaker 1: you make the best choice you can given how you
Speaker 1: size up a situation at the moment. So I think
Speaker 1: that that I think we all do that when when
Speaker 1: a trauma occurs when you're younger, it's probably the most
Speaker 1: adaptive thing to just freeze through it, because you're not
Speaker 1: going to be able to fight, and maybe you're not
Speaker 1: even going to be able to flee, So just breathe
Speaker 1: through this and let's see where it goes. Do you
Speaker 1: think some of that then becomes learned and ingrained, so
Speaker 1: that if when we were younger we learned that freezing
Speaker 1: was what was going in too get us out of this,
Speaker 1: or or or be the best recourse, maybe we've become
Speaker 1: more freezers as adults, or or any of the any
Speaker 1: of the responses. Maybe maybe we did flee or maybe
Speaker 1: we did fight, or is it as you say that,
Speaker 1: it really does depend on the circumstances. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. I mean one of the most important
Speaker 1: things that happens when you're in a situation of extreme
Speaker 1: stress is that the body's release of stress hormones, among
Speaker 1: other things, helps you remember what has happened, presumably for
Speaker 1: the purpose of allowing you to have a better response
Speaker 1: next time. So, yes, our responses to trauma very much
Speaker 1: depend on what has happened to us before that moment,
Speaker 1: which is why when you're responding to a trauma in
Speaker 1: the here and now, if you're also responding to a
Speaker 1: lot of things that have happened in the past. And
Speaker 1: this is why we start to get a lot of
Speaker 1: individual differences in the way people respond to events, because
Speaker 1: so much of what you're doing in the moment, Sure
Speaker 1: it's biologically conserved and your program to save yourself, but
Speaker 1: a lot of the decision making about how to respond
Speaker 1: to trauma does have to do not only with what
Speaker 1: happened in the past, but what the outcomes of those
Speaker 1: decisions were. That makes so much sense. So let's go
Speaker 1: back for a moment to Cleveland and the Holocaust survivors.
Speaker 1: And was this the beginning of your exploration of or
Speaker 1: sort of identification of epigenetics in the intergenerational effects of trauma.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, no, that didn't happen for a
Speaker 1: really long time. Interesting. Yeah, no, no, no, I didn't
Speaker 1: know the word every genetics when I first started studying
Speaker 1: Holocaust survivors. It wasn't a word that was used in
Speaker 1: neuroscience or matl health or psychiatry. And it wasn't even
Speaker 1: a concept that was available to me, which is what
Speaker 1: makes the whole story so much more um interesting, because
Speaker 1: what I was thinking to myself, Well, what happened was
Speaker 1: we study, we did a study on Holocaust survivors. We
Speaker 1: were able to replicate the hormonal findings, which to me
Speaker 1: meant this is real and worth pursuing because I got
Speaker 1: to find out what is it that is resulting in
Speaker 1: lower cordisol levels and people that have had a trauma
Speaker 1: so long ago and now have PTSD, Like, what's that about?
Speaker 1: But the other thing was, you know, there's a whole
Speaker 1: population here of Holocaust survivors that there's an unmet mental
Speaker 1: health need. And when I went back to New York
Speaker 1: and I started my first job as an assistant professor
Speaker 1: around Sinai in New York. I was dis gusting this.
Speaker 1: With my chairman, I said, I really wish that we
Speaker 1: could we could create a clinic for Holocaust survivors, and
Speaker 1: he said, do it, and so I did it. UM.
Speaker 1: What I found was that it was it was the
Speaker 1: children of Holocaust survivors that began calling, and so I
Speaker 1: didn't know what to make of that. UM. Some of
Speaker 1: my best friends are children of Holocaust survivors, and they
Speaker 1: didn't seem that different from me. UM. But again, things
Speaker 1: are very different when you look deeper than on the surface. UM.
Speaker 1: But these adult children of Holocaust survivors were really claiming
Speaker 1: to be casualties of the Holocaust, and certainly casualties of
Speaker 1: the way they were raised in their homes. So we
Speaker 1: started clinical programming for both Holocaust survivors and offspring, and
Speaker 1: we continued to do biologic work to try to figure out,
Speaker 1: you know, what exactly is going on with this very
Speaker 1: unusual hormonal us bonds, which, by the way, many offspring
Speaker 1: showed as well the evidence of the low cortisol levels
Speaker 1: and um the high adrenaline levels. And we kept at
Speaker 1: it until we figured out that at least four adult
Speaker 1: children of Holocaust survivors, many of the biological and clinical
Speaker 1: features that we were observing that looked like a traumatic
Speaker 1: stress response actually occurred when one of the parents had
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress disorder, and that a few years later
Speaker 1: even learned that there were kind of different effects if
Speaker 1: the mother was traumatized or if the father was traumatized.
Speaker 1: We started to just go deeper and deeper. Now every
Speaker 1: genetics came along in kind of like maybe two thousand
Speaker 1: and four or something like that, there was a paper
Speaker 1: that was published by actually a very good friend and
Speaker 1: colleague of mine, Dr Michael Meaney, and he was studying
Speaker 1: again laboratory rats, but he was studying um parenting. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: he thought he started out thinking he was going to
Speaker 1: study maternal um stress. And what happens when you remove
Speaker 1: a mother rat from the cage where her little babies
Speaker 1: are right and you handle the animals, you return the
Speaker 1: mother back. Um. It's a stressful thing for the mother.
Speaker 1: It's probably a little stressful for the babies. UM. But
Speaker 1: what the mother starts to do after being removed from
Speaker 1: the home cage for fifteen minutes is she starts looking
Speaker 1: and grooming her pups, and what Dr Meni and his
Speaker 1: UM group noticed was that there was a lot of
Speaker 1: variation in how much licking and grooming there was, and
Speaker 1: eventually they realized that the licking and grooming of the
Speaker 1: pups by the mother h was really having a profound
Speaker 1: effect on the way that offspring the baby wrath as adults. Right,
Speaker 1: um developed different kinds of stress responses and cognitive responses
Speaker 1: as adults, and so they came up with this wonderful
Speaker 1: theory of early developmental programming and really understanding that the
Speaker 1: kind of mothering that you receive may have a profound impact.
Speaker 1: And they started measuring this with stress hormones even in
Speaker 1: the rats that as they became adults, which for fortunately
Speaker 1: for rats it just takes a few months um. But
Speaker 1: they began to see that they were the first really
Speaker 1: to apply epigenetics to this question, and they began to
Speaker 1: see that in the hippocampus of these rats that had
Speaker 1: been exposed to differences in maternal care, they found differences.
Speaker 1: Epigenetic differences is on a stress related gene, and it
Speaker 1: just happened to be the gene that is the receptor
Speaker 1: for cortisol, which is called the global cordicord receptor. So
Speaker 1: when I read this, I was just all over it
Speaker 1: and I actually called Michael Mini and said, I think
Speaker 1: this work might apply to Holocaust offspring. At the time,
Speaker 1: I thought maybe the Holocaust offspring for the way they
Speaker 1: were because of parenting. That's certainly what I thought in
Speaker 1: the early two thousands, right, and um, so I asked
Speaker 1: him to help me figure out how to do ety
Speaker 1: genetic measures. Um. We didn't have brains available to us,
Speaker 1: but we decided we could measure the same part of
Speaker 1: the gene in blood and indeed we began looking at
Speaker 1: every genetic changes and then what we saw was that
Speaker 1: there were different that that direction of change in offspring,
Speaker 1: in Holocaust offspring was different depending on whether the mother
Speaker 1: or the father had PTSD, And so we we knew
Speaker 1: that this couldn't just be parenting. We knew that there
Speaker 1: had to be a bigger story here, UM that would
Speaker 1: explain a different epigenetic finding right in Holocaust offspring based
Speaker 1: on parental gender. And that's when we started to really
Speaker 1: explore epigenetic changes, looking at the contribution of in uterine
Speaker 1: stress or perhaps thinking about the fact that some of
Speaker 1: the changes might be UM might have been present preconception
Speaker 1: and might have been transmitted through sperm or egg, And
Speaker 1: that's when, you know, we began to really connect the
Speaker 1: epigenetic findings with the concept of every genetic inheritance. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that was a journey that really took a long
Speaker 1: time and began. And that began with the fact that
Speaker 1: those that those offspring of of the of the generation
Speaker 1: of survivors were the ones who who reached out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we studied them. We found that, sure enough, there was
Speaker 1: more anxiety and depression and PTSD in those offspring than
Speaker 1: in Jewish very similarly demographically similar comparison people and UM.
Speaker 1: And then we chased the hormonal findings and by then,
Speaker 1: you know, we were just we just got lucky because
Speaker 1: by then molecular neuroscience had given us all kinds of
Speaker 1: tools to be able to look inside the cell and
Speaker 1: look on the d NA, so we couldn't do this work.
Speaker 1: Even though in the early nineties when I first encountered this,
Speaker 1: I knew that it wasn't exactly genetics that was explaining this,
Speaker 1: but I thought it was more than just being raised
Speaker 1: in the environments that offspring were raised in, because there
Speaker 1: was so much diversity in the homes of you know,
Speaker 1: some parents talked all about the Holocaust all the time
Speaker 1: and some didn't say a word, and so there was
Speaker 1: I felt there had to be more, and indeed there
Speaker 1: seems to be more. We'll be back tomorrow with part
Speaker 1: two of my conversation with Dr Rachel Yehuda, and please
Speaker 1: keep in mind that Season five of Family Secrets will
Speaker 1: drop on April one with ten all new episodes. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.