Recently, Laurie asked me a question which I replied to. What follows is her question and my reply.
Hi Jim Edd,
I have been looking toward the February FEST writing group and thinking about your work in early life adversity. I wonder where you are with it since your presentation at the Symposium. It is humbling to learn the research regarding how much of our functioning potential is to a degree determined early on, and how it relates to DoS. I came across this article while researching stress.
Laurie
https://www.pnas.org/content/109/50/20578
Hi Laurie,
I pretty much said at the Symposium everything I have figured out about early adverse experiences, later serious symptoms, and differentiation. I have not really had any new thoughts in addition to what I presented in November. What people call childhood adverse experiences describes a subgroup of low differentiation systems, be it family systems or laboratory childrearing experiments in rhesus macaques.
The results reported by Cole and Suomi are an impressive part of the big picture. The way I would characterize their results and those of the San Diego study of adverse childhood experiences(ACE) is that growing up as a child in low differentiation circumstances appreciably increases your chances of having serious adult chronic serious symptoms. Associated with that is evidence of ”embedding in one’s physiology” a legacy of the remnants of those early low differentiation child development conditions.
And neither kind of study, neither San Diego nor rhesus macaque studies, describes the conditions in which those adult symptoms get manifested. There are the child development environments and then there are the adult environments in which the symptoms appear.
I strongly suspect that the adult conditions are also low differentiation, as were the childhood environments. I am very sure about that for the human beings who reported severe adverse childhood experiences, which I am reinterpreting as very low differentiation families of origin in which these people grew up.
As adults, you’d expect the whole multigenerational family to continue to be low differentiation, and you’d expect the individuals to choose low differentiation mates and then to create a continuing low differentiation family of procreation.
Cole and Suomi created some intensely low differentiation rearing conditions, first devised by Harry Harlow and his followers. I fully expect that other kinds of low differentiation family rearing conditions will also result in similar kinds of unfortunate epigenetic changes to the DNA complex. Low differentiation systems are rough places to try to grow up in and to try to develop a decently functioning self.
A couple of statistics points. It appears in the San Diego study that the association between ACE and serious adult symptoms is moderate at best. Statistically very significant; that is, statistically very improbable that the associations occurred by chance, but the strength of the association is moderate, far from perfect. This is what I’d expect to see in any living system where there are many interconnected influences affecting the system’s functioning and that of any individual.
The upshot is that other aspects of the system and of any individual are required to work together with the childhood environment in order to produce a particular version of the adult system or individual adult functioning.
So, low differentiation family of origin, adverse childhood experiences, and maternal rearing conditions are important to pay attention to, but by themselves give only a very partial picture of the influences on the adult functioning.
Note that this line of argument applies to the Cole-Suomi rhesus macaque rearing environment. Without doubt the differences in epigenetic expression of important genes are very statistically significant( though they never mention any test of that), but the amount of adult variation in functioning explained by rearing environment is likely moderate, not enough to explain the quality of adult functioning by itself.
Important to note, but more is needed to work together with childhood environment and experiences.
Oh, and one more thing I am assuming. To be explicit, low differentiation families of origin will mostly create an inadequate child rearing environment, which I have no doubt will result in unfortunate epigenetic changes in individual children, that, in turn, will be associated with serious adult symptoms.
Thanks for the link to the article,
Jim Edd
Jim Edd,
I wasn’t at the November symposium, so I appreciate the chance to get a part of your presentation in this post. Your words, “many interconnected influences,” steer me to seeing how Bowen theory provides a more complex understanding of the connection between childhood adversity and adult functioning. The family projection process explains how some children get more than their siblings of the brunt of the low differentiation. How far does this go in understanding the variation between the life course of siblings raised in low differentiation families? I found the section in Michael Kerr’s new book on “families in the public eye” really illuminating. Investigating the public records on four individuals, he constructs their family histories and brings in the “many interconnected influences” that help explain how these individuals came out at the extremes of emotional and behavioral disturbances.
Jim Edd,
One thought – I think one of the very important findings from Steve Suomi’s work is the difference that the calm better functioning foster mother can make in the functioning of the reactive youngest conditioned in the relationship with the reactive mother. How do youngsters disadvantaged in their early emotional conditioning find their way into situations in which they might thrive, when they are able to do that? The hypothesis from theory would be that their chances are better in a system of relationships in which the higher functioning parts of the family and the community remain responsive in a responsible way to those who are more compromised by their emotional systems.
There is plenty of ‘slack’ in the correlation between ACE and adult serious symptoms. You have provided one of the ways a person can become an ‘exception’ to the trend.
One thought – I think one of the very important findings from Steve Suomi’s work is the difference that the calm better functioning foster mother can make in the functioning of the reactive youngest conditioned in the relationship with the reactive mother. How do youngsters disadvantaged in their early emotional conditioning find their way into situations in which they might thrive, when they are able to do that? The hypothesis from theory would be that their chances are better in a system of relationships in which the higher functioning parts of the family and the community remain responsive in a responsible way to those who are more compromised by their emotional systems.
it seems that as long as families are producing different leaves of functioning ie a hierarchy and that at least the research in the book The Pecking Order” notes that ones child’s functioning can let you know the socio economic functioning level of others. This also points to variation in the family. Not cause and effect…
Differentiation is too poorly defined as to emotional maturity to do much to help us say what level of functioning people can obtain due to poor parenting. IMO
Of course I am making a distinction between emotional functioning and socio economic functioning which his is easier to track.