Session 303: How Trauma Affects the Brain

Published Apr 19, 2023, 7:00 AM

The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.

Due to the dedicated work of so many brilliant scientists like our guest today, we have learned and continue to learn so much about how the traumatic experiences of our parents, grandparents and other ancestors are passed down. Today we’re diving into an exploration of intergenerational trauma with our guest, Dr. Bianca Jones Marlin.

Dr. Marlin is a neuroscientist and Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cell Research at the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University in New York City. She studies how information learned can be passed down to future generations through transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. It's all about understanding how traits and behaviors are passed on through generations, shaping how we act and behave. During our conversation she breaks down the science behind generational trauma and how trauma manifests in our bodies, brains, and everyday lives. 

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Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, doctor Joy hard and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for joining me for session three oh three of the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors. Due to the dedicated work of so many brilliant scienceists like our guests today, we have learned and continue to learn, so much about how the traumatic experiences of our parents, grandparents, and other ancestors are passed down. We're diving into an exploration of intergenerational trauma with our guests today. Doctor Bianca Jones Morland is a neuroscientist and Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of cell Research at the Zuckermann Institute at Columbia University in New York City. Doctor Marlon studies how information learned can be passed down to future generations through transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. It's all about understanding how traits and behaviors are passed on through generations, shaping how we act and behave. In our conversation today, Marlon breaks down the science behind generational trauma and how trauma manifests in our bodies, brains, and everyday lives. If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please share it with us on social media using the hashtag TBG in session or join us over in the sister Circle. To talk more in depth about the episode, you can join us at community dot therapy for Blackgirls dot com.

Here's our conversation.

Thank you so much for joining us today, doctor Marlond, Thank you so much for having me so. I'd love if you could get a storted by talking about what you do as a neuroscienceist and how you get interested in neuroscience and behavior.

What I do as a neuroscientist. I really think I have an amazing job because I get to ask questions that interest me about education, about learning, about stress, and about survival. And I have an amazing talented group of students and trainees and fellow scientists who dive in and really look at the answers, the mechanisms, by logical aspects of these questions that we.

Ask, how did you get interested in it?

How did I get interested in neuroscience? I started off studying adolescent education, so I was a seventh through twelfth grade teacher in biology. And what I began to note during my studies as a teacher is that some of my students I could almost tell how their day was going based on their attention in my class. And I really be clear with speaking about my students because it wasn't as if those that came from quote unquote bad homes were quote unquote bad performing in school. No, there were students who were coming from difficult situations and I couldn't get them to pay attention in my class. And that makes total sense, because if you're thinking about whether or not your siblings are safe, whether not your mom is okay, or how stable your household is at home, it would not make evolutionary sound sense. You to be worrying about differential equations when you're worried about what's going on at home. And so I really say it as in honoring their experiences, but I noticed that there were certain ways I could pick up what was going on in the household based on what was happening in the classroom, and it did affect their performance the way that we standardize as teachers, and I really wanted to look into how to optimize how stress changes learning in the brain. And I realized as educators we didn't have much information as to how the brain worked, and so it was almost as if there were these scientists that had this information, but they didn't speak to educators, and so how do we bridge that gap? And so instead of bridging that gap, I became a neuroscientist and now explore how the brain adapts to parenthood for optimization of parents, how the brain adapts to stress and trauma, and what that looks like to inform our kids for many generations to come.

So had you known you wanted to go to school beyond where you had gone to become a teacher, or was it only in exploring these questions that you decided I'm going to go back to school and do something else.

Now, Oh my gosh, No, I didn't know at all that it was an option. My heart breaks a little bit every time I say that, to think that I'm here where I am now, I'm a professor at a prestigious institution, and I didn't know this was an option. I thought, if you loved biology, you could go into med school and become a doctor, or you become a science teacher. And the way that I understood doctor working in a hospital, I didn't fought that poll an educator was like, well, this makes sense. I guess this is what I will do. I respect so many teachers that really go through and dedicate their lives to that. And it was only as I was studying to be a teacher biology teacher at a due major, I actually did biology and adolescent education, so I dove straight into biology that I realized, like, oh, there's this whole facet. You become a scientist through something called a PhD. That's not just a doctor of philosophy and thinking about philosophy. You actually can do hands on where gloves and do science, and that's a career choice. Like my professors who taught me had PhDs and it opened up this whole realm that I didn't know existed. Yeah, and it led me to where I am now.

Nice, Nice, thank you appreciating it.

So, something that you spend a lot of time studying and that you know has become more of a term people or familiar with recently is transgenerational epigenetics or generational trauma. Those sound like very big words. I think that out of us right, Like, what in the world does any of them mean? So I wonder if you could give us like a one oh one. What are we talking about when we say transgenerational epigenetic.

Yes, transgenerational, Let's break the whole word down, transgenerational trans meaning across generational, cross generations. When we talk about transgenerational, what we're really referring to is a person. Let's talk about humans for a second. So a person their grandchild would be considered transgenerational to them. Their child would be considered intergenerational. And the reason that we highlight those two differences is because when we're speaking about something being passed on through generations. My mother can pass something on to me genetically or through a conversation at the dinner table, because I grew up with her because I was constantly around her. Whereas in any situations a grandparent, you could actually be born never knowing your grandparent. You can't be born never knowing your mother or never really interacting or having at least some connection with your mother. So intergenerational is mom offspring, dad offspring. Transgenerational are their grandkids. So we have that part down. So transgenerational, epigenetic, what does that mean? Genetic? Our DNA? What makes up who we are? That's the same in every one of the cells in our body. Epigenetics means above the genome, and it really is just describing these markers we'll call them right now that scientists observed in the genomes. What does this mean? Our genetics are the same in every cell in our body, which means your DNA and your liver and the DNA and your skin and the DNA and your eyes those are all the same DNA. But how do we have liver cells, eye cells and we don't have teeth growing in our eyes. It's because certain parts of our genome can be quote unquote read so scene or quote unquote unread or unseen, and that's the epigenetic component. There's certain markers that say you're a liver cell, so make your liver. Do your a liver thing. And you're an eye cell, so don't make liver components of your DNA. And those epigenetic markers are what differentiate certain cells from another. When we talk about transgenerational across generations, epigenetic above the genome inheritance, it's what an experience and a grandparent changes those markers that say, become this, don't become that, and those changes are inherited in the next generation. Because we thought for a long time those changes happen, but it doesn't get passed on to the next generation because it's not actually the DNA, it's just stuff around the DNA. We're coming to see that those things around the DNA, or things that change those things around the DNA are somehow they passed down And this is really the crux of the Marlin lab and what we study.

So we don't necessarily have any firm answers yet, but this is a part of what you are learning. We do know that it happens, and a part of what you're studying is like.

How this happened, and particularly how this happens in response to stress and trauma and how much of this is adaptive versus maladaptive. This is really what we focus on.

Got it? Got it?

So, you know, we talk a lot about in psychology around like trauma getting tramped in the brain and like our body experiencing trauma. Can you talk about what actually happens in the brain when we have had a traumatic experience.

What happens in the brain when we have a traumatic experience. I'll start off by saying, I'm a firm believer that biology wants us to survive and thrive. So any change the body has is a hopeful potential adaptation to the stimulus. What we've come to see both as humans as you see this as we live on this earth and walk throughout life, but also as biologists, is that certain stressors, certain traumas change the way we respond to future stressors and traumas because we've learned earned a different response. So that learning mechanism, that's beautiful, that's in the brain, that's well established, Like I was well studied, I would say, how the brain learns, and it would make sense that if you are Let's give an example of like you're walking down the block and all of a sudden, you walk past a baseball field and a ball comes whizzing behind you, you jump back. The next time you walk past that baseball field, you're going to keep your eyes open both ways as you're crossing the sheet. That heightened alertness that will may be very much aware of my surroundings is essential for your survival. You to get to work looking cute and wherever you're going and not get hit by this baseball. But when you're walking throughout life and you're not just walking past a baseball field and you feel that constant at to be aware something that could happen, this is when it becomes maladaptive. So this is what really us as neuroscientists, the group of us that are studying these facets, are really looking at what does it mean to learn one experience, generalize it to experiences that really it doesn't fit, and then potentially even take those memories of that one bad experience that could have been helpful in learning something although it was unfortunate experience, and passing it down to the next generation where they don't live anywhere in air baseball court, but they feel that tension every time they walk down the street.

So many things are going on in my head as you're talking about this, doctor Rylan, and I know you've also talked a lot about racism as a traumatic experience in how that really changes the DNA and changes all of this the operating matter as black people, right, Like when you have had racist experiences and you're kind of looking for this baseball all the time, right, that does change the way we kind of show up in the world.

Yes, I guess the fortunate part for my work, but also the enforcement part of my life of the study is that do we have exact mechanisms in which racial stress changes these molecules that change the DNA? Know? But we do know that. Let's speak about America. For example, Black Americans who are descendants of slaves are more likely to suffer from hypertension, which is high blood pressure diabetes. Could it possibly be that what we understand and what we know as a black population and what we experience as a black population could have a biological ramification and mechanism. I think it's pretty unfortunate that we haven't put our finger on that. It's understudied in the realm of biology. But we know it as a people group, and we know it as Americans, as all Americans as people who come to the marriage. People have studied America, people of the world see this, so we see it with our eyes. But if we don't have it written down in a biological manner, or written down in a first primary research publication, it's almost as if it's not really true. Dare I say? And so, although I use mice in my studies the questions that we're asking, I really hope that people take that and take it to the next level. If this is the biological mechanism that we've seen in rodents, what could it mean to stress a rodent? Very simple, we do something like a light foot shock, the rodent's a little bit bent out of shape, and we see changes in the brain and body. What could it mean for generation on general of blatant trauma on a people group. And I also want to specify by saying Black people aren't the only ones traumatized by the history of slavery, because in order to induct and induce and maintain slavery, there's another population, the white population, that had to do that. And I think it hurts us as a society if we don't address that as well, not to put blame on where we are in twenty twenty. But to acknowledge that, ignoring that you have ancestors who for generation on generation said yes to slavery and made a conclusion that they're better than another people group. That's damaging. And that's the level of damage that we also haven't dug into as a society because it's scary to some people. And I think we're doing damage to ourselves as a country, as a world, as our environment by not addressing those things. Now is exactly what my lab does. Now, we still stick to the mice, I think, but I hope that it informs those who take it to the next level.

More for my conversation with doctor Marlon after the break, So can you give us some examples of how trauma manifests in our bodies, brains, in everyday lives, Like what does this continue to just look like.

In our model organism, the mouse. What we do is we have an animal use its senses, so we explore the world. All mammals right including humans, explore the world through smell, through sound, through taste, through touch. So we use these senses and we explore the circuits of these senses in the brain and see if they change and how they change with trauma, both in the parents, and then it changed throughout generations. So we're following up on really exciting work done by former labs that have shown that if you have a smell, you pair that with a light foot shock, it seems to change the structure in the brain and somehow that's inherited pass on to the next generation. I'm saying these things, and I know I'm saying it as a scientist, so you may just be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense, Okay, cool, because she's a scientist. This is astounding. This is not something we should take lightly and experience in a mammal is changing the structure of the brain. Biology doesn't waste energy, so if the structure's changing and neurons are changing, that's a really big deal. And so this small stressor can change the smell neurons in a mammal. And then somehow that message is getting from the nose and these studies we use males, it's getting from the nose to the testicles to the sperm somehow being passed on to the next generation. So this sperm makes the egg gets implanted into a female who's never met anyone else, and then her kids are born with the change in structure. Her kids are born like with their daddy's issues.

You know our kids.

The kids are born with a change in brain structure. And so we're really looking at what that means. Are these offspring more anxious when they smell a smell? Are they more sensitive to things? Or are they ready to take on an environment in which this odor may come into play and survive it and learn more quickly and run away? And these are the questions that we're asking. Okay, so I'm glad you explaining that was like, Okay, what's actually happening with the mice? So you have this male you then do this shock.

And then or the lead mice, I guess because it's not my world.

So then do they become like a verse to the male? Is that what's happening? Ah, that's a really good question. Based on our preliminary observations, our preliminary data, we don't see that the animals are averse to the odor. And the experiment that we're doing. So you have an odor hair with the light foot shock for ten seconds odor and the light foot shock, and end of the light foot shock, those animals will avoid they smell the oder they go the other way. The offspring are born, and it doesn't seem like they are affected by the odor. But the way my student described it, what she said is, look, when I go up to give a talk, I stand on the platform, and I stand in front of the stage, and I walk confidently on the stage and I present myself. Well, you don't notice I'm sweating, like my hands are shaking, my palms are sweating. So could it be that the mice feel a certain kind of way and what we see with them going left or right is just too much above the threshold. We don't see the animals avoid. But do they feel anxiety when going in that corner question that we're looking into.

But their brain structures are definitely changed because.

They are consistently seeing that their brain structure. They're inherited with a different brain structure, and they've never experienced the odor ever. Just the sperm of their dad is the only thing that's giving them this information.

So you study mice, but what kind of questions might you have for somebody who was studying humans? Right, Like, oh, what kinds of things might you wonder about humans? Based on what you have studied in these mice?

All of our work and everything that we do. If it doesn't go back to not just informing but like uplifting humanity, it drops down on my list of interest of things that go on alot. And really it's something that we stand for, and everyone who enters a lot knows that although we're using rodents as our model organism, it's for the helps of informing humanity. So all of these questions we can look up the answer of, like what can we picture in humans in one of two ways. I'm a neurobiologists, biologists, psychologists, all these things by training. I will say, like a biologist first, and we need to understand how mechanisms work before we can apply them to humans. Ever, because historically, especially in this country, we've jumped that and we've used humans and it's caused a lot of damage and a lot of hurt. So I take a lot of pride in saying that we treat the animals, of course humanely. We treat the animals with the utmost respect. Everything that the animals go through. My students go through every foot shock. My students put their finger on that change and they get the shock. First, they understand the experience and experiment, but we have to understand these mechanisms first, and then through the larger scientific community through psychologists who read our work, through psychiatrists who read our work, and through other biologists who read our work, it grows and it strengthens, and it says, okay, well what does this look like in humans? So that's really first matter. We study mice on purpose. It's not because of sort of access to humans. It's because it needs to be done in order to do the work properly and understand properly how humans work. And I would say, secondly, what does it mean for humans? We explore the world through our senses, through smell, and through hearing, and through taste, and it seems that a lot of these mechanisms are very similar in rodents, especially smell, taste, and hearing, the three that we use. The site's a little bit different, but I also wear glasses, so I feel like I see probably as good as some them. But because we use smell to navigate our world, in our environment and to unlock memories and remember things, and they're associated with emotions, we use that as a proxy from ice, and I think it's a pretty solid proxy.

Very fascinating. I'm definitely interested in digging.

Way into your work.

So in an interview for The Washington Post, you said, if I take a step back from being a scientist and I'm just a fellow human in society, we see inherited trauma playing out in many instances across the world. It makes sense now we need to identify the biology behind this inheritance, which will help let's better understand and navigate the stresses of our world today. I feel like you have spoken to a lot of it is already, but I wonder if you could kind of say more specifically, like what do we typically inherent from our parents and great parents through the transgenerational epigenetics.

Yes, so the beauty, but also the struggle when it comes to studying humans and understanding what we inherit from our parents and our grandparents is that for some of us, some of us who are blessed enough to have this, we hear about the experience of our parents and our grandparents at the dinner table. It's because we're sharing what they went through, and we're hearing their joys and their pins, and we're seeing the way they navigate the world, and we mimic that, especially as developing humans. We mimic that. So how much of these learning things that are happening in our brain coincide with the epigenetics that have been inherited versus it's solely being learned and solely being inherited, And really the question of nature versus nurture, because there's a whole other way of looking at this is if you have a non genetically associated person, you have an adopted sibling in the household, are there mannerisms similar to yours and your parents? Yeah, of course they've learned that. Are their outlooks on life? And culture? Is similar to your parents, your biological parents, Yes, of course, like they've learned that. And so there's one of those questions you really want to take into consideration, like how much of the inherited parts are also culturally inherited? Now when it comes to what is epigenetically inherited, these are the questions that keep us up at night when it comes to like medicine and health. And I'm not giving you an answer because we don't have the answer. We've gone left and we've gone right as scientist when it comes to this, But when it comes to certain pathologies that keep on showing themselves in certain populations, it's hard to say that an increase in anxiety is solely because you saw anxious parents at the dinner table. I study a lot of people populations in America, not directly in the lab, but through our studies. One is the Jewish population, not just those who left during the Holocaust, even before, when they're still placing ghettos. There's a constant story of anxiety. Now, how much of this is just Grandma was anxious versus generations and generations on this genetic disposition is leading to anxiety in the future. It's a question I can't give you an answer to because we don't know yet. But we see it with our eyes, and that's really what I mean by it. But I quote we see with our eyes, and so it's great to give really diligence to what we already know as humans.

So something that I have always wanted because you do hear a lot of stories around like trauma being passed intergenerationally, right, And I have always thought if trauma can be passed intergenerationally, can joy in humor and all of those like negative things, right, and those be passed intergenerationally as.

Will That's an awesome question, and I'm going to answer you now as a human and not as a scientist. I do believe they are because as a Black American, there's no way that we could be here for one for that that ability to say, you know what, you've gone through a lot for generations. But also strength is part of something I'm going to teach you. We're going to epigenetically have for survival and then therefore pass on as part of our being. Does it come up, it's pluses and minuses that word strength, that were diligence, that were resilience. Of course they're triggering at this point, especially after the last few years hearing them, but doesn't mean that there's not a truth in it, and so I personally believe that that's the case. Now when it comes to what we're studying in the lab, we're really focusing on the traumas first because I really hope that joys passed down. And if love and joy have passed down, great we have less work to do as scientists. But it's really the traumas that are going to need our brains and our attention, our minds.

So what if.

Anything in our environment can suppress or enhanced the way that our genes work.

Oom. This is an excellent question. It's extremely controversial. If you look it up, you start seeing like, oh, gosh, if you eat kale, kale's the answer to everything. It's like, first long, you're eating it raw, and I don't even eat it like that. So know what you're talking about. You know. It's there's a lot of cluff out there that will say, like, yeah, your nage inducing or creating these changes certain dispositions. So not for everyone. For example, smoking can cause epigenetic changes. But I want that to be clear, not for everyone. It's not that every person you study who smokes can have epigenetic changes that will lead them to cancer in the future. And that's the beauty of the nature versus the nurture. It's not beautiful to have cancer, of course, it's not what I'm saying, But the fact that not one hundred percent of the people will have this disposition means that we're starting off with something that's natural. And then the nurture part is what's creating these epigenetic changes. We do know pretty consistently across the board that stress leads to epigenetic changes. Now across the board is exactly what I mean as in all different facets in metabolism. Going back to what I chatted with you about before with diabetes and hypertension, when it comes to reproduction, having stress seems to play a really important role in lack of reproductive health, leap, hygiene, and learning. These are all things that we can put our finger on that change epigenetic markers when it comes to stress. So it's really a big component.

So are they thing that we should be mindful of. Let's say we do know some things about like our grandparents, and if your research is correct and the research people are doing that, we know that we may have kind of be genetically predisposed to higher levels or stress or something like that. Are there things that we should be mindful of in our everyday lives.

Yes, And I think the one thing I'm going to suggest that we're mindful of is that if we are living in inherited trauma, and what inherited trauma looks like, like we've been able to demonstrate, is a change in the brain. It does not mean we're broken. Biology wants us to survive. And so if biology changed our brain in a particular way based on a stressor in the past for us to survive. Let's take a second to honor what biology does which makes sure that we survive. Now, with that being said, we know that stressors do change epigenetic markers. We don't know what this exactly means to be hypervigilance. If we are living in a war torn whatever that means, whether it's in our mind, in our household, in our community, or in the world, it may lead to hypervigilance, which may not be great for day to day but also allows us to survive. It does not mean we're broken. It means we're optimized in a way that unfortunately the universe is not changing as such. But also it probably means that we should be delicate with ourselves and take care of ourselves, because if we're going through and living life with inherited trauma, that potential hypervigilance, maybe because of the brain structural changes that we're seeing, which means you be hypersensitive to things in the environment, can wear us out. And we know that living in a state of hypervigilance where a part of our brain body, the HPA, the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal access is in the access of stress that releases stress hormone from the brain into the body and the body back to the brain and feedback can wear us down. It wears down our immunity, it wears down our sleep health, it wears down our metabolics. So we're ready to fight in every corner and survive on every corner, but we also have to be I think kind to ourselves and say, I live constantly ready to fight. I have to train and force my body to bring it back to a homeostasis by slowing down. And I'm speaking to you, doctor Joy, not from the pulpit, but standing in the crowd with us because I know it, but because of culture, because of the way that we are socialized, it's so hard, especially as a woman, as a mom, as a black person, to say I can sit down. I feel very strongly that my job is to do this research so I can help my people, and I can help my people up the world and I got my people of society, and that can be a really big task. And I have to remind myself that if I'm not working optimally, I can't help anybody. And sometimes that means just sitting down. So that's my advice. Sit down.

Yeah, that's a good one that's good advice important and we don't always.

Think about it in that way, but it really is sandpoint.

More for my conversation with doctor Marlon after the break. So something else that she spent a lot of time talking about in studying is the relationship between mother and child, And so can you talk a little bit about why the bound between mother and.

Child is so important? Once again, it's because biology is so beautiful. I just wants to survive. I'm in love with biology. So what I looked into was how the brain changes to make sure offspring survive. And by the brain and by offspring, I don't just mean a mother takes care of her kids. And I mean that really specifically and right now, I also want to be very clear, I'm talking about when I say male and female, I'm talking about mice. I'm not talking about human population, which I know goes well beyond male and female. I'm talking specifically about sex and mice. But even when it comes to do mom mice and dad mice and their brain's changing, what I showed was that virgins, these are animals that have never given birth, never made it, they can learn to be excellent caregivers through the addition of this quote unquote love drug some people call but a hormone called oxytocin, which changes the hearing centers of their brain and makes them respond to the sound of a baby crying. So mothers will hear a baby cry, and even if it's not their baby, they'll go pick it up and take care of it mother mice. Whereas virgins before oxytocin, the first time they hear a baby cry, they like won't they won't pick that baby up. Sometimes they'll cannibalize it, and that may not lead their survival. But what we were able to show through our studies is that it's nature and nurture because it seems that if you just look at those two situations, virgin mates with the male then gives birth great mom. What we saw at our observations was that a virgin who lives with the mom, we treat her with oxytocin. The neurons with electricity. The hearing center's change with electricity, and they fire differently, and it's as if they're encoded differently. They're getting a different message when the baby cries, and it's no longer attack or ignore, take care of it. Says if the brain is ready to be a mom, but it needed that learning experience and oxytocin for to take place.

Okay, And do you do any experiments with the male mice with oxytocin? Do we see something different? So we did do experiments with male mice, and I feel like this always gets me a little bit in trouble. We did experiments with mail mice.

Do they have oxytocin receptors which is how the brain works with the oxytocin? Yes? Do they pick up puffs? Yes? Virgins will learn to pick up a pup on the order of twelve hours, males line three to five days, So in the wild that's not as great. But also there are sex differences in the male and female brain and mice, and it could just be that they're optimized for different things. The mother will feed the puffs for twenty one days, which means it may make more sense for her to have to hear these pups and pick them up because she's going to be forging and coming back to the nest where the dad's going to be out and about. So biology maybe has optimized these two as well.

Got it? Got it? Okay?

So what messene or questions? Do you feel like your own motherhood journey have brought up.

Oh goodness, I thought I knew everything about motherhood. I'm like, yeah, I'm a whole PhD in this, I've got this, and then I gave birth. But I do think that not only was I blessed enough to be a mom of two kids, but I also had the opportunity for Peter trying to be a foster mom. And this comes from, I think, via observations. I told you I was interested in education, but I was also interested in how the brain changes. Because I was blessed enough to grow up in a household where my biological parents were foster parents, and so I was able to speak with my siblings about the wives that they had before they came to my home and what that looked like. And so I think something that's brought from my science to my household and to my heart is really that biology has a setup for survival, because you don't have to give birth out of your body for biology to set up your brain to take care of an offspring. And to see that both in the lab but also in practice, just further gives truth and credence to what we already know in our heart, but it's great to see it when it comes up as data. So I think that's been the biggest I think blessing of being able to be a parent, know that even when I'm not the best the way I would define the best, I have the crown work to be good enough and that's what my kids need sometimes good enough and biologies got me set up for that.

Thank you appreciating it.

So you bring up an interesting thing, you know, when you think about adoptive children, and you know we don't always have like the history of our parents or our grandparents. How can we identify Is there a way to identify inheritance trauma without the insight from parents or grandparents.

That's an amazing question, and it really comes down to how do you interact with the environment, and then being sensitive to that because that may be questions that we can't answer. You don't know your parents, or you may not have a pation about your parents, and there for your grandparents, and many of us who have you know, who have our biological parents don't know what happened for generations back. And so being aware of how you interact in different environments and being sensitive to how different environments make you feel, but also knowing that if epigenetic changes can be put on, they can be taken off, which means that even if you don't know the trauma and trauma that has happened, it could be for the better, not something that's replaying the nurture part that's replaying again in your mind. And if you find that there's sensitivities that you can't put your finger on, you don't know where they came from being sensitive to being soft in those situations and maybe for speaking with a more handway of non biological term, but essentially massage those epigenetic markers off that part of your genome.

What do you mean when you say they can be turned on, they can also be turned off, because I think you know there is also the conversation around like people being the one in their family to like break the generation generational curse. Yeah, yeah, And so what do you mean when you say that.

Exactly what you said, that the breaking generational curses, breaking generational traumas. We hear this commonly and we feel it in our hearts once again, so we want to bring credence to that. When it comes to the science into the biology, there are many ways that our DNA sits in our body and it allows it to be read or unread. These are epigenetic markers as well as other things that are floating around in our cells that we're still learning what they are. So like an example of this is something called long and uncoding RNA, which is a part of our cells, but we don't really know how it's working to change the rest of everything and can increase your decrease of response to trauma, et cetera. What does it means we turned on and off. What it means to be turned on and off is that we can add epigenetic markers in lab we can go and we can blast the epigenetic markers on are inject drugs and they put these epigenetic markers on and off, but because there's a mechanism that has put them on in the environment. For example, if you put on a lot of weight during the winter, which sometimes happens, it changes some of the epigenetic markers in your body, and then when you lose weight in the summer, it changes some of those epigenetic markers in your body. They're not permanent, is what we're saying.

Now.

How to target the ones that are particular to stress as opposed to metabolos or something I'm talking about right now. That's the question. How do we say, you know what, looking a little thick in the winter is someber not The issue that we're trying to focus on. We're trying to focus on is the anxiety I feel walking into this room, and how do I change that if that is inherited epigenetically, And it's one of the questions we look to answer targeting.

Got it?

Yeah, I mean, you know, as a psychologist, I feel like, you know, there's a lot of research that talks about therapy and like the different kinds of things that you know, therapist and prectation youists do use to kind of help massage as you mentioned exactly the epigenetics. I appreciate you sharing this so I think I thought that they were permanent, but you're saying they're not.

That the markers are not permanent. And I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart because I found my therapist through you. What on the website, you know, I'm like, and I'm not just all you know, massaging stuff off that I do and you don't know that's there. But also preventing and preparing for future stressors that are one hundred percent going to come. I'm a human on this earth. Stressors are going to come. But finding ways to adapt and response to them, even something as simple as the way you respond in a stressful situation can change us up tonight markers or prevent them from even going on.

So, as I'm listening to you talking as a fellow period, you know, I think a lot of us are thinking about, like, Okay, how do I not pass this on to my chout or children?

Every day I'm talking to you, but I'm talking to myself like, Danca, it's fine, You're fine. You can be massaged off like you look black and Jewish. It's like, oh gosh, y'all.

So what ads would you.

Give to fellow parents or caregivers about how to maybe not want to don't want to ans on any generational trauma, Like what kinds of things should they be in mind below or what kinds of practices may they want to engage?

Yes, for sure, if you're a parent right now, it means that your kid is there, is born. So we're not talking about the genetics. You're really staring at it, staring at you right. But when it comes to your epigenetics, I think one important thing we can teach our kids. If I teach, I really mean to demonstrate, right, because not everyone's going to be out there is going to be a you know, a child psychologist or have the time or the bandwidth to you know, really practice these things. But in modeling how we navigate certain situations, and modeling what stress looks like, and modeling what taking care of yourself looks like, and modeling what sleep hygiene looks like, and modeling what I mean, we could use it say the word self care, but self care is worlds care, right, so like societal world's care looks like we could be priming our little ones not to take on epigenetic markers of stress that aren't beneficial to them because they're able to navigate these situations, and even doing a little bit of the massaging because as they start to take care of themselves, as they start to honor the parts that are not going to heighten that anxiety one it's unnecessary, those can be the stuff's taking and really like you can sit yourself in a spiral of Wow, this happened to me, and then I decided to give birth. Am I wrong for doing that? Should I not have passed these things on? People have been giving birth since the beginning of time. We're not going to stop giving birth, So it really I just hope that what our work shows is that you shouldn't be afraid of taking these steps. You shouldn't be afraid of giving birth. They shouldn't be afraid of of what you can pass down as much as how you can prevent anything going further not's something we can do in the here and now. And that's the nurture part. We can't control the nature, but we can't control the nurture. And no, there's no pill you can take. It's not that it happen with more care, but it can happen with things like you spik about doctor, like therapy, like working through your emotions, like modeling healthy emotional responses, keeping stress at a level that is low when it needs to be, and not ignoring stress. The stress is also adaptive and sometimes needs to be high. It just doesn't need to be high all the time.

So doctor walland where can people stay connected with you and all the incredible work that you're doing. What is your website as well as any social media handles you'd like to share.

Oh, yes, thank you, thanks for asking. I'm looking forward to sharing all the exciting work coming out of the lab. So my lab website is www dot Bianca Jonesmarlin dot com and on Twitter I'm at at Bjmarlin as well as Instagram at Bianca Jones Marlin Perfect.

We will we should include all of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for sharing with us today, Doctor Wilin.

Thank you so much for having me, Doctor Joy.

I'm so glad Doctor Morland was able to share her exercise with us today.

So learn more about her and her work.

Visit the show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash session three oh three and don't forget to text two of your girls until.

Dim to check out the episode as well.

If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check out our therapist directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash directory.

And if you want to continue.

Digging into this topic or just be in community with other sisters, come on over and join us in the Sister Circle. It's our cozy corner of the Internet designed just for black women. You can join us at community dot Therapy for blackgirls dot Com. This episode was produced by Frieda. Lucas and Elis Ellis, and editing was done by Dennison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to.

Continuing this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care.

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