The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

After the encounter with Caroline, Burke Harris found that her work gained more visibility and connected her to more collaborators. Burke Harris gave a widely viewed TED talk on ACEs and toxic stress—and even participated in several high-profile conferences. At these conferences, she learned of some pushback against her focus on ACEs.

At one conference, community activists passionately argued that Burke Harris’s toxic stress framework was turning a societal and cultural problem into a medical one (a phenomenon called “medicalization”). What people needed was work on inequities, they argued, and labeling the problem as ACEs and toxic stress responses simply added more stigma to people of color and poor communities already dealing with great challenges. One person even argued that Burke Harris was labeling the children of poor people of color as “brain-damaged” (178). Burke Harris (by then a mom) missed this blowback because she was out pumping milk, but Jeanette Pai-Espinosa, the president of a foundation that centered work on addressing ACEs in the lives of young women, and Nancy Mannix, the chair of a Canadian foundation that used an ACE lens to create the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative, filled her in. The trio began working together because of that encounter.