âHard timesâ do not make for strong people. Not strong women or strong men. âHard timesâ make for damaged people that are in need of healing. Whatâs more, when someone is damaged and does not receive understanding and support from their community, if the feedback they get is more like âwalk it offâ and less like âIâm here to helpâ, that damage is likely to continue to grow and put them in an early grave.
We know this from quite a lot of studies, but letâs look at two of those.
Back in 1998 Dr Felliti gave a questionnaire to thousands of medical patients of all varieties in San Diego that asked the patient two sets of questions. The first was had they experienced any of a set of âhard timesâ as a child, things like physical abuse, sexual assault, neglect, etc. (later becoming the âACE scoreâ) And the second asked if they had or were suffering as an adult from things like obesity, addiction, depression, etc. The correlation was so dramatic that they had to double check the results. These âhard timesâ, especially when there were multiple âhard timesâ, put these patients at a 1100% increased risk of these negative health outcomes.
Whatâs more, they expanded the study. When these patents would come in for their next visit the doctors were given a script that went like âI see here on your chart that you experienced [the hard time they mentioned]. Iâm so sorry to hear that happened to you. That never should have happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?â About 60% of people did want to talk about it and on average those conversations lasted 5 mins. And for those people that did talk about it, just those 5 mins led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety. And those that were randomly assigned to a therapist to talk about it further, had an even bigger decrease in depression and anxiety.
In conclusion, hard times fuck you up, and community support heals.
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/s0749-3797(98)00017-8/pdf
And letâs do one more along those lines. Of all the things you can do to increase both your life span and health span, eating well, sleeping well, working out, etc. What do you think has the biggest impact?
A supportive community.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development or âGrant Studyâ started tracking 724 men in 1938(back before women were included in medical research) and out of the 10â20 predictors used, the most impactful was community. It was the quality of relationships, and very importantly, not just relationships with immediate family, but relationships with those outside the immediate family⌠community.
https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/
âHard timesâ damage people. And unacknowledged hard times, and going through hard times without an understanding and supportive community to help you, not only fucks you up, it puts you in an early grave.
âHard timesâ â strong people.
