July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:39
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing very well. So, you may or may not know that for many years I've argued that the origins of violence in adulthood is violence experienced in childhood. | |
| And you can look at these very big areas. | |
| I'm in the process of reading Lloyd DeMasse's excellent work called The Origins of War in Child Abuse, which you can find for free at freedomainradio.com forward slash free in PDF and audiobook format. | |
| Here is an interesting article which is beginning to throw more science behind what seems intuitively true. | |
| You've got to watch intuition, right? | |
| Intuition is very dangerous. My intuition is that chocolate is better for me than broccoli in terms of taste. | |
| So you've got to watch your intuition, but it is nice when intuition and science dovetail nicely. | |
| So this is an article, and I'll put the link below, entitled, Maltreated Children Show the Same Pattern of Brain Activity as Combat Soldiers. | |
| Children exposed to family violence show the same pattern of activity in their brains as soldiers exposed to combat. | |
| New research has shown In the first functional MRI brain scan study to investigate the impact of physical abuse and domestic violence on children, scientists at UCL in collaboration with the Anna Freud Center found that exposure to family violence was associated with increased brain activity in two specific areas, the anterior insula and the amygdala, when children viewed pictures of angry faces. | |
| Previous FMRI studies had scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations, and they showed the same pattern of heightened activation in these two areas of the brain, which are associated with threat detection. | |
| The authors suggest that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to be hyper-aware of danger in their environment. | |
| However, the anterior insula and amygdala are also areas of the brain implicated in anxiety disorders. | |
| Neural adaptation in these regions may help explain why children exposed to family violence are at greater risk of developing anxiety problems later in life. | |
| And just jump out of the article for a sec. | |
| I've done some work on this and spoke to Dr. | |
| Vincent Felitti on this. You can go to fdrurl.com forward slash bib for more of the effects of this. | |
| To continue, Dr. | |
| Eamon McCrory, lead author from the UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences and the Anna Freud Center said, quote, We are only now beginning to understand how child abuse influences functioning of the brain's emotional systems. | |
| This research is important because it provides our first clues as to how regions in the child's brain may adapt to early experiences of abuse in the home. | |
| Dr. McCrory added, quote, all the children studied were healthy and none were suffering from a mental health problem. | |
| What we have shown is that exposure to family violence is associated with altered brain functioning in the absence of psychiatric symptoms and that these alterations may represent an underlying neural risk factor. | |
| We suggest that these changes may be adaptive for the child in the short term but may increase longer term risk. | |
| In the study which is published in the journal Current Biology, 43 children had their brains scammed using an fMRI scanner. | |
| 20 children who had been exposed to documented violence at home were compared with 23 matched peers who had not experienced family violence. | |
| The average age of the maltreated children was 12 years old and they had all been referred to local social services in London. | |
| When the children were in the scanner, they were presented with pictures of male and female faces showing sad, calm, or angry expressions. | |
| The children had only to decide if the face was male or female. | |
| Processing the emotion on the face was incidental. | |
| As described, the children who had been exposed to violence at home showed increased brain activity in the anterior insula and amygdala in response to the angry faces. | |
| Professor Peter Fanaghi, Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Center and Professor of Psychology at UCL, said, quote, Dr. | |
| McCrory's groundbreaking research has undoubtedly taken us an important step closer to understanding the devastation which exposing children to violence can leave in its wake. | |
| His exciting findings confirm the traumatic effects these experiences have on brain development. | |
| Professor Fanaghi added, quote, The report should energize clinicians and social workers to double their efforts to safeguard children from violence. | |
| By helping us understand the consequences of maltreatment, the findings also offer fresh inspiration for the development of effective treatment strategies to protect children from the consequences of maltreatment. | |
| Dr. McCrory said, quote, even though we know that maltreatment represents one of the most potent environmental risk factors associated with anxiety and depression, relatively little is known how such adversity gets under the skin and increases a child's later vulnerability. | |
| The next step for us is to try and understand how stable these changes are. | |
| Not every child exposed to family violence will go on to develop a mental health problem. | |
| Many bounce back and lead successful lives. | |
| We want to know much more about those mechanisms to help some children become resilient. | |
| And it's interesting. | |
| I recently collated some research on this question of mental illness. | |
| And I was thinking about it this morning. | |
| I don't think we have a good word for this, this kind of injury. | |
| So when a child is exposed to violence, directly or indirectly, It changes the child's brain. | |
| It distorts, it hurts, it harms, it injures the child's brain. | |
| And it's true that I believe that through neuroplasticity, philosophical self-knowledge, competent and effective professional psychological help through therapists and counselors and psychologists, I believe a lot of the damage can be undone. | |
| And you may even get... | |
| Better coping strategies than if you'd never been damaged. | |
| But that's still not good. | |
| If you have a heart attack, you may end up leading a healthy life, but nobody wants a heart attack. | |
| You can get good out of bad, but that doesn't make the bad good. | |
| But there's no really good word for it. | |
| So I'm sort of mulling it over. | |
| If I stab you in the heart and you die, nobody will say that you died from an excess of steel. | |
| You had a steel illness. | |
| That wouldn't make any sense. | |
| An injury, to say that I injured you, would be to not have a moral component to the situation. | |
| Because injuries can occur just sort of accidentally or randomly or whatever. | |
| A wound is better, but still not perfect. | |
| You can get a wound from an accidental effect. | |
| I think assault is closer. | |
| The way that I sort of view it is that child abuse is an environmental toxin, like mercury or asbestos. | |
| It's an environmental toxin that undermines the efficacy, changes the capacity of the brain, and renders it very susceptible to dysfunctions later on in life, anxiety, depression, Various kinds of addictions, violence, criminality, and so on. | |
| It harms and hurts and wounds the brain. | |
| So child abuse is a kind of environmental toxin. | |
| But toxin, again, is kind of a neutral term because you could have an environmental toxin like mold in the walls of your house that had no moral component. | |
| So I don't know, and if anyone has any suggestions, I don't have any particularly great word for it. | |
| It's something like an assault, that a perpetual assault on the child's mind through violence, through humiliation, through verbal, physical, sexual, emotional abuse, that this harms and corrupts and begins to devastate the child's brain. | |
| But this is why I keep going back to this. | |
| And people are really starting to listen. | |
| And can I just say thank you? | |
| Thank you so enormously to all the parents who are writing in to say that they have given up thanking their children. | |
| I can't tell you just how amazingly wonderful that is. | |
| I know you're not doing it to make me feel wonderful, and the fact that I feel wonderful is pretty irrelevant, but I still want to just say it anyway. | |
| I don't know how many hundreds of parents have written to me, or more, just over the last little while to say that they have viewed the information on spanking and they have... | |
| I think that is so unbelievably heroic. | |
| I think that is so unbelievably admirable. | |
| I think there are not enough medals that could shower down from the commissar of all that is perfect and virtuous upon people and weigh them down enough to get a sense of how heavy and shiny, by respect, is for what they're doing. | |
| So thank you, everybody, for listening. | |
| Thank you, everybody, for taking the time and taking the energy to refocus parenting on peaceful methods. | |
| If we are to have a world free from war, if we are to have a world free from abuse, if we are to have a world free from hierarchy, if we are to have a world free of violence, It is going to come from parenting. | |
| It is going to come from peaceful parenting. | |
| Thank you, everybody, so much. |
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