Salutations My Friends

It’s not “proving that crickets can be traumatized”. It’s proving that *animals can genetically pass on the stress that a dangerous situation causes, and the offspring will instinctually respond to the same situation without ever having personally experienced it.*

And that’s a big deal for many things, including human psychology.

When Nazis invaded The Netherlands, local Dutch peoples were under extreme emotional and physical duress. The Nazi army took their food for the soldiers, starving the population. They patrolled the streets and harshly reinforced their new laws. Existence was horrible and some parents had to give their children away to wealthier families because they couldn’t feed them anymore. This event is known as the Hongerwinter, or Dutch Famine.

One generation later, the children of mothers who were pregnant at the time of the famine have been proven to exhibit intense reactions to stress, and heightened fight or flight responses. They also experience more obesity because their bodies are prepared for starvation.

Some of these children were never personally exposed to the famine. Their mothers gave birth after conditions had improved, or even after moving to another country. But the effects are there, and those people are now adults who can recognize this and attest that they didn’t experience something else traumatic during childhood. It was passed on in the womb.

You can read about it here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.amp.html

This is called epigenetics. It’s essential to understanding how the human brain and body works. That our responses to stress can be passed on genetically. That it can show up in how we look physically, our physical health, our mental responses, our instinctual reactions. It’s especially important for people who are in therapy and need to understand *why* they act a certain way before they can actually work on it.

My maternal grandparents were incredibly, unbelievably tough people. They were Great Depression-era farm kids who grew up in a time and place where most people were hungry and hurting, barely scraping by. My granddad especially had it rough, a farm worker who broke his arm as a teen and gutted it out without ever saying a word because there was no money for health care but illegal whiskey (Prohibition!) and whatever folk remedies were available.

They were literal farmers in the lower Great Plains, so they remembered the fucking Dust Bowl because they were THERE. Like, we’re talking some John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath shit they lived through. They were in their late teens/early twenties. Their stories were unbelievable. They never once complained about rain.

How does that level of grinding, endless hardship NOT affect your babies? Or your babies’ babies? Turns out it does, and it is responsible for some VERY surprising things.

All this happened up into the 70's, when others decided that we were a people. Now, only two gens away, my family, as well as other native kids, run and hide immediately if there is an unexpected visitor. I can personally attest that I've never even came close to the horrors my Mema had to face yet I've always had the instinct to run and hide Everytime there's a knock on the door.

Pink Hair Beej moment