Quick summary: A global health expert describes how she spent three decades achieving academic and professional success while the biological consequences of a high-adversity childhood went unaddressed. Drawing on the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) research, she explains how chronic childhood stress reshapes the nervous system and leaves measurable physiological traces that professional accomplishment alone cannot resolve. Her account carries a direct message for clinicians: high-achieving survivors may present as functioning well, yet competence and psychological integration are not the same thing.
I have spent my career studying what disease does to the human body: how a pathogen enters a system, evades detection, and causes damage long before symptoms appear. It was not until I sat down to write my memoir, Blood Orphan, that I fully reconciled a parallel truth. The most deleterious malady I would ever study had been living inside me since childhood, and I spent 30 years helping it evade detection.
I grew up in Los Angeles in a household that presented to the outside world as accomplished, educated, and stable. Behind that image was severe physical and sexual abuse at the hands of my stepfather, considered one of the most influential American jazz and soul musicians of the 1970s and 1980s. His notoriety heightened my mother’s desire to protect his image at the expense of her two young daughters’ overall well-being. By the age of 10, I was hiding knives in piles of laundry, shielding my younger siblings from violence, and making calculated decisions about survival that no child should ever have to make. The household that should have been my safe haven was, instead, my first experience of chronic threat.
What I did not know then, and what I have come to understand only through both scientific study and painful personal reflection, is that my body and brain were keeping precise, merciless records.
What the ACE research tells us
The landmark adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente in the 1990s, established what many trauma clinicians had long observed: the more types of adversity a child experiences, the more substantially and consistently it shapes their long-term health over a lifetime. The study identified ten categories of ACEs, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, domestic violence in the household, and the loss of a parent. Each category present in a child’s life increases their ACE score by one point.
The findings are unambiguous. Individuals with an ACE score of four or more are at dramatically elevated risk across nearly every major health category: heart disease, cancer, depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, autoimmune conditions, and even shortened life expectancy. The dose-response relationship is striking. Adversity is not merely a psychological wound. It is a physiological one. It changes the developing brain’s stress response architecture. It dysregulates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. It leaves the nervous system perpetually scanning for threat, long after the threat itself is gone.
My ACE score, had anyone been paying attention, would have been high. But no one was paying attention. Thus, I learned, very early, to manage the symptoms of a wound no one could see.
“The body keeps the score, not metaphorically, but biologically. Chronic activation of the stress response leaves measurable traces: in cortisol levels, in inflammatory markers, in the architecture of the prefrontal cortex.”
What high achievement cannot fix
There is a version of surviving childhood trauma that appears, from the outside, like thriving. I lived that version.
I earned three advanced degrees and two graduate certificates, from Northeastern University, New York Medical College, and A.T. Still University. I built a career as an infectious diseases scientist and global health expert. I became an advocate for women’s health and community health initiatives. I kept moving, kept achieving, kept building a life that looked, by every external metric, like evidence that what happened to me had not touched me.
But the body keeps the score, not metaphorically, but biologically. Chronic activation of the stress response leaves measurable traces: in cortisol levels, in inflammatory markers, in the architecture of the prefrontal cortex. The hypervigilance I developed as a child, the constant environmental scanning, the ability to read a room’s emotional temperature in seconds, the reflexive readiness for danger, served me well in the house of horrors. In my adult professional and personal life, it was exhausting and, at times, profoundly destabilising.
Achievement, I came to understand, is not the same as healing. It is possible to earn a doctorate while still running from a ten-year-old’s terror. I did it for several years. Many survivors do.
What healing actually requires
When I finally began to do the real work of healing, not the performing of wellness, but the actual, often unglamorous process of confronting what happened, I discovered that the ACE research had named something I had always felt but never had the framework to articulate: my nervous system had been shaped by chronic threat, and reshaping it would require more than time and willpower.
It would require acknowledgement. Not just my own private acknowledgement, though that came first, but the kind that happens when a story leaves the body and enters the world. Writing Blood Orphan was, for me, that act of acknowledgement. It was also the first time I fully understood what the research means when it says that social support and the ability to process traumatic experience in narrative form are among the strongest protective factors against the long-term consequences of high ACE scores.
Faith was, and remains, a central pillar of my healing. I have found that for many survivors of childhood abuse, especially those raised in communities where faith is foundational, the spiritual dimension of healing is not supplementary but structural. God’s voice, as I heard it throughout my childhood, was the one consistent source of affirmation that I was more than what was happening to me. That voice did not disappear when I became a scientist. If anything, the two deepened one another.
I also came to understand that healing is not linear, and it is not quiet. There were years when the ghosts of the house of horrors, what I know now to be intrusive memories, hyperarousal responses, and the legacy of a chronically activated stress response, were louder than my forward momentum. Fighting them required what I can only describe as the same relentless, methodical discipline I brought to my scientific work: identifying the source, understanding the mechanism, and refusing to accept the current state was permanent.
“Achievement is not the same as healing. It is possible to earn a doctorate while still running from a 10-year-old’s terror.”
What i want clinicians and researchers to know
Survivors of high-ACE childhoods are sitting across from mental health practitioners every day, and many of them look, on paper, like they are doing well. They have credentials. They have careers. They have built impressive external lives over unaddressed internal wounds.
The ACE research has given us the tools to see past the surface. A survivor’s professional success does not inoculate them against the biological and psychological consequences of a high-adversity childhood. If anything, the drive to achieve can be one of the coping mechanisms through which those consequences remain unaddressed for decades.
I am a scientist who spent years not applying the science to herself. I understood the research on adverse childhood experiences, on the long-term health consequences of chronic stress, on the neurological impact of developmental trauma, and connecting it to the child I had been was an arduous process. That dissociation is itself a symptom. Clinicians and researchers who work with high-achieving survivors must know that competence and integration are not the same thing.
The road from ACEs to healing is long. It does not run through achievement, though achievement can run alongside it. It runs through acknowledgement, through narrative, through safe relationship, and, for many survivors, through a faith that insists on their worth even when nothing in their environment does.
I am still on that road. Blood Orphan is not the end of the story. It is the moment I stopped telling the story only to myself.
Dr Ashley S. Glosson is an infectious diseases scientist, global health expert, and memoirist whose work explores resilience, trauma, faith, and the lasting impact of adversity. Her first memoir, Blood Orphan, is available now.
