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Resilience is My Gain

by Shenandoah Chefalo

In 1985, Dr. Vincent Felitti wanted to know why his obesity clinic had a 50% dropout rate, and when he looked closely, those that were leaving were actually losing weight. This dichotomy was getting in the way of what he called, “building a successful program,” and he wanted to know why. So, he dug into the files, but after looking into nearly 2,000 patients he couldn’t see any correlation.

Uncertain of what could possibly be the cause, he decided to do face-to-face interviews with 200 of the dropouts. He had a standardized questionnaire that asked: How much did you weigh when you were born? How much did you weigh in first grade? What did you weigh in high school? How much when you became sexually active? How old when you got married? He asked the patients, and nothing came out of it during the first several weeks.

An Accidental Discovery

Then, by pure accident, he misspoke. Instead of asking the patient how old she was when she became sexually active, he asked, “how much did you weigh when you were first sexually active?”  She muttered 40 pounds. Felitti, assuming she misheard asked again, but misspoke again, and she responded 40 pounds. She was 4 and it was her father.

Stunned, Felitti didn’t know what to say or do. But, 10 days later he ran into a similar testimony from another client. Soon, every other client was giving testimony about sexual abuse. He feared that he was somehow injecting bias into the questions, so he asked colleagues to take over the remaining interviews. The results remained. Most of those patients reported sexual abuse. Thinking he was onto something, he began speaking at conferences, but frankly, most claimed that his patients were lying to cover for not living up to their own life goals. But he never gave up.

Adverse Childhood Experience Study

Eventually, with the help of the CDC and Dr. Robert Anda, who at the time was studying how depression and hopelessness affect coronary heart disease, they were able to join forces and take on the massive work that became known as the Adverse Childhood Experience Study. Now some 30 years later, we are still working to better understand that depth and breadth of that initial work.

Since the original study, it has been re-administered numerous times looking at various populations, yet the original data remains unchanged. It has become the backbone to understand using a trauma-informed lens to change systems and organizations and heal individuals. Even in trying times, we know that the antidote is and remains resilience. Resilience is a learned skill that is brought forth in the ways in which we are connected to each other. Of course, that connection means that we can be disconnected; and as the world spent most of 2020 in quarantine, I fear the lessons we learned from that disconnection might be long lasting.

Perhaps poet, Tammy Smith, so eloquently puts it in her poem Quarantine, “resilience is my gain.”

Quarantined in 2020 

written by Tammy Smith