Dr. Joe talks to Leslie Roberts about Childhood Stress

by Numinus

Sep 14, 2014

Leslie Roberts: The headline reads: “How Childhood stress can knock 20 years off your life.” When we talk about childhood stress, we’re not talking about the most extreme, we’re talking about probably things that happen at your house and back in the day we didn’t realize what parents were doing to their kids, and I would say you know as I always do, parents do the best they can with the tools they have but a lot of toolkits were missing a few tools and as a result kids had some childhood experiences that could be affecting them later on into adulthood and I think that’s a conversation we have to have because a) you could have it and not know it and it could answer some of the questions about why you are the way you are why you react the way you do and b) there is something you can do about it. I want to bring in Dr Joe Flanders, Founder and Director of the Numinus Clinic. Joe- this is something new to the general public but it’s something that in your field you have probably followed for years.

Dr Joe Flanders: Sure, ya. Myself and my team here at Numinus do work with children, supporting them, working through the kinds of issues you just described and also helping adults process these types of challenges looking back and making peace with the challenges they face as adults that are the downstream consequences of what they experienced as children so yes this is something we see on a regular basis.

Leslie Roberts: It’s becoming more mainstream, more people becoming more aware of this as we go down that stream of self-help. I hate to use that term because a lot of people roll their eyes but I think we can all benefit from it.

Dr Joe Flanders: Yes, so self-help has this sort of bad reputation because I think anyways that a lot of books out there fall into the self-help genre and in many cases its superficial, pop-psychology, and you know, many people can benefit from some of the ideas in there but it is important to distinguish it from good solid evidence based tools for helping people cope with these types of challenges.