Trauma in infancy rewires your stress response before you form memories. Rat studies show that mothers who lick and groom their stressed pups create calmer, more resilient adults. Low-buffered pups had prolonged stress hormones and passed the same pattern to their own offspring through epigenetic changes.
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People used to think that stressors or traumatic experiences that happened in, like, infancy, like, oh, if you don't remember it, it didn't affect you. And it turns out it's the exact opposite, right? The younger you are, those experiences that happen in infancy, they can actually shape the way that your stress response is wired, right? So you may not remember the actual event, but the body remembers. There's been some really fascinating research on this. What they did was they took these baby rats and they stressed them out, right, by handling them. And then they gave them back to their moms. And some moms naturally did a lot of buffering. So lots of licking and grooming, and some moms not so much. And what they found was that the rats that had a lot of buffering did better on cognitive tests, right? They were more stress tolerant. When they actually measured their biological stress response, their stress response shut itself off more normally after the stressor was gone. And the ones who didn't receive a lot of, of buffering care, it was the opposite. Their stress response would stay on longer after a stressor. So after the stressor's already gone, they're still fired up with the stress hormones, right? And when they had their own babies, they were less likely to do the buffering care. So here's the really cool part.
So then what they did with the next generation of rat babies, The ones that grew up with, with rat moms and dads that gave a lot of cuddling and licking.
Right. They went to a low buffering. Okay. And the ones that were from a low buffering mom, they cross-fostered them to a high buffering mom. And what they found was they took on this performance on the tests the stress reactivity of their rearing mother, not of their biological mother. And then even the epigenetic markers were of their rearing mother, not of their biological mother. And what that showed was that experience of receiving buffering actually changed the epigenetic markers for these baby rats. So it actually changed the way their DNA was read and expressed. And that was what translated into changes in behavior.
