Connection, trauma, and resilience

I may come back to do more on this, but want to make a note about this very interesting interview by On Being's Krista Tippett of psychiatrist/neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda: How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations.

The topic is epigenetics and how what's happened before we were born can wind up being expressed by our genes later in our own lives. This is the money quote for me (emphasis mine):

What I hear from trauma survivors ... is how upsetting it is when other people don't help, or don't acknowledge, or respond very poorly to needs or distress. ... And I'm very struck by how many Holocaust survivors got through because there was one person that became the focus of their survival, or they were the focus of that person's survival. So how we behave towards one another, individually and in society, I think, can really make a very big difference in, honestly, the effects of environmental events on our molecular biology.