S1E3: Toxic Stress and ACEs
We're continuing our exploration of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) by exploring different types of stress, including toxic stress. Toxic stress is one of the primary ways we experience long term damage to our bodies as a result of adverse childhood experiences.
Resources
In this episode we discuss podcasts related to mental health. Here is a small selection of our favorites to get you started.
We also referenced The ACA at 10: How Has It Impacted Mental Health Care? study, which examines the differences the Affordable Care Act made to mental health care in the US over the last 10 years.
Transcript
Athalie: Welcome to the third episode of season one. This season we're exploring Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs for short.
If you haven't heard episode one, you might want to listen to that first, but as a quick overview ACEs are a set of 10 adverse experiences that a person might experience during childhood. Things such as physical abuse, poverty, and others. Research shows strong correlations between experiencing these things as a child and having significant health issues later in life.
Today Joseph and I are exploring different types of stress, including the idea of toxic stress. Toxic stress is one of the primary ways we experience long term damage to our bodies as a result of adverse childhood experiences.
Before we really dive into that, you had something that you discovered on the wonderful portal of social media that is Twitter that you wanted to talk about.
Joseph: It's been on my mind for a little bit. So maybe a little bit of a backstory I follow a lot of people on Twitter that talk about building businesses things like that they call it "Money Twitter", right? And so I understand the mindset of Money Twitter. It's a lot like accept responsibility, go do this, go do that. You're in control of things.
But ever since we started talking about ACEs, it showed me that I had a very limited understanding of some of the obstacles people face. I saw a tweet this morning that says, "If you're broke or fat that's entirely your fault". Immediately, I saw that it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I understand in Money Twitter speak this makes sense to them but it's also a large part of this conversation that I don't know that they're privy to.
So I said I was going to bring that to you and see what insights you have. Not necessarily for the person that posted this but for someone that reads this and has the tendency to either think a little less of themselves or begin to try to beat themselves down or feel bad about it. What would you say to someone that reads this and is in this situation from the lens of ACEs as we've been talking about.
Athalie: One of the interesting things in the original ACE study that Dr. Felitti discovered, was that when he really dug in and talked to these women who are trying to lose weight was that for a lot of them gaining weight back or not losing it in the first place seemed to actually be a protective thing for them. So part of their subconscious was somehow trying to protect them from men who might harm them again by trying to make them "unattractive".
Part of how he came to this conclusion was that he had several women who all day would make the right choices about food and they were exercising and they were working really hard on this (losing weight). And then this one woman would go to sleep, sleep walk, eat an entire tub of ice cream in her sleep and go back to bed. She would wake up have no memory of what happened but she would see that there was an empty container of ice cream in the kitchen. It was like her body was literally trying to undo all of the work she was doing. And his theory was, that her body in some way was trying to protect her from this traumatic thing happening again.
And maybe she is someone, like many women in the US or all around the world who've grown up with this standard of beauty that is thinness, even anorexic, malnourished thinness. We've talked about this before that this is maybe less of a beauty standard in some parts of the world. But certainly in the US thinness is held up as a sign of beauty.
So that's just one example of how being fat might have an actual purpose that our body has of trying to protect us. Even though certain types of body weight might have long-term negative effects in other ways on our health or development of other diseases. This idea that it's purely wrong or there was no reason it was happening in the first place is not taking into account the whole picture. Which, I think, is what you're saying with this tweet - that they're very focused on one angle and there's more to the picture than just this one thing.
Joseph: I agree with you a hundred percent. I mean, if you're trying to inspire people, I don't know that you're doing a good job, you know, by beating them down Like I was saying before we started, one of the things I don't know - you call it a pet peeve maybe? I don't know how anyone will take pleasure in beating people that are really down. You're still kicking them while they're down. And so when I saw that I just knew that maybe in another timeline in my life I would have agreed with this, but today I see things a little bit differently.
Even looking at it from the lens of ACEs we still don't have the full picture, but when I look at it from that lens I am now dealing with actual humans. I am dealing with people that have problems that I can't even imagine. I don't even know the words to use, but if you're listening to this, I would hope that you will gravitate towards people that encourage with kindness, people that encourage with understanding, instead of looking for someone to blame entirely.
To add a little bit to what you said, I did read another really long tweet about people protecting themselves in situations that they find to be a little bit, what would be the word?
Athalie: Threatening in some way?
Joseph: Exactly! The tweet I was referring to is along the same line. There was a girl that witnessed her eldest sister being abused. And what she did was she cut her hair and began to dress like a boy. So that that will in a way dissuade her father from having any interest in her. And it's amazing the lengths she had to go through just to protect herself. And so when you shared that story, I remembered that, and I connected with that.
I think a lot of animals in nature do that. You try to blend in because you know that if you don't, what's going to come on the other side, is not something you want to deal with. And so I really thank you for sharing that. I will try to reach out to the original poster of the tweet, and be like "I see what you're saying, but there's a lot of angles to this thing. I don't know that this will be received well, especially by people that are actually hurting." They don't have to listen to me, of course, but I feel like I have a responsibility as part of that community to share my perspective and a lot of that I'm learning as we're doing this work. So thank you very much!
Athalie: I think an important thing to point out in the second tweet you just talked about as well, is one of the key things that takes something from being "just" a horrific experience and making it truly traumatizing is the amount of agency that we feel in it. So for a lot of kids, especially if it's the adults that are supposed to protect you in your life that are acting out these things, it's easy to feel really helpless. But even small things like actions that you can take, help to channel that stress energy into at least trying to protect yourself.
And so even the fact that she's able to take some actions like cutting her hair, being like "this is what I'm going to do to protect myself", is a somewhat protective factor for her in terms of how she's going to carry that forward. As opposed to if she just felt completely helpless and just shut down because there's nothing she can do to alter the outcome. And so I don't want to say that this person has no effects from this, but there is at least some protective factors there in that she felt like there was at least one thing she could do: try to look like a boy. Clearly, she had picked up on the fact that her dad wasn't interested in boys.
I think that brings us into a nice transition to factors that lead to stress. So, in the multitude of studies that people have done, there's three factors that universally lead to something being a stressful situation.
Having uncertainty about what's going to happen, having a lot of unknowns, and not having information about what's going on, or information to understand what's happening right in front of you. And that loss of control, as in, there's no actions you can take that will affect the outcome. These factors altogether often add up to what people experience as a traumatic event that leads to post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a extreme version of trauma.
To get diagnosed with that, there's a number of thresholds you have to meet including having flashbacks or nightmares and an amount of debilitation in your life. But there's many steps leading up to that where people are still affected by their trauma, even if they wouldn't officially qualify to be diagnosed with PTSD.
I think it's Important to know that all stress isn't bad. In her book, The Deepest Well, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris talks about three categories of stress. Two of which can be positive. Well, maybe I should say, one of which is positive, one of which is universally negative, and then in the in-between could be positive or negative depending on several factors.
What she calls positive stress is stress that's short in duration. It's essential for development. So it's a stressor that's put on your body that's important for understanding things. Like you feel hunger that stimulates you to eat something. That's a normal and productive form of stress. And that's how babies learn "I have this feeling - it means I need to do this action. That's creating a normal chain of events and often this helps us accomplish things. Like if you're an athlete, before an event you have the pre-game jitters. That is adrenaline and stress hormones coursing through your body. They are going to help you perform in this event.
The middle type of stress is what she calls tolerable stress. It's longer in duration. It's also essential to have SOME of this type of stress in our lives. This helps to calibrate how our stress system responds to things. But for it to be healthy, it needs to be time limited and there needs to be some strong relationships like a healthy parental relationship to guide you as you process the situation. A great example of this would be somebody who's has the longer-term stress of, say, working towards a degree. There is stress associated with that and challenge, but by being able to take actions working towards a goal, having supportive people in your life, you can come out on the other end of that. There's a point where it ends. It gives you something to look back on and say "this is something I can do this type of hard thing" and it becomes a building block for how your stress response can respond in the future.
Now you can have this same thing happen and feel very alone, unsupported, and like you don't have the resources to actually achieve something making it an unhealthy stress for you in your life. So this is where depending on the other factors, the confidence that you have going into this that you've received throughout your life up until that point, or the supportive relationships in your life help determine whether this is actually healthy and helpful for your development or whether it's something that's going to go into the next category which is toxic stress.
Joseph: I have a couple of questions concerning the two types of stress that you just talked about which are positive and tolerable stress. One of the key differentiators that I'm picking up on is whether or not we feel we have agency over what's going on in our lives. I want you to speak to that a little bit, if you can. My example here will be a job interview. I see that as a positive stress the agency I may have over that is to learn all I can about the company and try to put my best foot forward. But that kind of stress, I feel it will stay with me until I get feedback from the organization I'm dealing with, which I don't have a lot of control over. How does this play out? Because we're in a time where millions of people out of jobs. This is something that people are going to deal with. Where does this fall and what will be something that we can do to give us a sense that we have more agency over the things that we don't necessarily have agency over if. That makes sense.
Athalie: Yeah. I think the example you just used could be either a positive stress or a tolerable stress. So if you are somebody who's applied for jobs over and over constantly gotten rejected and you haven't gotten feedback that you can learn from, it's easy to see how that would become a feeling of helplessness. Like "it doesn't matter what I do, I've never been offered a job. There must be something wrong with me. No matter what actions I take it, doesn't change the outcome and so why bother even trying to get a job?" However, if you go into this and you get feedback that you have no control over. The person says "well, you're not the right candidate for the job. These are the weaknesses that we saw in your application." You can take that. You can go forward you can say, "okay, what did I learn here? What can I do differently the next time?" And I think you have to at some point be able to see your actions connect to a changed outcome.
This is something that we learn as little kids. When they've done studies in orphanages in Eastern Europe. The reflex of a baby crying when they're hungry is to get an adult's attention so they will be fed. And if you have a healthy attachment with a caregiver, you cry, you'll get some attention. They'll try to figure out what your need is. You're learning from a very early age that when I asked for something, I get some response. I get some sort of feedback to go forward with. Babies that were in orphanages where there wasn't staff or the staff that was there was not inclined to have that nurturing feedback, they just stopped crying altogether. Already at a very young age, as babies, they've learned there's no point in asking. There's no point in trying to express that I have a need because nobody's there to listen to it anyway. This happens a lot with neglect.
And so, if that's the neural pathways that are already developed you can see that it'd be very easy to just slide into that later in your life when you're an adult. You have you applied for a job and in a metaphorical way nobody hears you or sees you. A lot of these traumas and these pathways first get built by people not seeing us or responding to our expressed needs as kids. That's setting a trajectory for the future of how we will even ask or feel like there's a point in asking for what we need in life.
Joseph: I totally can relate with that. I will tell people that I hate asking for favors. And I would say that in this weird way I was coming across like well I can handle stuff on my own. But when I sat with that, it wasn't really that. It was exactly what you just talked about. Because growing up, the things that I would ask for and the response was not what I wanted. A lot of times there was no response at all. And so you just give up like you say. Why ask? You already know what they're going to say. They're going to say no. And so that was where I got that line from where I don't like asking for things. And I think it morphed to a point where I actually didn't like receiving things. I like to give what I like to receive. And all that stuff kind of connects to what you just said. And then when I sit with myself. When I think back upon my childhood, I see a lot of a lot of the stuff you just talked about plays out to a T. It's amazing.
Athalie: Yeah I think well both of us grew up in big families with lots of kids, right? I guess this is where I get a bunch of flack from people that are really into big families. But it's just not physically, emotionally, mentally possible to have really attuned responses to lots of people that depend on you. In my opinion. I used to think that I wanted to have 10 plus kids myself. That's the environment I grew up in. That was like a normal family size - maybe on the slightly larger end of normal. There was seven kids in my family.
Joseph: I have nine siblings.
Athalie: Well, so you have 10 kids altogether.
Joseph: Yes. We're 10 kids, yeah.
Athalie: But as I started actually raising a kid, I had a baby. First of all, I was really sick when I was pregnant, so I was like, "yeah I don't know if I want to do this again". But then also the amount of work to invest in this human the way I want to, it's just knowing my own bandwidth and what I can do. Well, I was like there's no way I can do this for 10 kids. I'm sure there are people out there who can do that, but just to hold that up as like a standard that everyone should aspire to I don't think is helpful at all.
Joseph: You're right. I haven't met anyone that has, to be honest. I grew up in a large family myself and you're right. Just if we were to use a different example, in the work environment, right? If you have 10 people at the same time asking you to do something at the same time, that is overwhelming. And this is just maybe in a day. Now you have 10 kids that all need something from you every day in a 24 hour period. Like, I don't know what kind of human strength that is available to one person to do that. I don't even think that it's possible.
But this ties into a past conversation we've had about counseling and when people are getting into a marriage situation I think a lot of times counseling classes are focused on the people getting married. There's really no thought or consideration into the offspring that come out. Because I don't think my parents went to counseling and said, "Well by the way we want to have 10 kids". You know what I mean? Like that wasn't something that came up in conversation. The conversation was focused on, we want to make sure you two are compatible or work together. Totally neglecting the fact that they're going to be stewards of children. We basically had to figure things out on our own.
And a lot of what I tried to figure out was wrong, of course because there was no feedback. There was no feedback telling me "well if you do ask for something and I didn't give it to you, it's probably because I didn't hear very well or was distracted or had a few things to do. You know? Come back when I am a little bit more relaxed and ask me." All that wasn't there. And so my mind went to a safe place: Well, let's just not ask, that way we don't get disappointed. And that lived with me for a long time until I began to do some of the work that I did to begin to move away from that mindset.
So hopefully someone will get something out of this today that will help them. If you are in exactly the shoes that we just talked about just keep listening.
Athalie: And try to find a therapist to talk to, so you can have a buffering relationship. Which brings us to the third type of stress the toxic stress. This is prolonged adversity. The adverse childhood experiences definitely fall under this because for most kids these things are happening for most, if not all, of their childhood. One of the things that's missing here that makes this different from the tolerable stress is that you don't have this buffering relationship.
There were studies that looking at ACEs that found that even having one adult even if they weren't iving in their home, it could be a school teacher or a neighbor or a grandparent that provided that support and that feedback and that acknowledgement of their needs, helped make recovery easier or even possible at all for these people. And so having even one healthy relationship with an adult who can help meet your needs, goes a long way towards buffering this. When a situation really turns into toxic stress, is when you don't have any of these relationships and you're all alone to deal with the situation.
What happens is your body sends out these fight or flight signals. You have these stress hormones alerting you to danger but after a while when you are not able to respond or no one responds on your behalf to alleviate the danger, your brain becomes numb to the signals that there are stressful things happening. And even though your body is still having that stress response: it's still releasing cortisol, it's still releasing adrenaline, you're not aware of it.
So your conscious brain basically learns to tune it out because it's not something that you're able to react to. It's like the boy who cried "Wolf". It happens enough times and your body's like, "Well can't do anything. I'm going to tune this out as not relevant information coming in". The problem is, in your body, as Bessel VanDerKolk says, the body's still keeping the score. So cortisol is still destroying your tissue as it does over time. The adrenaline is still raising your blood pressure which leads to a whole host of health problems. The body is still keeping the score even if you're conscious mind stops paying attention to it. And this is why a lot of people over time when this has been their state for a long time and it's become a chronic situation, if you ask them if they're stressed… I see this myself. I'll often be like "Oh no! I'm not stressed!" Meaning I'm not thinking about stressful things, right?
But as I've learned and gone kind of deep into myself with mindfulness practices, I've realized, "Oh I am I'm having a visceral (visceral meaning something happening in my body) experience of stress". Even though my brain has said, "Oh no, this is normal - this is a normal baseline situation to be in".
And so one of the things that psychiatrists and psychologists working in this field have discovered is the way back out of this is to have visceral experiences of having agency. Having someone respond to you. This is where other humans can really come into our healing. So the situations where we learned that there's no one there to respond, there's no one there to help us, no one's going to protect us. By being in that position again and someone actually being there for us, whether that's a therapist, a doctor, a romantic partner, or a friend.
You can viscerally experience and learn, sometimes for the first time, what it's like to have someone say, "Wow that's intense! That shouldn't have happened. I'm sorry there was no one there to protect you. What can I do for you now?" All of those things can help us heal over time. For most people it's not just one thing that gets them into this state of chronic stress. It's going to take multiple iterations of having an opposite experience to get us back out of it. But it is possible. I've seen it happen in myself I've seen it happen to my kids and lots of people that I know that have put in a lot of work with a therapist to build a different way of being in their bodies.
Joseph: That's awesome. As you were talking, a few thoughts came to me and I don't know if you can help me shed a little bit of light on. Also some of the solutions that you have pointed us to - one of the big ones you repeatedly talked about is therapy. I believe in therapy a hundred percent, but not everyone can afford this solution. If I take that out of play for someone that can't afford it, the solutions are reduced. Because I'm looking at someone on the fringe of society, maybe homeless, has almost no support system. Where does one start? You see now we know that loving relationships, like you said, can help. They don't make it go away, but it can help. What if someone has very limited access to things like this? Even for people that have a regular job, not everyone can still afford a therapist. How does one begin to navigate this?
Athalie: That's a really great question and it really highlights how we need a multifaceted approach to addressing these problems. Because you're talking about somebody who wants to put in the effort from their side and the resources are just not available to them. And I think that's a great example of where we have systems in place that really limit people's ability to heal themselves or to find those resources for themselves. So first of all, I want to acknowledge that that is a huge problem. And it's also been a huge barrier, in healthcare, to a lot of people's healing because of the amount of money that we invest. We decide that people have a right to access healthcare. We want people to be able to get care for their diabetes. We do not have that same mindset for health as a whole and it is certainly not displayed in the way we fund resources for mental health care in general.
Helping people process through these things is expensive because it takes time with a professional to really get into this for each individual person. And you can't make progress in these things with a 15 minute appointment. That might be what you would get with your doctor to refill your prescriptions for diabetes. So that part is definitely true. It's definitely complicated. And over time we are slowly starting to realize the importance of paying for this stuff preventatively.
It was only in 2012 with the Affordable Care Act, that there was any requirement for Medicaid insurances to pay for mental health care at all. And so we're talking about something that is becoming accepted as important and everybody should at least theoretically have access to this. That's only been happening in the US last decade so I want to definitely acknowledge that there's a problem with access to this stuff and that therapy is expensive.
And I think there with the internet there's a lot of resources that people can find that would be more generic. There's a lot of podcasts done by therapists. We can link to some of them in the show notes. Where you can listen to hear how a therapist has helped other people work through their problems. I guess someone I consider a role model is Dr. Hillary McBride. She is a doctor of psychology working out of Vancouver, British Columbia and she has a podcast called Other People's Problems, where it's literally people who have consented to have their therapy sessions recorded. So you're listening into someone's therapy session. There's a lot of books. Lots of the information that I reference comes from books that people have written trying to explain these viewpoints. I don't think a book or a podcast is a substitute for a healthy relationship. But it's possible if you can find one other person to read through a book together, listen to a podcast together. You can hash that out with someone and have some support from them even if they're not a professional. I think that can still be beneficial.
I would love to see us treat our mental health and working through our childhood trauma with the same value and viewing it as just as necessary as treating our heart attacks and diabetes and cancer. We're not there yet as a society, so there is a gaping hole of support for a lot of people.
Joseph: I agree with you a hundred percent. I wanted to ask what are your thoughts on online communities support groups online. Maybe Facebook groups, maybe meetups and things like that. Like have you heard of any that you can say maybe people can begin to explore because I don't know that personally I have run into any. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.
Athalie: I think group settings can be really helpful in a lot of ways. I think in an ideal situation, a group setting would have some sort of a moderator who's familiar with the healing process. Because it can just be people that are acting out their traumas in a way that's actually just further traumatizing to them and the people around them. So it's not a guarantee that that would be a healthy situation. I mean we've seen the internet it's a dumpster fire. Just because something's happened to you and you share it doesn't mean that's going to heal you or heal someone else. So ideally I think there would be settings where somebody who has some sort of expertise in understanding how to talk about things and can moderate that conversation would be really useful. That's not something I've really looked into a lot personally, but I think probably there's a lot of those things have sprung up in the age of coronavirus. Where group sessions that used to be happening moderated by therapists or clinics would run support group type things, even like AA meetings going online. It does open up more opportunities for people to join that might not be able to go to a physical location. I'm skeptical as someone who just always prefers an old school sit down and talk with someone. I don't know if there's research on them being as effective as meeting up in person with somebody in a group setting. But I guess those are my thoughts or my caution about online groups.
Joseph: You mentioned physical changes that also happen as a result of this continued exposure to stress. And one of the things you mentioned was cortisol. You said it destroys tissue. Can you can you just talk a little bit more about that? Like what tissue does it destroy? How can one recognize this happening in themselves?
Athalie: Well, one of the things a lot of people are familiar with is this idea of high stress periods of time leading to stomach ulcers and this is related to the cortisol literally destroying parts of your digestive tract where you might have bleeding or ulcers in your stomach. We say "stomach ulcers", but it's also ulcers in your intestine that cause bleeding into your gut.
That inflammation also affects your body's ability to digest food which affects how you are able to absorb nutrients from your food. It affects the microbiome of the bacteria in your gut. When you think about our ability to absorb nutrients if that's hampered that's going to affect all parts of our body.
The inflammatory process related to high amounts of cortisol in our blood is also tied to a lot of autoimmune diseases. So some examples of these are eczema, lupus, even diabetes is considered an autoimmune disease, where your body starts to attack itself and its ability to process sugar. And there's many other illnesses - multiple sclerosis, ALS, these are all autoimmune diseases where the body is attacking itself. This inflammation is damaging us from the inside out. Or if it's a skin condition, which is quite common, from the outside in.
This hits very personally for me, because for years now I've dealt with a problem of having low cortisol which is a result of my adrenal glands basically being burned out.
They've produced high amounts of cortisol to the point where they're not functioning anymore. I've seen this interact with other parts of my body, like my thyroid. I'm having skin problems. I have a family history of thyroid problems, and I think I've kind of been teetering on the edge of having these things manifest in my own life. I think if that does end up happening, you know, it's partly the family history but also partly the stress and how the stress hormones interact with my thyroid.
The way out of this for me has been a lot of these things that we are talking about. I'm still in a period of continuing to recover. I've done years of therapy I've done a specific type of therapy called EMDR which is a way to re-inhabit your body in a safe way while you're reliving a traumatic experience. I've worked a lot on things that I have some control over like diet and exercise and finding activities that I love like dance. All of these things have helped me come back into my body and be able to pay attention and notice that the clues my body has been screaming at me that I was ignoring for a long time. I've seen this healing happen in myself. I've seen it happen in other people and I really believe it's possible. So I have a lot of hope for all of us - that we can learn more. We can be kinder to each other. We can be more supportive friends and family members and we can heal. Humans are incredibly resilient.
Joseph: I thought you thanks for that. Thanks for sharing your story with me today. And for everyone listening I really got a lot from this starting with your response to the tweet that I got. And also moving forward, how I take some of the things that you've shared and begin to apply that in my personal life. I think the big one for me is to begin to put a little bit more weight into seeking professional help. Get a therapist to begin to work through some of the issues that I need to work through. Also going into conversations with people understanding that we are all in different places on this journey. Being sensitive to that and being understanding of people, where they stand. That for me is a very huge one. I want to just continually put positive energy into the world and knowing things like this helps me to hold space for myself first and also to hold space for people who are hurting. And occasionally we will act out. To be able to say, "You know what? I don't condone this behavior. But I do understand that you're dealing with hurt." And then have conversations from a place of compassion, caring, and love.
Athalie: Hi! It's Athalie here with a quick fact check. In this episode, I mentioned that mental health care coverage wasn't required of health insurance companies until the passage of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare). In fact, two laws passed in 1996 and 2008 required private insurers to cover mental health services at the same level they covered medical and surgical services. However, smaller plans and public plans had the freedom to deny coverage based on a history of mental health problems or chose to not cover the treatment for them. The Affordable Care Act plugged this hole and made it universally required for mental health care to be covered by health insurance. Getting expanded Federal funding for State Medicaid programs is contingent on providing mental health services. However, there are some states who have opted to not expand Medicaid and the services available in these states are much more limited. Check the show notes for a study to learn more about the differences that the Affordable Care Act made to mental health care in the US over the last 10 years.
Also check out the show notes for links to podcasts hosted by therapists. There are many approaches to therapy that work differently. Use these podcasts as a starting place to learn more. The greatest benefit will come from building a relationship with a therapist yourself, but these podcasts can be a beautiful supplement to your own therapy sessions, or help you on your journey if therapy isn't an option for you. This is only a small selection. Please chime in with your favorite podcasts through Instagram or website if you have favorites we're missing here.
Song Credits
Many thanks to these artists for licensing their music under Creative Commons. Tracks featured in this episode, in order of first appearance, are:
I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626 Ft: J Lang, Morusque
nightRain by airtone (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/55887
reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/59721
Between Worlds (Instrumental) by Aussens@iter (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/tobias_weber/56664 Ft: (Smiling Cynic)
