This material is for informational and educational purposes only and is not medical, psychological, or psychotherapeutic advice. If you are experiencing an acute psychological condition or need professional support, please contact a doctor, psychologist, psychotherapist, or crisis service.
Modern science confirms that the limbic system of the brain, which is the "repository" of our emotional and traumatic experiences, poorly understands complex logic or text instructions. However, it responds perfectly to images, colors, and metaphors. That is why MAC cards act as a safe "bridge" to those areas of the nervous system where bodily reactions to the old stressful environment are recorded. When a person describes a card, they activate the prefrontal cortex (the area of awareness) while simultaneously touching emotional centers. This triggers the processes of neuroplasticity — the formation of new neural connections. And as neurobiology proves: regular alteration of neuronal responses can change the hormonal background, which, in turn, can create new epigenetic conditions for our body.
Below is an expanded and updated article, where all original texts and links are preserved, but deep scientific explanations and interesting facts are added.
Everything Around: How Experience, Stress, and Environment Touch the Body
The material is educational and self-reflective in nature. It does not replace a consultation with a doctor, psychotherapist, psychiatrist, geneticist, neurologist, or other specialist. Epigenetics, telomeres, stress, and psychosomatics are complex topics where it is dangerous to make simple conclusions like "all illnesses are from nerves" or "it is enough to change your thinking." MAC cards do not diagnose, treat, or change genes. They can help to more attentively see experiences, emotions, bodily signals, old scenarios, needs, and accessible steps for support.
We Do Not Live in a Laboratory Test Tube
Sometimes you really want everything to be simpler.
Here are the genes. Here is the character. Here is childhood. Here is adult life. Here is health. Each item lies in its own drawer, signed in a neat handwriting, and does not interfere with the others. You open the "mood" drawer, look, close it. You open "body," figure it out. You open "social circumstances," get a little upset, but put it back.
Unfortunately or fortunately, humans are more complex. We do not live in a laboratory test tube. We live in a family, language, country, economy, war, city, apartment, body, memory, news, relationships, childhood conclusions, and our own attempts to somehow come to terms with all this.
The body does not ask: "Is this psychological or social?" It simply reacts. Modern biology uses the term "exposome" — the totality of all environmental exposures on an individual throughout their life, which perfectly complements this thought. Even our gut microbiome instantly feels changes in the emotional background, because there is a direct connection between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract via the vagus nerve.
If a child grows up in tension, their body does not keep a meeting protocol: "Today we received family stress, tomorrow - school stress, on Thursday - socio-economic." For the nervous system, this can be one big climate. In this climate, they have to mature, sleep, learn, want, fear, love, defend themselves, and pretend that everything is normal, because the adults are already tired.
That is why the topic of epigenetics is so touching. It returns us to a thought that many people felt intuitively: what matters is not only what we were born with, but also what we lived in. Not only "what my character is," but also under what conditions this character had to grow up. Not only "I am an anxious person," but also how many years my system trained to notice danger faster than others notice the weather.
And here a very important caution begins. Epigenetics does not mean that every thought immediately rewrites DNA. It does not mean that stress "magically creates disease." It does not mean that you can blame a mother, father, childhood, or yourself for every symptom. The organism is not as primitive as a motivational poster in a fitness club corridor.
Epigenetics speaks of something else: the environment can affect how certain biological systems work. Without changing the actual text of the genes, it can influence their activity, sensitivity, "loudness," or "silence." It's as if we have a complex musical score, but life constantly touches the volume controls.
Genes are not a sentence. The environment is not a trifle. Experience is not just a memory in the head.
And the body is not a separate tenant who was settled next to the psyche and asked not to interfere.
Telomeres: Little Caps with a Big Question
Elizabeth Blackburn received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for discovering how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. Put very simply, telomeres can be imagined as protective tips on chromosomes. They do not make a person immortal, they are not sold in a jar near the checkout, and they do not promise "minus 20 years in a week." They help cells maintain stability during division. With each cell division, these "caps" shrink slightly, protecting the core genetic information from damage.
Popular texts often call telomeres a "cellular clock." This is a beautiful metaphor, but it should be kept on a leash. Telomeres are linked to cellular aging, stress, inflammation, lifestyle, and many other factors. However, they are not a simple indicator of destiny. You cannot look at one number and say: "That's it, your internal passport has expired."
Something else is interesting. Studies by Blackburn, Elissa Epel, and other scientists have shown that chronic psychological stress, prolonged burden, caring for seriously ill loved ones, social inequality, discrimination, and early adverse events can be associated with changes in biological markers of aging, particularly with telomere length or telomerase activity. When the body functions for years in "fight or flight" mode, the constant release of cortisol and adrenaline provokes oxidative stress, which literally "burns" these cellular structures. Again: associated - does not mean "one cause for a lifetime." But it is a strong hint that health does not end at the boundary of the skin.
We are used to thinking of health as an individual project. Sleep. Eat. Move. Meditate. Do not get nervous. Do not read comments after ten in the evening, because it is a separate kind of extreme sport.
All this matters. But if a person lives in constant danger, poverty, discrimination, emotional abuse, war, social isolation, or exhausting responsibility, then the advice "just don't stress" sounds roughly like "just become a dolphin and swim away." Nice, but there is no instruction.
The science of telomeres and stress is important not to scare a person with another level of guilt: "Oh no, I worried, now everything has shortened for me." It is important because it returns the conversation about health to reality. Our body is not separate from how we are treated, where we live, whether we have support, whether we can rest, or whether we have to hold on for years on internal duct tape.
Epigenetics: Not Changing the Text, but Changing the Reading
DNA is often compared to a text. But the text itself is not yet life. You can have a book that no one opens. You can have a paragraph that is read too loudly. You can have a chapter that is constantly returned to, although you would like to finally move on.
Epigenetic mechanisms are one of the ways a cell regulates gene activity. They do not rewrite the DNA sequence itself, but they can influence which genes are more active, which are muted, and how the system responds to signals. In scientific language, this refers, in particular, to DNA methylation, histone modifications, regulatory RNAs, and other complex processes that a normal person does not necessarily need to carry in their head along with a shopping list. A classic historical example is the Dutch "Hunger Winter" (1944-1945): children whose mothers were undernourished during pregnancy had epigenetic marks that tuned their bodies to store calories, leading to massive obesity in adulthood, even when food became plentiful.
For a psychoeducational article, something else is important: the body is constantly listening to the environment.
If the environment is sufficiently safe, predictable, and supportive, the child can spend energy on development, play, curiosity, contact, and learning. If the environment is unpredictable or threatening, the body may spend more energy on defense. Sometimes this becomes a lifestyle: even when the danger has passed, the system still walks around with an internal metal detector checking every intonation.
Here it is very easy to slide into fatalism: "If childhood influenced it, then that's it, it's a sentence." But this is not true. Plasticity is also part of biology. Our brain has a phenomenal capacity for neuroplasticity: it can rebuild its own architecture through new positive experiences. Support, therapy, stable relationships, sleep, movement, a safe environment, bodily mindfulness, reducing chronic load, social support - all this does not cancel the past, but it can change the conditions in which the system lives now.
The past could have set up the alarm system. Now adult life can gradually teach it not to scream at every shadow.
Sometimes this sounds very simple. And in practice - it is years of soft return to oneself.
Childhood Experience: When the Organism Learns About the World Before the Child Learns Words
A child is not born with a ready-made instruction: "If adults are emotionally unavailable, develop adaptive pleasing. If the environment is unpredictable, increase threat scanning. If love depends on convenience, form chronic self-editing."
A child simply lives.
They feel when they are looked at warmly. When they are picked up. When they are heard. When they are shamed. When they are rushed. When it is quiet around, but not safe. When an adult smiles, but the child's body hears tension in the air. When everything seems normal in the house, but everyone walks on tiptoes around someone's anger.
Before words, the body already knows a lot. This mechanism is known in psychology as "neuroception" — the continuous subconscious scanning of space for safety, described by Stephen Porges in his Polyvagal Theory.
Early studies of stress epigenetics were often conducted on animals, particularly in models of maternal care in rats. They cannot simply be transferred to humans, as if we are identical laboratory tables with or without a tail. But they provided an important direction of thought: the quality of early care can affect the regulation of the stress system, in particular the sensitivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. In human studies, the picture is more complex, but the general idea is confirmed: early adverse experiences, chronic stress, abuse, neglect, poverty, and lack of support can be associated with long-term changes in mental and physical health.
In the article "Children of the Dungeon and the nervous system", we already talked about "fight," "flight," "freeze," and "fawn" reactions and how childhood defenses can live in an adult body. The topic of epigenetics adds another layer to this: childhood experience is not only memories that can be told. It is also the way the system learned to expect danger, deficit, or warmth from the world.
Familiar adult scenarios are born from here:
- a person calmly explains to themselves that everything is fine, but the body clenches;
- a partner is silent for half an hour, and a small evacuation already begins inside;
- a manager writes a short "ok," and the brain builds a three-season TV series;
- rest causes guilt;
- someone else's sadness automatically becomes a personal responsibility;
- asking for help feels like a dangerous luxury;
- calm seems suspicious, because in childhood after calm something often started.
Here the online deck "Children of the Dungeon" can be not "about a cute inner child," but about an honest meeting with parts that once really adapted. They are not stupid. They are not weak. They are not dramatizing. They simply lived in the conditions that existed and drew their own conclusions from them.
The problem is that childhood conclusions often come into adult life without a software update.
Social Environment: Health Does Not End at the Individual
One of the most valuable thoughts in the modern science of stress: health cannot be fully explained by personal choice alone.
Yes, choice matters. But choice always happens in conditions. It is very easy to say: "Take care of yourself" if a person has money, time, space, safety, support, sleep, and at least one room where no one demands immediate functionality. It is much more difficult if a person lives in chronic deficit, danger, or responsibility that cannot simply be paused. This phenomenon is described by the term "allostatic load" — the price our body pays for constant adaptations to environmental challenges.
There is an important line: poverty, racism, urban desolation, social injustice, discrimination, traumatic experiences - these are not abstract "external circumstances." They can have bodily consequences. At the level of stress systems, inflammation, immune response, sleep, diet, access to medicine, sense of control, safety, and the future.
This is especially important for the Ukrainian context. We cannot talk about stress as if a person simply does not know how to breathe with their belly. There are experiences where the problem is not a lack of self-regulation techniques, but the fact that the world truly was or is dangerous.
Here psychoeducation must be humane. Not "take responsibility for everything that happened to you." But "let's look at where your responsibility begins, and where you carried what was bigger than you."
MAC cards are useful here because they do not reduce a person to a diagnosis or advice. A card can show not only the internal state, but also the environment: who is nearby, where the danger is, where the support is, where the boundary is, where the child is alone, where an adult can finally approach.
A prompt for the card might sound like this:
- What environment shaped me?
- What danger am I still expecting, even though it is a different time now?
- Where do I take the blame for what was a systemic or family problem?
- What support do I need not "for development," but just for a normal human life?
After such prompts, it is good to add resource decks. "I Have the Right" helps to return basic permissions: to have boundaries, not to be convenient, to want, to rest, to ask, to refuse. "I Live My Happy Life" supports movement not only away from pain but also toward the future.
Because if we constantly look only at the damage, we might forget that the goal is not to live near the trauma archive. The goal is to find conditions in which the body will finally believe: life does not consist only of survival.
Psychosomatics Without Magic and Blame
When people hear that stress affects the body, an old unpleasant phrase often enters the room: "Everything you have is from nerves."
You want to politely escort it out the door.
Because "from nerves" often sounds like devaluation. As if the symptom is fake. As if the person is to blame. As if, if it hurts, you just need to stop worrying, become bright, grateful, and preferably not bother others with your organism.
A normal psychosomatic framework should be different. Symptoms are real. The body is real. Medical diagnostics are important. And at the same time, the psyche, nervous system, stress, sleep, inflammation, hormonal regulation, lifestyle, social support, and experience can influence well-being. These are not mutually exclusive things. Research in psychoneuroimmunology confirms: emotional pain can stimulate the release of inflammatory markers (cytokines), exacerbating very real physiological pain.
If the back hurts, you should think about a doctor, and about the load, and about sleep, and about movement, and about ergonomics, and about whether the person has been living for years in the "I hold everyone up, and only coffee holds me up" mode. In the article "Psychosomatics of the back, joints, and support", we already touched on this topic: the body should not be romanticized, but it is worth listening to.
A card here can help ask not a magical question "what emotion created this symptom?", but a human one:
- What is my body trying to endure?
- Where have I been living for a long time without recovery?
- Which part of me has no right to get tired?
- What do I not allow myself to say, ask for, or finish?
- What small step of support is possible right now?
The Bodily Diary "Conversation with Myself"
The Bodily Diary "Conversation with Myself" works well alongside this. It does not replace a doctor. But it helps to stop treating the body like an employee who must silently carry boxes while management upstairs reads books on mindfulness.
When Cards Are Needed Not for an Answer, but for Contact
MAC cards do not prove epigenetic changes. They do not measure telomeres. They do not see DNA methylation. If a card starts claiming that it has determined the activity of an inflammation gene, you should cover your teacup with it and take a pause.
Their strength lies elsewhere.
They help to see how a person organizes an experience. Which image resonates. Where constriction appears. Where there is a desire to turn away. Where an unexpected laugh arises. Where the child part suddenly says: "This is about me." Where the adult part can finally stop explaining and just look.
For the topic of epigenetics and telomeres, this is especially important, because the topic itself easily becomes either too scientific or too scary. Molecules, markers, inflammation, cellular aging, early stress - and the person is already sitting with the feeling that their childhood was not just difficult, but also put a "everything is bad" stamp somewhere in the cellular archive.
MAC cards can return the scale to human:
- what exactly happened to me;
- how I learned to survive;
- what I still do automatically;
- where I need support;
- what resource I already have;
- what new condition I can create for myself now.
When working with this topic, it is good to combine several decks:
MAC "Children of the Dungeon"
MAC "Dreams"
- "Children of the Dungeon" - for childhood experiences, old defenses, shame, loneliness, play, fear, and forgotten resources.
- "Dreams" - for dialogue between the inner Child, Parent, and Adult: who wants, who forbids, who can choose a real step.
- "My Myth: The Hero's Journey" - for seeing life as a journey where a crisis does not necessarily mean failure.
- "Dream. Desire. Fantasize" - for returning desires, imagination, the bodily "I want," and aliveness after a long survival mode.
- "I Have the Right" - for permissions, boundaries, and breaking free from people-pleasing.
- "I Live My Happy Life" - for moving toward the future, where a person not only understands the past but gradually builds other conditions.
MAC "My Myth: The Hero's Journey"
MAC "Dream. Desire. Fantasize"
MAC "I Have the Right"
MAC "I Live My Happy Life"
Practice: Environment Card
Take one card from the online MAC cards MriyaRun or from a paper deck.
Look at it not as a prediction, but as a scene.
Write down:
- What is the environment here?
- Where on the card is danger, cold, pressure, or loneliness?
- Where is there support, warmth, space, or the possibility of movement?
- Who is the most tense on the card?
- Who is used to holding on?
- What does this scene remind me of from my life?
Then add a second layer:
- What environment does my organism consider normal?
- What am I so used to that I no longer notice its cost?
- Where am I still living as if danger is near?
- What new condition could become a small signal of safety for me?
This can be very simple: sleeping without a phone near your face. One conversation where you don't have to guess. Less news before bed. Warm food. An honest "I won't make it." A pause before answering. A visit to the doctor. A therapy session. A walk. Refusal of a person after whom the body always packs a suitcase inside.
Small conditions are not always small for the nervous system. Creating such routine "islands of safety" sends a signal to the vagus nerve that there is no longer a physical threat.
Practice: Three Cards for an Old Reaction
This spread is well suited for "Children of the Dungeon", and after it - for a resource card from "I Have the Right".
Formulate a situation: "When I get stressed, I often..."
For example:
- stay silent;
- attack;
- escape into work;
- save everyone;
- disappear;
- don't ask;
- start controlling;
- pretend I don't care.
Draw three cards:
- What old condition taught me this reaction?
- What was this reaction trying to preserve for me?
- What new way of support is available to me now?
After that, you can draw a fourth card from the resource deck:
What right do I need to reclaim so that this reaction no longer automatically controls everything?
It is important not to scold the old reaction. It is not an enemy. It is like a security guard who hasn't been told in a long time that the object is no longer the same, the camera is new, the doors have been changed, and the siren does not need to be turned on every time someone opens the fridge at night.
Practice: Bodily Trace
This practice is best done gently, without diving into overly traumatic memories. If the topic causes severe anxiety, flashbacks, panic, or a feeling of losing control, it is better to work with a specialist.
Take a card and ask:
- Where is the tension on this card?
- How might this tension be felt in the body?
- Is there anything similar in my body right now?
- What is my body doing: squeezing, holding, running, freezing, hiding, smiling?
- What one small movement or gesture can add safety?
This might not be a heroic bodily practice, but a very simple action: unclench the jaw, put feet on the floor, drink water, place a hand on the chest, take a longer exhale, look around and name five objects, leave the room, write one phrase in a diary.
The body often does not need a dramatic ritual. It sometimes just needs a signal: "I am here. I am an adult. I see that it is hard for you. We will not pretend that you are just in the way."
When the Old Environment is Already Inside
The most difficult thing in the topic of stress and epigenetics is not that the environment affects us. The hardest thing is that the old environment can continue to live inside, even when the conditions outside are already different.
The person moved. Grew up. Earns money. Is in a relationship. Has access to knowledge. Can buy a nice cup, therapy, a deck of cards, and a blanket that looks like adulthood.
But inside there is still a part that expects to be taken away, yelled at, abandoned, shamed, devalued, not believed, mocked, or blamed.
This does not mean that the person "hasn't worked through it." It means the system once learned very well. Neurobiologists use Donald Hebb's famous rule: "Neurons that fire together — wire together." The more often a stress pattern was activated in the past, the wider this internal "highway" is.
Changes often begin not with a big breakthrough, but with a new experience repeated many times:
- I can say "no" and not lose love;
- I can make a mistake and not disappear from shame;
- I can rest and not be bad;
- I can ask and not destroy my dignity;
- I can be inconvenient, but alive;
- I can choose not to reply immediately;
- I can ask for help;
- I can build an environment that does not recreate my old basement.
This is exactly where "I Have the Right" and "I Live My Happy Life" become not just beautiful resource decks, but a continuation of working with the body and experience. Because for the nervous system, hearing one smart phrase is not enough. It needs new repetitions. New conditions. New small proofs.
Not "I understood everything, so now I will never react the old way."
But "I notice the old way sooner. I do not scold myself for it. I add a new step. I return the choice to myself."
Not Everything Can Be Changed Alone, and This is Not a Defeat
There is one dangerous turn in the topic of epigenetics: if the environment influences, then a person might start thinking they must create a perfect environment for themselves, otherwise they are "not trying hard enough."
But the environment is not just an aromatic candle, a sleep schedule, and a beautiful planner. It is also laws, war, economy, access to medicine, safety in the city, working conditions, social support, the family system, discrimination, housing, money, time, and community.
Not everything can be solved individually. Sometimes a person needs not another gratitude practice, but help, protection, a doctor, a lawyer, social support, a different job, evacuation, money, people nearby, less workload, normal sleep, and someone who won't say: "Well, you just think the wrong way." Our physiology deeply depends on "co-regulation" — the ability to recover and calm down through safe and trusting contact with the surrounding society.
This does not cancel self-help. It returns it to its real scale.
MAC cards can help a person see themselves, but they should not replace real changes where action is needed. If the card shows a lonely child in a dark place, sometimes the question is not only "what internal part of me needs attention?", but also "who in real life can be near?"
Therefore, alongside the cards it is good to have:
- a specialist, if the topic is deep or traumatic;
- a doctor, if there are symptoms;
- a diary, so as not to lose observations;
- supportive people;
- small bodily practices;
- boundaries with what regularly harms;
- honesty about what can no longer be called "nothing terrible."
Experience Influences, but Does Not Take Away the Future
The most important thing in this topic is not fear.
Yes, experience influences. Yes, stress can touch the body deeper than we would like. Yes, childhood, social conditions, poverty, discrimination, war, emotional loneliness, chronic responsibility, and trauma do not disappear just because a person became an adult and bought a new notebook.
But influence is not a sentence.
If the environment can harm, the environment can also support. If the nervous system learned danger, it can gradually learn safety. If the body is used to holding on, it can learn to let go in small steps. If a child part once concluded "I am all alone," adult life can respond many times: "Not anymore. Now I am with you."
In this sense, MAC cards MriyaRun are not about magical healing. They are about contact. About mindfulness. About an image that helps approach the topic without violence. About the moment when a person looks at a card and suddenly sees not a "problem," but a part of themselves that tried very hard to survive for a very long time.
And then the work of adult life begins.
Not to prove that the past didn't matter.
But to create conditions in which the past will no longer be the sole director.
Dmytro Telushko
Source Framework for the Scientific Part
- NobelPrize.org: Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009 - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2009/blackburn/facts/
- Lin J., Epel E. Stress and telomere shortening: insights from cellular mechanisms - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8920518/
- Epel E. S. and others. Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC534658/
- Early Life Stress, Physiology, and Genetics: A Review - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6688564/
- Harvard Center on the Developing Child: toxic stress and early childhood development - https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resource-guides/guide-toxic-stress/
- CDC: Adverse Childhood Experiences - https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html
- Social disadvantage, genetic sensitivity, and children's telomere length - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4000782/
Author's framework: Dmytro Telushko, MriyaRun, psychoeducation, MAC cards, bodily mindfulness, childhood experience, stress, social environment, self-reflection.
Internal MriyaRun links:
- Online MAC cards MriyaRun
- Catalog of paper MAC cards
- Online deck "Children of the Dungeon"
- MAC "Children of the Dungeon". Part 1: Fairy Tale World
- MAC "Children of the Dungeon". Part 2: Courtyard Childhood
- MAC "Children of the Dungeon". Part 3: Game, Pain, and Magic
- MAC "My Myth: The Hero's Journey"
- MAC "Dream. Desire. Fantasize"
- MAC "Dreams"
- MAC "I Have the Right"
- MAC "I Live My Happy Life"
- Bodily Diary "Conversation with Myself"
- Diary of Emotions EQ
- Diary of the Mistress of Her Boundaries
- Diary of Acceptance
- Children of the Dungeon and the nervous system
- Childhood psychosomatics: when a child's body says what there are no words for yet
- Psychosomatics of the back, joints, and support
- Trauma, an old fairy tale, and loss of flexibility
- MAC cards online and in paper
Diary of the Mistress of Her Boundaries