The Roseto Effect
:The Importance Of Community Connection In Times of Turmoil
We are living amidst hard times. Natural disasters abound. Political corruption has taken over in many countries. Climate crisis worsens, unmitigated. Oppressive systems seem to be winning the fight over those activists who have been tirelessly standing up for equal human rights for all. Oligarchs and billionaires don’t seem to give a crap about all the people they step on to hoard resources. And narcissism seems to be the modus operandi of the day.
We can’t control all that as tiny individuals. But we have more power when we come together to at least resource ourselves and each other, if not cooperate towards active resistance. In times like this, we need communities of healing- not just for our mental and emotional health, but for our physical health.
If you need a safe online space to heal, feel, process, connect, rant, cry, laugh, goof off, improve your relational health, practice Internal Family Systems, learn to set and enforce healthy boundaries, off ramp from spiritual bypassing, and generally learn how to safely co-regulate with your fellow human beings, join us for an ongoing Zoom community of practice LOVE SCHOOL, which starts February 10.
Not to suggest that a Zoom community could ever replace in person community, but it’s helping me to remind myself how impactful it is that we all find our community connections as we approach the times ahead.
Have you heard of The Roseto Effect? My small California community is doing our best to recreate the qualities of Roseto in our own way, to make the times ahead more bearable and to improve our health and wellbeing. I’ll be leading an Internal Family Systems process to our local community women’s group in two weeks, and so many others are offering their gifts, so we can survive what lies ahead as best we can.
Yes, we need activism. We need active resistance. We can’t just isolate in our bubbles and pretend we’re blind to what’s happening. We need to take strong stands and push back against that which we can control. But we also need sanctuaries of refuge where we can find them, to process the helplessness of those parts of us that feel painfully out of control and helpless. In other words, this is not a time to be a rugged individualist. This is a time for community.
The Roseto Effect
Many health enthusiasts are rugged individualists who think that all they have to do in order to ward off illness is follow doctor’s orders, work out, eat healthy, avoid toxic substances, take their supplements, get enough sleep, and use their bio-hacking devices and practices to ward off chronic or potentially terminal diseases.
But the science of loneliness, trauma, and community suggests otherwise. As I wrote about in my New York Times bestselling book Mind Over Medicine, researchers now know that it takes a village to live an optimally healthy life, as clearly suggested by what loneliness researchers have come to know as the “The Roseto Effect.”
To understand the strong link between optimal health, the importance of community, and healing loneliness and the trauma that tends to lead to it, let me take you back in time to Roseto, Pennsylvania in 1961, a town where a community of Italian immigrants settled together in an enclave that recreated the Old Country in the New World. Named after Roseto Valfortore, the homeland of its residents, the village of Roseto, Pennsylvania clings to a forested ridge in the Poconos, where a group of immigrants from Roseto Valfortore first set sail for the New World in 1882, in search of a better life.
Because it’s so remote, few outsiders stumble across this village. But if you had landed there in the daytime, you’d have found ghost-town-empty streets. The children would have all been in school, while the men worked back-breaking shifts at the rock quarry, and the women labored away at the blouse factory, trying to earn enough money to send their kids to college. Two-story stone houses built along the main street of Garibaldi Avenue would have been around Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, which was presided over by the inspiring and enterprising young priest Father Pasquale de Nisco.
Much of what came to make Roseto unusual can be largely credited to Father de Nisco, who encouraged the townspeople to plant crops, raise pigs, grow grapes, set up spiritual societies, and plan celebratory festivals. Blossoming under his influence, schools, shops, the blouse factory, and other evidence of culture sprang to life.
In the evening, if you were wandering around, you’d see the village of Roseto come alive as people returned from work, strolling along the village’s main street, stopping to gossip with the neighbors, and maybe sharing a glass of wine before heading home to change into dinner clothes and greet the children. You’d see women gathering together in communal kitchens, preparing classic Italian feasts, while men pushed tables together in anticipation of the nightly ritual that gathered the community over heaping piles of pasta, Italian sausage, meatballs fried in lard because they couldn’t afford olive oil, and free-flowing vino.
As a community of new immigrants surrounded by English, Welsh, and German neighbors who turned up their noses at the Italians, the people of Roseto had to look out for each other. Multi-generational homes were the norm. During the week, men and women both worked, and on Sundays, everyone worshipped in the Catholic church together. Boundaries between families were fluid, with neighbors wandering in and out of each other’s kitchens, kids playing, and holidays joyously celebrated communally.
Although work was hard, the work ethic in the community was strong, fueled by a common mission- the immigrant’s dream of a better life for their children. Although the people of Roseto were not particularly privileged in the traditional sense of the word, they took good care of one another. Nobody in Roseto was left to struggle through life alone. Roseto was living proof of the power of the clan.
This isolated village might have gone largely unnoticed by the scientific community had it not been brought to the attention of Dr. Stewart Wolf, a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine, who bought a summer home nearby in the Poconos. At a local medical society, Dr. Wolf had been asked to speak, and the doctor who took care of most of the people from Roseto invited him to the local pub for a couple of beers. While chatting, the local doc said, “You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"
Dr. Wolf was a skeptic, and he assumed the doctor was exaggerating. Nevertheless, he figured it was worth a look.. The zeitgeist of 1961 was all over trying to understand why heart attacks were happening in epidemic proportions, ringing in as the #1 cause of death in men under 65. Curious but not convinced, Dr. Wolf did his homework, scanning through death certificates from Roseto and comparing them to death certificates from the surrounding towns over a period of seven years. To his amazement, he found that the men of Bangor had heart-attack rates paralleling the national average.
But the heart-attack rate in Roseto was astonishingly low. It was nearly zero in men under 65, and overall, it was half the national average. It wasn’t just heart disease, though. The death rate from all causes was 30 to 35 percent lower than average in Roseto. He decided this deserved more scientific study.
Dr. Wolf enlisted the research assistance of his friend John Bruhn, a sociologist from Oklahoma, who said in an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, who published these words in his book Outliers, “I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembered. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it." He couldn’t quite believe it himself.
Curiously, Roseto seemed to be full of health outliers. But why? Researchers inspected, interviewed, and examined two-thirds of the village’s adults. It must be their Old World Mediterranean diet, Dr. Wolf suspected. Perhaps it was all that heart-protective olive oil.
So he hired eleven dieticians to watch what the people of Roseto bought at the grocery store and observed them preparing the communal meals often eaten together. But it definitely wasn’t the olive oil. Unable to afford healthier olive oil, they routinely cooked with lard. Back in Italy, they might have eaten pizza, but it was a thin crust with a few tomatoes and fresh mozzarella. In Roseto, they used thick bread dough and piled it with sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham, cheese, and eggs. In fact, a shocking 41 percent of their calories came from fat.
In Italy, they only ate sweets like biscotti and taralli on special holidays like Christmas and Easter. But in Roseto, they ate sweets almost daily. And it’s not like they were working out with personal trainers or doing downward dogs in yoga class to burn all that off. On the contrary, the people of Roseto smoked heavily, and many were obese. So…it wasn’t diet or exercise that explained their longevity and relative health span.
What else might explain the disparity? Dr. Wolf suspected genetics. Because the Rosetans all originated from the same small village in Italy, Dr. Wolf suspected they might have inherited some disease-protective gene. So he tracked down other immigrants originating from Roseto Valfortore, people who lived elsewhere in the United States, wondering if they were as healthy as their Pennsylvania cousins.
They weren’t. He had to check genetics off the list.
Maybe it was their geography,something in their water, the climate, the air quality or some particularity about the kind of medical care they received locally. He expanded his study to look at the neighboring communities of Nazareth and Bangor. But they all shared the same water, air, climate, and medical care, and the people in the adjacent community were as sick as the rest of the US.
By process of elimination, Dr. Wolf concluded that if it wasn’t their diet, their exercise, their avoidance of bad habits, their genes, or their local geography, there must be something disease-protective about Roseto itself. They invested in studying how the people of Roseto lived and noticed some qualities that made Roseto seem very different than the neighboring communities. The elders were treated with respect and dignity. Accumulation of wealth and flagrant displays of showing off were culturally discouraged, while helping out your neighbors if you had enough to share was rewarded.If anyone wound up hard on their luck, the community would rally to pitch in. Everyone knew everyone, and they took the time to stop to talk to each other on the streets. There were no single mothers, on their own, facing a harsh world without enough support. There were no old people neglected in nursing homes. They’d created a relational fabric that everyone was embedded in.
Dr. Wolf ultimately concluded that a supportive, tight-knit, emotionally bonded community was a better predictor of heart health and overall longevity than cholesterol levels or tobacco use.
All of this research concluded just as the golden age of Roseto’s community life began to disintegrate. As the older generation, proud of its Old World culture, began to age, the younger generation wasn’t so thrilled about life in Roseto, which seemed to them backwards, embarrassing, and immune to modernization. When the young people went off to study at college, they brought back to Roseto new ideas, new dreams, and romantic partners from outside the community. The children strayed from the church, joined country clubs, no longer wished to live with their parents, and considered themselves real Americans, moving into single-family suburban houses with fences and pools.
Along with these changes, the multigenerational homes disbanded, the nightime parties ended, and the people of Roseto started taking on more of the “every man for himself” philosophy that was commonplace in the neighboring communities and the United States in general.
The neighbors, who used to regularly walk through open doors and visit one another, began phoning each other to schedule appointments. The evening rituals of adults singing songs while children played with marbles and jacks turned into nights in front of the television.
In 1971, when heart attack rates began dropping in other parts of the country because of widespread education about heart-healthy diets and regular exercise, Roseto grieved its first heart attack death in someone younger than 45. Over the next decade, heart-disease rates in Roseto doubled. The incidence of high blood pressure tripled. And the number of strokes increased. Sadly, by the end of the 1970s, the number of fatal heart attacks in Roseto had increased to the national average. Dr. Wolf, who continued to study the community of Roseto for many years after that, concluded that the lone wolf rugged individualism so often glorified by American life interferes with optimal health.
The Science of Loneliness, The Medicine Of Connection
I agree with Dr. Wolf that any person isolated from the support and sense of belonging in community can be far too easily overwhelmed by the slings and arrows everyday life. When we’ve experienced relational trauma, when we’re robbed of healthy intimacy, when it’s replaced by transaction or unequal relationships, when we don’t know where we belong, it’s impossible for the nervous system to regulate optimally. We’re tribal beings. We need one another. It takes a village to create the conditions for an optimally healthy life.
As Robert Putnam put it in his bestselling book Bowling Alone, “As a rough rule of
thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the
next year in half. If you smoke and belong to no groups, it’s a toss-up statistically whether
you should stop smoking or start joining. These findings are in some way heartening. It’s
easier to join a group than to lose weight, exercise regularly, or quit smoking.”
Curing loneliness is as good for your health as giving up smoking, according to John
Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, Illinois, who has devoted his life’s work to studying
the impact of relationships and loneliness on health. According to Cacioppo’s research, when it comes to cortisol signaling genes, the inflammatory response, and the immune system, people who lack quality relationships are physiologically different than people with strong, healthy social networks. Cacioppo says that relational healing and learning how to be less lonely is not so much about spending more time with people; it’s about the way we relate with others, and our feelings about relationships and belonging.
Lonely people, who are often lonely because of relational trauma, come to view intimacy with other human beings as potentially dangerous. When too much relational trauma causes us to feel like relationships are more dangerous than they are nourishing, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn stress responses flood our bodies and the physiology of fear is activated. When relationships have been intrusive, boundary-violating, emotionally traumatic, violent, neglectful, or otherwise unsafe, it makes sense that the body would come to fear other people, and our bodies would be more prone to illness and breaking down of the body’s natural self-healing mechanisms. As it turns out, healthy human connections nourish each other, even more than a poor diet, smoking or drinking might harm it. The health of the body appears to reflect this.
But don’t despair if you don’t live somewhere like Roseto. Most of us don’t. But there is much we can do to be proactive about relational healing, so we can create the healthier partnerships, more healthy birth families, adopted families, or chosen families, and healthy communities.
It might not come anywhere near replacing Roseto. But have you checked out your local community center or safe, non-bypassing spiritual community to see if you can get involved with your community? Might you be the one to set up weekly potlucks in your neighborhood? What about book clubs, clothing swaps, and meet ups to discuss subjects of interest?
If You Don’t Have Your Own Roseto, We Welcome You To LOVE SCHOOL
At the very least (and no, it’s not a replacement), we can gather together online. I’m launching a new healing community LOVE SCHOOL for survivors of relational trauma who want to practice Internal Family Systems together, engage in creative practices together, improve the quality of their relationships, learn relational tools, and support each other through the next four years of inevitable chaos. We start just before Valentine’s Day on February 10, so you’re officially invited to join us! We’ll be meeting every other week at first and we might add additional offerings depending on how many people say yes. This is our attempt at offering some health equity to those who are struggling to find IFS therapies or communities of practice at an affordable rate. We’ll be processing our parts, writing, dancing, singing, introducing you to cool guest teachers, answering Q&A, and creating space for community connection as best we can online.
Find community, connection and a safer way to love at LOVE SCHOOL. Learn more and register here.
Until then, my heart goes out to all who are suffering right now. So many who are at risk of losing everything might not just lose their communities, but their jobs, their country, their families, their health, their lives. May our hearts be with all the suffering our communities and the individuals that create them are experiencing right now.