What are ACEs?
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are stressful events occurring in childhood as listed in the study below.
In 1995, a multi-year survey commenced of 17,000 middle class patients in a health care plan in California USA which looked at their health and also asked what childhood traumas they had experienced.
Ten childhood traumas were listed in the categories of personal; (abuse and neglect) and family (dysfunction):
Sexual abuse
Verbal abuse
Physical abuse
Emotional neglect
Physical neglect
Parent who is mentally ill
Parent who is an alcoholic
Mother who is a domestic violence victim
Family member who has been jailed
Loss of parent through divorce or abandonment
When the doctor conducting the research first saw the results, he was stunned. “I wept,” he says. “I saw how much people had suffered and I wept.”
As well as suffering, what did the data reveal?
There was a direct link between childhood trauma and a higher risk of adult onset of chronic disease, as well as mental illness, doing time in prison, and work issues, such as absenteeism. This does not mean that these diseases and events will not occur in someone who had experienced a low level of childhood trauma but the RISK of this is much lower.
About two-thirds of the adults in the study had experienced one or more types of Adverse Childhood Experiences. Of those, 87 percent had experienced 2 or more types. ACEs usually didn’t happen in isolation.
More Adverse Childhood Experiences resulted in a higher risk of medical, mental and social problems as an adult. People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, more auto-immune diseases, and more work absences.
Yet these were average citizens. They were middle-class, middle-aged, and 74 percent were college-educated. They all had jobs and great health care. Their average age was 57.
The ACE Study, which has been replicated many times over, became even more significant with the publication of parallel research that provided the link between why something that happened to you when you were a child could land you in the hospital later. The stress of severe and chronic childhood trauma releases toxic stress hormones that physically damage a child’s developing brain.
Children with toxic stress live much of their lives in fight, flight or fright (freeze) mode. They respond to the world as a place of constant danger. With their brains overloaded with stress hormones and unable to function appropriately, they can’t focus on learning. They fall behind in school or fail to develop healthy relationships with peers or create problems with teachers and principals because they are unable to trust adults. Some kids do all three. With despair, guilt and frustration pecking away at their psyches, they often find solace in food, alcohol, tobacco, methamphetamine, inappropriate sex, high-risk sports, and/or work and over-achievement.
They don’t regard these coping methods as problems. Consciously or unconsciously, they use them as solutions to escape from depression, anxiety, anger, fear and shame.
We need to recognise and develop the “resilience” of the developing child—the brain’s and the body’s ability to manage and recover from severe stress, as well as how caring relationships can act as an antidote to stress. People who have experienced trauma should not be “defined” by their trauma. Adversity is not destiny.
PLEASE NOTE - The Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score is a relatively crude measure of cumulative childhood stress exposure that can vary widely from person to person. Unlike recognized public health screening measures, such as blood pressure that use measurement reference standards and thresholds for clinical decision making, the ACE score is not a standardized measure of childhood exposure to stress.
Why is this? The questions from the ACE study cannot fully assess the frequency, intensity, or chronicity of exposure to an ACE or differences in the timing of exposure. For example, 2 people, each having an ACE score of 4, may have different lifetime exposures, timing of exposures, or positive experiences or protective factors that affect stress. A person with an ACE score of 1 may have experienced intense, chronic, and unrelenting exposure to a single type of abuse, whereas another person who has experienced low-level exposure to multiple adversities will have a higher ACE score.
As a result, projecting the risk of health or social outcomes based on any individual’s ACE score can lead to significant underestimation or overestimation of actual risk. However you will know how ACEs affected you and you can seek help. |
More on the ACEs Study Find out your ACEs score