ACEs High

Artwork by Ashlie Curtis

I’m not going to lie. Trauma flooded a significant portion of my childhood. Although my parents did the best they could with what they had, I was still exposed to several situations and experiences that affected me in a traumatic way.

I unknowingly carried a lot of this trauma through adolescence and adulthood and still have to occasionally remind myself that sometimes it is okay not to be okay.

It wasn’t until I learned about ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) a few years ago that I could make some sense of it all and deal with my childhood trauma in a way that allowed me to grow and be part of the solution instead of the problem.

After I learned what ACEs were, I was curious about my own experience, and I took the quiz online, which is ten questions that pertain to stressful and unfortunate experiences such as violence, abuse, neglect, or other household dysfunction that a person may or may not have experienced during adolescence.

I have been going to therapy for years, which has helped me identify those childhood experiences that have significantly impacted my mental health, so I assumed that I would have a high score and was right. I also knew that I had experienced quite a bit of adversity as a child and that those experiences had somewhat shaped who I was and how I responded to specific life situations.

What I didn’t know is that these experiences also play a role in my overall physical health, mental health, and overall well-being and can even impact life opportunities.

In the mid-1990s, there was a landmark study conducted by the Center for Disease Control that revealed that 12.5% of individuals who experienced four or more ACEs before their 18th birthday had a 390% increased risk of COPD, a 240% increased risk of hepatitis, a 460% increased risk of depression, and a shocking 1,220% increased risk of suicide.

Even for individuals reporting just two ACEs, the increased risk for adult alcoholism amounts to more than double that of the control group. I found this absolutely mind-boggling!

There has since been much more research published regarding ACEs and their impact on the human condition. High ACE scores have been linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance use issues. ACEs are strongly associated, in a dose-response fashion, with some of the most common, serious, and costly health conditions facing our society today, including nine of the ten leading causes of death in the U.S. and earlier mortality.

The life expectancy among populations with six or more ACEs is 19 years shorter than those with none.

In addition to ACEs, exposure to other adversities, such as poverty, racism and discrimination, and housing and food insecurity, are associated with health risks and are believed to be risk factors for toxic stress. ACEs and toxic stress are associated with increased risk of a wide range of health conditions in both pediatric and adult populations, known as ACE-Associated Health Conditions.

There are so many people out there who don’t even know what ACEs are or the impact they have on a person’s development and well-being. Some of these people even work in the medical field. The studies and statistical data on the CDC’s website clearly show how much of a toll ACEs take on the body and mind, and I think it is imperative that we try to do something about it.

Knowledge is power. Spreading the word not only helps us as a society to understand one another, but it also helps people who are suffering to understand their situation better, hopefully providing some relief and starting a shift toward healing.

Connecting youth to caring adults and activities is one of the best ways to help reduce the prevalence of ACEs and to help build resilience. When an adolescent has other forms of encouragement and acceptance outside of the family system, resilience is more likely to manifest. It’s almost like overriding bad with good – or at least muting it a little.

Some family dysfunction is difficult to detect and can also be overlooked by outsiders – intentionally or unintentionally – and a child may suffer. There is power in numbers, and the more people trying to offer grace and love to our youth, the more opportunities that child will have to build resilience and overcome adversity.

We don’t know what we don’t know, and I believe this is true for family dysfunction. A person raised in a highly dysfunctional household will have difficulty building a functional home when they become an adult due to their lived experiences.

However, if that person had some amount of healthy love and support outside of the family unit, then there is a much greater chance that person will be able to break the cycle and rise above the conditions of their childhood.

It could also help them avoid picking up bad habits along the way and even help a person live a healthier and more peaceful life. Why wouldn’t we want that for everybody?

There is a quality of resiliency that has the potential to form within a person who endures these adverse experiences during adolescence, which can be carried over to many aspects of life, allowing that person to overcome obstacles and maintain their footing in life in this thing we call life.