How unresolved childhood trauma affects your health, how to test your own childhood trauma using ACES, and where the ACES test falls short.
I recently watched an enlightening Ted talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris on how childhood trauma affects our health by changing our DNA and physiology as a child.
Childhood trauma is defined as any kind of abuse, neglect, growing up with mentally ill parents or substance abuse. Some of the characteristics of children who’ve experienced severe trauma are not speaking and withdrawn, acting out, not wanting to be touched or difficulty socializing with others.
Apart from characteristics and brain function, living with childhood trauma adversely affects the developing immune system and changes the DNA structure, becoming more susceptible to sickness throughout their life.
The hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis (HPA), is the brain’s response system that governs our fight or flight response. Those with childhood trauma live with this system constantly activated, releasing cortisol and stress hormones at all times. When your body stays in this state it goes from being adaptative to maladaptive, damaging your immediate and future health
Adverse childhood experiences are the single greatest public health threat facing our nation today. Brene Brown said it best when she began her 2010 TEDxHouston talk stating that, “We are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in US History.” It’s no secret that we are becoming more and more unhealthy, even as we continue to advance with brand new technology each year. But why?
The typical response to health issues in our society today is to put a bandaid on your problems, by continuously prescribing drugs for your ailments, then additional drugs to help with the side effect of the initial drugs, and so on, It’s no wonder why we are getting sicker, as we continue to fix the symptoms of the issue rather than looking at the underlying cause.
All is not lost yet, though. Thanks to developments like the Adverse Childhood Experience Study (ACES), we may finally be getting on the right track.
In her talk, Dr. Burke mentions how her life changed when she discovered the ACES test. The ACES test asked 17,500 adults about their exposure to various types of childhood trauma. This included physical, emotional or sexual abuse, mental illness, substance abuse, family incarceration and more. Every yes on ACES added to the score, and the higher the score the more severely traumatized you were.
The results were then measured against each person’s health history to see if there was any correlation. The initial ACES study found that the higher the ACS score, the worse your health. This means that the risk of heart disease, hepatitis, depression, suicide, cancer and more was two to TWELVE times higher for those who experienced the trauma.
We need to treat childhood trauma as a global health issue, not just something for a therapist to fix when the child is an adult. The reason why anxiety, depression, and stress are some of the worst mental illnesses IN THE WORLD is because of our denial of childhood trauma, no resources and no sense of urgency to dig deeper into what exactly is causing our depression and stress.
While the ACES test is a start, we still have a long way to go. The ACES measures the 10 most common childhood traumas, but it needs to be updated to include others that are now commonplace in our society.
The first is childhood trauma from cults and extreme religion. Since the rise of cults in the 60s and beyond, many adults are only now trying to deal with how their upbringing is affecting their life. Whether they were born into cults or abusive families who used religion as a weapon of fear, this type of trauma needs to be recognized.
The second type of trauma is from war. Global war is nothing new, but in the last couple of decades, the number of refugees from wars is steadily increasing. In 2017 we reached a record high of 68.5 million, while stats from 2018 reported an increase of 70.8 million. Dr. Burke says that the average stay in a refugee camp is 7 years, and if you are a child, that is nearly a decade of traumatic, unstable living, not to mention the war that brought you to the camp in the first place.
Hopefully the ACES test is just beginning in helping to diagnose and treat childhood trauma, and remove it from the list of taboo topics into the world of socially acceptable illnesses that need to be addressed, just like depression, anxiety and stress.
To watch Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s TED talk see the link below:
To test your own ACES score, click this link: https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/