ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experience and it’s a term used to describe events in a child’s life that might have an impact on their physical, emotional or academic development.
As we learn more and more about trauma and how it affects us, we’re learning more and more about the significance and importance of ACEs.
So many adults currently grappling with their ‘mental health’ say that they don’t really know why… There’s no concrete or tangible incident or event that logically would create such turmoil and bad feeling. When we begin to speak with these adults about their background and family history though, they disclose ACE after ACE, begging the question:
Are you struggling with your mental health or are you struggling because of unresolved childhood trauma?
Some may say that this is semantic pedantry but it’s not.
Trauma is NOT a mental health condition, it’s a brain injury.
The mental health condition is usually a consequence of the unresolved trauma, so ‘treating’ the mental health condition without acknowledging or exploring the unresolved trauma will likely bring unsuccessful outcomes for the person suffering.
The tricky thing about ACEs is that on their surface, they’re life-events… Things that don’t necessarily ‘stand out’ as traumatic in and of themselves (there are exceptions to this; for example there’s no argument that sexual abuse is traumatic, but we all know how deeply hidden sexual abuse is while it’s being perpetrated).
If we agree that trauma is not just the event, but what happens inside us as a consequence of the event (and we should!) we begin to see that the ACE is not necessarily the most relevant part of this process; whether or not we’ve properly healed from it is.
Healing from trauma requires:
Trusting
Relationships
And
Unconditional,
Meaningful
Acceptance
It’s that simple! The antidote to trauma is connection so when we go through something challenging, we need to feel safe enough to work through the thing without fear of judgement or rejection.
Safety is not merely the absence of threat, it’s the presence of connection, so if you didn’t have adults around you who you felt safe with and connected to (and if you have a high ACE score, that’s probably a given!) you didn’t have the opportunity to heal. If you haven’t had the opportunity to heal, the trauma is still doing its stuff inside of you, unchecked, unhealed, and stuck at whatever point it occurred, insisting you relive it, all the time... If you haven’t healed it, your kids will inherit it and you want them to have a childhood they don’t have to heal from, don’t you?
We unconsciously repeat what we don’t consciously repair so if the trauma remains unresolved, it will inevitably repeat itself in future generations. This is generational trauma…
Generational trauma is even harder for your children to recover from because often, they have no idea what the trauma was or why or when it happened. If you’re unsure about whether your own unresolved ACEs and trauma have impacted your children, think about this:
When your child does something to irritate you (and they will, they’re children and it’s their job!), how proportionate and safe does your response to their misdemeanour feel to YOU? Do you often find yourself after an event feeling guilty that you might’ve ‘overreacted’ to something?
If your answer is yes, I invite you to think further:
What would’ve happened to your child-self if you’d behaved in the way that your own child just did? Would you have been shouted at? Spanked? Ignored…?
Yes again?
Then you’re not overreacting, you’re being triggered.
When I talk about being triggered, I don’t mean that you felt a bit uncomfortable or you were offended, I mean your nervous system was triggered into believing you were in danger – that’s why, when you ‘calm down’ again, you feel guilty – logic and reason are back online.
Our brains work spontaneously to keep us safe in times of danger – our back brain goes into fight or flight mode and we’re unable to think calmly or logically in this state – survival is our priority.
Now, when we were five and a big, scary adult was looming over us and screaming like a banshee in our face, survival mode was appropriate and useful. It (hopefully!) kept us safe from the escalation of the adult’s anger – answering back to an angry adult would only have increased their anger and our five-year-old self would’ve worked this out quickly.
So, when your own five-year-old says or does something that would’ve sent YOUR adults into an incandescent rage, your brain and nervous system remembers that sequence of events and prepares to safeguard you against it. And of course, in those moments, because your adults never gave you an alternative, all you have available to you as a parent, is the same set of reactions you received from your adults:
Child does something ‘wrong’
Adult reacts by shouting and being aggressive
Child goes into safeguarding mode, cowers and shuts up, quick!
Adult carries on raging
Child learns that when a child displeases an adult, the adult will bully them.
When the child becomes an adult and has their own children, this is the only pattern of behaviour they have available to them so they replicate it.
It’s worth remembering that even if you ARE aware of your ACEs and trauma history, and you HAVE done the work to understand and overcome the impact, it’s a fact of life that when we’re stressed or under pressure, we all bolt back to the safety of our ‘normal’.
For most of us, those ‘normals’ were set in childhood – According to Hebb’s rule: “Neurons that fire together, wire together” so our default, subconscious responses are deep-rooted neural pathway responses to stuff, created by hundreds and thousands of experiences.
If we were constantly shouted at as children and have not done the work to recognise these patterns and triggers, when we then experience someone shouting in adulthood, we will instinctively assume that they’re shouting at us. Our child-appropriate neural pathways will be triggered and hey presto, we’re back to being the frightened five-year-old, only we’re in an adult body now. Noticing this is enough to begin to create the space required to change the reactions.
Likewise, if our childhoods were full of love and unicorns, our neural pathways will have developed without safeguarding triggers so if someone shouts near us, we assume they’re angry with someone else not us, and we’ll be able to respond with logic and reason instead of safeguarding.
What’s the difference between a reaction and a response?
A pause…
Enough time to ask yourself, “Do I need safeguarding here?” and if the answer is no, that pause gives time to settle the uncertainty inside yourself BEFORE you say or do something reactionary that you might well regret…
Do you know your ACEs score?
ACEs Questionnaire
What’s your ACEs score? Complete the following questionnaire to find out…
Did a parent or other adult in the household often swear at you, humiliate you or insult you? Or did they act in a way that made you feel like you might be physically hurt?
Did a parent or other adult in the household often punch, push, slap, grab, pinch, or throw things at you? Or did they ever hit you so hard that a mark was left on you?
Did a parent, other adult in the household or any person more than five years older than you ever touch you or have you touch them in an intimate place? Or did they try to or actually have penetrative sex with you?
Did you often feel like nobody in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? Or did you feel that your family didn’t look out for each other; weren’t supportive? Were you often blamed for things that weren’t your fault?
Did you often feel like you didn’t have enough to eat, weren’t given appropriate clothing (dirty, too small, too big, had holes in)? Or were your parents or adults too drunk or under the influence to be able to take you for emergency medical treatment if you needed it?
Were your parents separated or divorced? Or did you live in a household where a parent died or worked away from home for long periods of time?
Were either of your parents ever abusive towards each other? This might include violent or non-violent acts. Were there ever violent episodes between your adults? Were there periods of non-violent ‘punishment’ such as silent treatment or refusing access to the other, safe parent? Did you feel like you had to ‘walk on eggshells’?
Did you live with an adult or adults whose alcohol consumption was problematic? This might be daily drinking or binge drinking. Were there drugs abused in your household? This might include the misuse of either street or prescription drugs.
Did you live in a household with an adult who was mentally unwell? This might include depression or another diagnosed condition. Did anyone in your household ever attempt suicide?
Did you live in a household where an adult spent time in prison?
For every ‘yes’ answer, score yourself one point – your final number is your ACEs score.
It’s important to say that we’re talking here about consistent and constant ‘behaviours’.
Most of us will have had a parent say to us on occasion, “Stop crying! You’ve nothing to cry about!” Most of us will have seen our parents drunk at some point; most of us will have witnessed our adults arguing with each other; and most of us will have heard our adults swear and curse. Most of us also have experienced the feeling of, “Nobody understands me! They don’t care what I want!”
These things, if they happen occasionally, do not constitute an ACE. It only becomes an ACE if the behaviour is constant and consistent.
Having said that, if you were EVER subjected to sexual assault from someone older than you, or you were EVER injured deliberately and badly by one of your adults, or you EVER lived with any type of domestic abuse, these DO constitute an ACE…
If your ACE score is four or more, you’re likely to need to take some time to understand the impact of your own upbringing on your sense of adult self. If you don’t recognise these things as problematic – if you’re part of the, “It never did me any harm!” brigade, then you’re going to be guilty of perpetuating abuse, even if you don’t mean to.
Top Tips
Know your own ACEs score and be really honest with yourself about the impact of those experiences. You may need some professional support to work through stuff and that’s ok.
Be really honest about your own children’s ACEs scores – Remember that trauma isn’t what happens to us, it’s what happens inside us as a result of what happened to us, so the important part is how well the ACE has been recovered from, rather than the superficial ‘seriousness’ of the ACE in the first place.
Remember that the antidote to trauma is connection so that moment when your kids seem to be at their least lovable and determined to get on every last one of your nerves, is when they most need you to CONNECT with them, not simply CORRECT their ‘behaviour’.
Recovery from trauma requires Trusting Relationships And Unconditional, Meaningful Acceptance – if you can’t do this for and with yourself, it’ll be really tricky to do it for anyone else… In other words, you’ll need to show these compassions to yourself if you’re to model them successfully for your children.
All change is scary – even change that is for the better. Whatever your neural conditioning (“Neurons that fire together wire together”, remember) it’s probably deep-rooted in your own childhood experiences. This conditioning must be UN-learned before you can start to RE-learn new strategies and nobody can undo twenty-one years of conditioning (because we’re all only twenty-one, right?!) in three weeks – it’s not a quick fix. The good news is that your children are much less fixed in their ways than their adults so you’ll see a change in their responses to your new approach quite quickly, sometimes even instantaneously!
JLTS has developed a special collection of Therapeutic Stories designed for children, providing a secure and efficient method to introduce and delve into difficult emotions and experiences. Find out more and purchase your own copy here:
Image Credits:
From Pixabay
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