Traumatic and Adverse Childhood Experiences and their Effect on Mental Health (+ ACEs Trauma Test)
Adverse childhood experiences are a subcategory of traumatic experiences that happen in childhood. Well beyond the child’s control, ACEs can cause a lot of negative effects on children and hurt their mental and physical health, negatively affecting their circumstances well into adulthood.
In this blog post, we will explore traumatic and adverse experiences in childhood, and we will list some of the most often resulting adverse effects. In the end, our ACE trauma test can help you understand if you have had any adverse childhood experiences.
What are Adverse Childhood Experiences?
Adverse Childhood Experiences (Scale), or ACEs for short, are traumatic or potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood - the first 17 years of life.
ACEs include traumatic experiences that are threatening to the life and safety of the child itself, as well as experiences that happen in the child’s environment that undermine their safety, stability, or bonding with those around them. Examples of immediate danger include experiencing violence, abuse of any kind, or neglect. Environmental dangers are violent households or neighborhoods, having family members who suffer abuse, mental illness, mistreatment, or violence, as well as instabilities of different sorts like divorce, poverty, eviction, discrimination, imprisonment of caregivers, and the like.
In the United States, 3 in 4 high school students report having at least one ACE, while every 1 in 5 students have four or more ACEs. The most common forms of ACE for teenagers were emotional and physical abuse and living in a household affected by mental health problems, substance abuse, divorce, and poverty.
Children who have more Adverse Childhood Experiences are prone to more mental health challenges that start earlier in life, as well as more chronic medical conditions, lower social development, and more learning difficulties and academic scores.
Types of ACEs
There are three types of Adverse Childhood Experiences:
Abuse - Physical, emotional, or sexual in nature.
Neglect - Prolonged physical or emotional isolation and neglect, where the child’s needs are continuously not met.
Household Dysfunction - Living in a household where there is mental illness, substance abuse, divorce, violent confrontations, or incarcerated relative.
The Effects of Trauma and ACEs
Traumatic and adverse childhood experiences have numerous negative effects on the child’s development. They impact their neurology and stress hormones and cause diverse behavioral, physical, and mental risks. Furthermore, they can also make children more susceptible to adverse experiences.
In the next part, we will explore each of these effects in more detail.
Brain Development
Unlike many species of the animal kingdom, humans aren’t born with fully developed brains. The structural development of the mind happens over time during the formative years and is guided by the environment, early life experiences, and interactions with others.
Continuous stress and chronic adverse experiences can activate the brain regions associated with the fear response more often, reducing the ability of other brain regions to develop and function. When our fight-or-flight response is activated, the brain regions associated with logical thinking, impulse control, and memory turn off. When done in the formative years, this sets the brain structure in a certain way that may predispose the person to other adverse experiences, primarily through automatic reactions to distressing situations and impulsivity.
Children who grow up with ACEs are at higher risk of having an overstimulated amygdala (the part of the brain associated with fight or flight responses) and an under stimulated frontal lobe, which is in charge of impulse control and logical thinking.
Chronic Toxic Stress
The American Academy of Pediatrics categorizes stress into two groups. One, eustress, is positive and tolerable, helping individuals to focus, give their full attention, and lead to success and growth. Eustress doesn’t cause permanent damage since it’s rare, moderate, and highly tolerable, often perceived as excitement.
Distress or toxic stress, on the other hand, is harmful and often overwhelming. Toxic stress is intense and frequent, repeatedly activating the body’s fight or flight response and sending signals to the brain that it’s in existential danger. Single distressing events can make toxic stress, but that form of stress is known to reduce and fade out as the occurrence and its danger pass.
Children are highly dependent on the adults around them; they need them and their households to feel safe and secure. When they experience adverse situations that stem from a parent or happen in their household, they feel entirely unsafe and in constant existential fear. This leads to continuous toxic stress exposure and may lead to mental health issues, behavioral difficulties, inability to adjust to changes, learning challenges, and the like.
Behavioral Difficulties
Children who have suffered ACEs are prone to more behavioral difficulties, both in their formative years and later in adulthood. As a way to regain control, they might resort to bullying, or if they tend to be quiet and isolated, they might become victims of bullying. They might cause different behavioral problems in the classroom or be completely isolated and alone, avoiding social interactions and having difficulties creating friends. Children with ACEs often have problems learning, remembering, and paying attention in school.
As grown-ups, they are more prone to smoking, drinking, or substance abuse as a coping mechanism or self-medication method. Furthermore, they might have difficulties concentrating and focusing, finishing school or work requirements, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Grown-ups who have experienced ACEs are more likely to neglect themselves and the people around them. They might show reduced parenting capacity or resort to maladaptive responses to their own children. This primarily happens due to their overwhelmed stress response system, which diminishes their ability to respond healthily to additional stressors.
Mental Health Risks
Children with ACEs are more prone to having mental health difficulties both growing up and as grown-ups. They might include low self-esteem, difficulties regulating their emotions, intense emotions of anger, sadness, or shame, and difficulties learning, focusing, and concentrating.
Growing up with adverse experiences substantially increases the risks of developing different mental health conditions like PTSD, depression, anxiety, or phobias. ACEs also increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and attempts of suicide.
To read more about the effects that trauma has on mental health, you can head over to this blog post.
Physical Health Risks
Children who have suffered ACEs grow into adults who have a higher risk of different physical health conditions or chronic diseases like severe obesity, diabetes, heart disease, strokes, or cancer. A study by the Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego explored the connection between ACEs and health risks and death in adulthood. They found out that the more ACEs a person has in their childhood, the more they are prone to chronic and autoimmune disease, but also alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide.
If you want to learn more about physical health risks due to trauma, you can visit this blog post and understand how trauma affects the body.
Susceptibility to more adverse experiences
Adverse childhood experiences can push children into uneducated and unhealthy coping behaviors like teen pregnancy, running away from home and homelessness, sex trafficking, risks of injury, and addiction.
ACEs' impact on life opportunities stretches well into adulthood. With potential learning and academic difficulties, children who have suffered ACEs have lower education and employment opportunities and, with that, more considerable risks of facing poverty or homelessness.
Psychologically, many children who have suffered ACEs may be prone to “repeating the cycle” and perpetuating the same traumatic events or circumstances as the ones they grew up in, associating with them by familiarity.
ACE Trauma Test / ACEs test / Childhood Trauma Test
In your childhood, did a parent or other adult in the household often yell at you, swear at you, put you down, or humiliate you?
In your childhood, did a parent or other adult in the household often make you feel afraid and worried that they might hurt you?
In your childhood, did an older adult touch you or prompt you to touch them in an inappropriate sexual way?
In your childhood, did you often feel like you were unimportant, no one loved you or wanted to pay attention to you?
In your childhood, did you often feel like no one was there to take care of you, give you food, wash your clothes, help you, or protect you?
In your childhood, was your mother or stepmother repeatedly hit, yelled at, pushed, grabbed, or threatened?
In your childhood, did you live with anyone who was drinking or using street drugs?
In your childhood, was a household member mentally ill or attempted suicide?
In your childhood, did a household member go to prison?
In your childhood, did you lose a biological parent through divorce, abandonment, or other reasons?
Positively answering any of these questions means that you have had that kind of adverse childhood experience. The first three questions reflect childhood abuse; questions 4 and 5 check for childhood neglect, and questions 6 to 10 cover aspects of household dysfunction.
It’s important to remember that not all adverse childhood experiences are necessarily traumas with long-lasting effects. Adverse experiences can potentially be traumatic for a person, and whether that is the case or not is highly individual.
How do we minimize the effects of trauma and ACEs?
To prevent adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), we must start understanding and addressing all of the factors that put people, especially children, at risk. Numerous campaigns and federal funding efforts educate caregivers, teachers, and social workers, helping them navigate difficulties, learn protective practices, and turn to relevant institutions for help. Furthermore, experts at the Center on Child Wellbeing and Trauma discuss the importance of PCEs in reducing the negative impact of ACEs.
PCEs (Positive Childhood Experiences) are supportive and motivational experiences in childhood that help the child feel protected, safe, supported, and appreciated by a helping adult, preferably a parent. Recent research has shown that PCEs can significantly reduce and offset ACEs and lower the long-term consequences of trauma and traumatic experiences.
Unfortunately, not all children have support and protection from those around them. Many of them have to grow up to adulthood and start working through their difficulties with the help of psychotherapy.
EMDR is one of the most successful psychotherapies for trauma, traumatic experiences, and all kinds of post-traumatic stress responses. By tackling the traumatic experiences, as well as the lingering emotions and detrimental thoughts and beliefs from those experiences, EMDR helps clients improve their emotional regulation, mindset, belief system, and coping skills so they can regain control over their inner and outer circumstances.
Conclusion
Adverse childhood experiences can cause life-long negative consequences on mental and physical health. So, for grown-ups who have experienced ACEs, it’s crucial to work through those experiences and regain their sense of control.
At EMDR Therapy Nashville, we provide a supportive environment for you to begin your path toward empowerment and personal growth. Our clinic specializes in services designed exclusively for survivors of traumatic experiences. We understand that trauma affects each person uniquely, which is why our therapists are highly versatile. Not only are we expertly trained in EMDR therapy method, but we also possess extensive knowledge and experience in various other therapeutic approaches.
Book your appointment today and start the road toward a promising future.
Resources
American Academy of Pediatrics. (2014). Adverse childhood experiences and the lifelong consequences of trauma. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.ncpeds.org/resource/collection/69DEAA33-A258-493B-A63F-E0BFAB6BD2CB/ttb_aces_consequences.pdf
Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (US). (1970, January 1). Understanding the impact of trauma. Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/
Child Trauma and Wellbeing. (n.d.). How to counteract adverse childhood experiences and the lifelong consequences of trauma. https://childwellbeingandtrauma.org/how-to-counteract-adverse-childhood-experiences-and-the-lifelong-consequences-of-trauma/