There is a recent but ongoing research about the effects of ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) on people’s further development along life. What we always imagined is true: those painful experiences when we are little in relationship with our parents and family limit not only our ability to be happy and prosper, but also determine our health for the rest of our lives.
We are now watching this information about a whole society filled with Wounded Children (the name we use here in this blog to name adults carrying around their own, repressed ACEs) doing the best they can to survive the wounds of their childhood, that are produced in and by people in their most significant relationships.
The same place where our birth places us is the home that will give us any one of the adverse experiences listed below, and in this way will put limits to our future possibility for happiness…
It is highly possible that our parents, by allowing any ACE to happen, are only reproducing the painful conditions of their own childhood; but the reality of us transmitting such pain to the new generations is very difficult to accept.
The ACE Study is an ongoing collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente. It is perhaps the largest scientific research study of its kind, showing a direct, causal relationship between nine categories of adverse childhood experience:
- physical abuse;
- emotional abuse;
- sexual abuse;
- an alcohol and/or drug abuser in the household;
- an incarcerated household member;
- living with someone who is chronically depressed, mentally ill, institutionalized, or suicidal;
- witnessing domestic violence against the mother;
- parental discord indicated by divorce, separation, abandonment;
- emotional or physical neglect
The presence of each one of the Adverse Childhood Experiences determines at least 18 physical, mental and behavioral health outcomes. If you are brave enough, can you identify how many of those experiences were there, in your home when you were growing up?
The more ACEs people have had in their formative years, the higher the rate of mental, physical, behavioral disease and disability in the population, including higher rates of chronic disease, low educational achievement and increased violence.
In the words of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study authors:
“The ACE Study reveals a powerful relationship between our emotional experiences as children and our physical and mental health as adults, as well as the major causes of adult mortality in the United States.
It documents the conversion of traumatic emotional experiences in childhood into organic disease later in life. How does this happen, this reverse alchemy, turning the gold of a newborn infant into the lead of a depressed, diseased adult?
The Study makes it clear that time does not heal some of the adverse experiences we found so common in the childhoods of a large population of middle-aged, middle class Americans. One does not ‘just get over’ some things, not even fifty years later.”
Whatever we can plan or imagine that would improve relationships in the home, is adding to the possibility that any newborn could have the whole deck of healthy possibilities allowed for his/her future.
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20110514/OPINION03/705149995
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