Adverse Childhood Experiences & The ACEs Test

Have you heard of the ACEs test?

I first learned of these through Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and her book The Deepest Well - Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

It’s a powerful book and it helped me understand the urgency of our situation in a very specific way.

She’s a doctor and started noticing that her patients who had experienced more intense childhood experiences seemed to have more medical issues - not just mental health issues or stress disorders, but physical health concerns like heart disease and asthma and diabetes. She began to wonder if stressful childhoods could lead to poor health. After a lot of research, after re-discovering the ACEs test (published in 1998 in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine), she arrived at a very clear conclusion: yes. it seemed that growing up in a traumatic household and experiencing what is formally termed “adverse childhood experiences” could lead directly to physical health issues. Lifelong physical health issues.

This stopped me in my tracks.

I have never - ever - felt an urgency to heal.

We know it is important for us to name our trauma, share our secrets, tell our stories so that we get them out of our bodies and so we can heal.

So we can lead lives with meaningful relationships, so we can shed old behavior patterns that keep us stuck, so we can be productive members of society not forever weighed down by what happened to us as kids.

We want to heal so the hole in our hearts, the thing that has always felt missing, the part of ourselves we never fully understood — it can all be filled, and found and fully understood.

That, to me, has been the importance in healing.

And as we are always told: true healing takes time. These are not lessons learned easily in a few weeks or years.

We must unfold. Unlearn. Rediscover ourselves. Relearn.

All of this takes time and I have over the years taken great comfort in knowing that I have all the time in the world to heal.

There are hundreds of Instagram quotes that re-affirm this. You are right where you need to be. You are on your own time. Healing is not linear. Etc Etc

Right?

We are told that it will all come when it comes and there is no need to force it.

And when you are healing from really crummy stuff, it is a great comfort to hear that you can take your time.

And then I read about ACES.

I realized that I might develop serious health conditions simply because of what I experienced in my alcoholic home.

Suddenly, healing on my own sweet time seemed like less of an option.

Healing asap seemed really important.

So what IS ACES, what is the ACES test and how can we use it as a tool — just like everything else I share with you, these are all just tools to take or leave as make most sense to you - to help put a finer point on why healing is so important and how do we balance that with still taking our time?

How might ACES help us prioritize (not force, pressure, stress about) healing in our lives?

Listen to the latest podcast episode to learn more and take your ACEs test here.