What are Adverse Childhood Experiences?
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According to the ACEs Aware Trauma-Informed Network of Care Roadmap, “Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood. The term “ACEs” refers to 10 categories of adversities in three domains – abuse, neglect, and household challenges – experienced by age 18 years that were evaluated in the 1998 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente landmark study of the same name” (ACEs Aware Trauma-Informed Network of Care Roadmap, 2021).
Adverse Childhood Experiences include having a parent or adult inflict:
Physical Abuse
Emotional Abuse
Sexual Abuse
Physical Neglect
Emotional Neglect
and/or experience in the household:
Domestic violence on mother or stepmother
Addiction or substance abuse
Mental illness
Incarceration
Divorce or parental separation
Why is knowing about Adverse Childhood Experiences important for health coaches?
The situations listed above are all stressful, especially for a child’s growing brain. Their little bodies are seeking safety and not finding it. When the body’s stress response stays activated over a long period of time, the result is increased inflammation and hormone disruption. When a child experiences this kind of stress, it can also affect brain development.
The link between ACES and Chronic Disease
An adult who has one or more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) that were not mitigated has an increased risk for many chronic diseases. Which diseases? According to the article ‘The Role of Mindfulness in Reducing the Adverse Effects of Childhood Stress and Trauma,’ they include “the presence of mental health disorders, adult ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures, and liver disease” (Ortiz & Sibinga, 2017).
What are mitigating factors? Children experiencing ACEs with at least one stable and supportive adult in their life are less likely to experience toxic stress and develop unhealthy coping strategies that lead to chronic disease.
Talking about ACES with our health coaching clients
Here is one example of a screening tool that includes questions about both ACEs and mitigating factors: https://www.thresholdglobalworks.com/pdfs/PACES-with-provider-note.pdf
Learn more about the concept of risk and protective factors here: https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/20190718-samhsa-risk-protective-factors.pdf
Want to learn stress reduction practices for health coaching clients? Find the Mindful Interventions for Health Coaches class (free!) here: https://plasticsurgeryrecoverymassage.teachable.com/p/mindful-interventions-for-health-coaches
The book Mindful Strategies for Adult Clients with Adverse Childhood Experiences provides the information and research to empower mind-body professionals to support their clients with adverse childhood experiences in reaching their health goals.
Resources:
ACEs Aware Trauma-Informed Network of Care Roadmap (2021 June). Retrieved from: https://www.acesaware.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Aces-Aware-Network-of-Care-Roadmap.pdf
Ortiz, R., & Sibinga, E. M. (2017). The Role of Mindfulness in Reducing the Adverse Effects of Childhood Stress and Trauma. Children (Basel, Switzerland), 4(3), 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/children4030016 Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5368427/
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