Posted: 10 May
Sometimes when we find out about the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) quiz it can be a revelation to us.
We roughly split into 2 camps.
Camp 1 is the group who score/score highly on the quiz.
You know you didn’t have a great childhood, but seeing it in black and white can been quite hard/saddening for you.
Most of you don’t realise that your childhood has had such an impact, or that so many of your current issues stemmed back to what happened all those years ago.
I want to send all you Camp 1 people some love and hope.
When I work with a client for the first time, our first session is what I call the fact-find.
Without using the quiz specifically, I always go back into my client’s childhood to establish if any of the main ACEs occurred.
If they did, I know I have to ‘clean up’ those as much as possible, before we can start to tackle their current issues.
Often just the cleaning up of those old childhood issues can solve their current problem.
Lots of clients will say to me, “Why do we have to poke around in my childhood – that was decades ago, it can’t still be relevant surely?”
But often it is.
We are ALL, very much, a product of our upbringing.
Very occasionally, I come across a client that has had a pretty horrendous childhood, but they appear to have come through it unscathed.
Their current malaise doesn’t appear to be linked to their childhood in any way.
These were the resilient children.
(Resilience – or mental strength can make 2 people respond completely differently to the same event).
It’s impossible to be sure, but I just get the feeling that I don’t need to dwell too much in their early years.
Others (the vast majority, I have to say) have ACEs that they’ve clearly never healed from.
They are still wounded little boys walking around in adult men’s bodies.
I don’t mean this to sound patronising.
I was a wounded child myself, until I was around 40.
If something happens to us when we’re very young, that we don’t have the knowledge or wisdom to process, it can make us stuck emotionally.
We can get stunted at that age.
We continue to grow physically and mentally, but we stay stuck emotionally, at that young age.
Until that wound is processed and allowed to heal, we remain at that stunted age.
If someone doesn’t work though their childhood wounds, it’s possible that they can go to their graves (severely) emotionally stunted.
They’ll go through life feeling numb, shut down, closed-off and/or empty.
They often won’t even realise that they can actually feel very different.
This will obviously have a major impact on their relationships, overall happiness and even mental health.
Emotional intelligence is a very real thing.
It’s very important to grieve and mentally send love to the little version of ourselves for what they went through.
I believe all the previous versions of us still live on inside our hearts.
(Just like the smaller Russian dolls do).
This can be remedied by simply picturing the little 4 year old or 7 year old us and mentally sending them as much love as we can.
Nobody knows what they needed (but didn’t have) more than we do.
Inner child work is a really beautiful healing process.
Studies repeatedly show that the greater the number of ACEs, the higher the likelihood of facing physical and mental challenges later in life.
These challenges range from depression and anxiety to conditions like cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune disorders.
Infancy and early childhood are periods of heightened neural plasticity, and traumatic experiences during this time can have lasting effects on behaviour, psychology, and development.
ACEs can alter brain chemistry, impacting areas responsible for impulse control, learning, memory, judgment, and emotional regulation.
They can also program the nervous system to remain stuck in chronic fight-or-flight response.
Consistently elevated stress hormone levels from this response can trigger higher blood pressure and blood sugar levels, disrupting mood, sleep, and contributing to weight gain.
They also accelerate aging, lower immunity, and foster chronic inflammation.
This is a lot of bad news.
The good news is, with the right kind of help, all of this wounding can be overcome.
Camp 2 is the people who don’t score on the quiz.
I’ve been asked so many times…
“But Christina, none of those things on the list happened to me, so why do I still struggle with A, B and C?”
Well, as I explained in my original blog, the list is not all encompassing.
It’s just a general guide to some of the major adverse experiences.
A more sensitive child can be impacted by much less severe experiences.
There are many other things that can happen in our childhoods that can go on to hold us back.
General MILD neglect over a long period of time can result in the same kind of damage as more short-term WILFUL neglect.
Being brought up by a parent, who has a different Love Language is a very common one I see.
Read about The 5 Love Languages in my previous blog series on the site.
Many sensitive boys need a very soft touch.
Their Love Languages are almost always Words of Affirmation and/or Physical Touch.
They need loving warm words and lots of cuddles as a child.
Quite often, they will have a Mother with an Acts of Service love language.
Mum will do things for them – wash their clothes, cook for them etc, but won’t love them the way they desperately need to be loved.
Mum is not abusive, but the love she provides just doesn’t nurture or suit the sensitive, young boy.
This feels like distance and/or coldness, which the child can interpret to mean something is the matter with them.
They’ll feel bad or sad or wrong for having these love needs.
They might even feel shame.
And remember, the child never blames the parent – they blame themselves.
They make themselves wrong.
They don’t stop loving the parent, they stop loving themselves.
They believe that they’re unlovable or unworthy somehow, which is blatantly untrue.
The final biggie that I want to talk about for Camp 2 is schooldays.
You could have had a loving upbringing, but if you were dyslexic, or had ADHD, or were just slightly different in some way – poor, overweight, cripplingly shy, had a stutter, or a different skin colour, ginger hair etc – (I had head-to-toe freckles) that can go on to cause all kinds of problems later in life.
School can be brutal when you’re ‘different’ or struggle academically.
This can definitely lead to low self-esteem and other issues.
So our schooldays simply can’t be ignored.
I’ve been told by some of my clients that their previous therapists/counsellors brushed over these ‘milder’ childhood experiences.
If there’s been an absence of the major ACE’s, they’ve disregarded the childhood altogether.
But these milder experiences are often the cause of your long term unhappiness.
So they simply can’t be disregarded.
I firmly believe that EVERYONE should have therapy.
I simply think of it as emotional hygiene.
I don’t think any of us survive childhood completely unscathed.
If your foundations are wobbly, how can you ever hope to build a strong, stable structure on top of them?
You don’t need to spend years in therapy to resolve these childhood issues, far from it.
I have a 12-week version of The Happy Man method.
A few short months can clear up so much of your old baggage and set you on a completely different (happier) path.
Your career, relationships and overall life-satisfaction will all improve when you’re not carrying all that baggage.
Your childhood DOES NOT have to dictate your future.
I promise!
Is it time for you to offload your old baggage?
I’m here when you’re ready.