Health Coaches Quick Guide to Adverse Childhood Experiences

What are Adverse Childhood Experiences?

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

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/