So many people have contacted me about the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) quiz since I uploaded it in last week’s blog.
Here it is, if you’d like to read it again.
It’s been a revelation to a lot of you.
I can split the people who’ve contacted me into 2 camps.
Camp 1 is the people who scored/scored highly on the quiz.
This group knew they didn’t have a great childhood, but seeing it in black and white has been quite hard/saddening for them.
Most hadn’t realised that their childhood had had such an impact, or that so many of their current issues stemmed back to what happened all those years ago.
I want to send all you Camp 1 people some Love, hope and a big hug.
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.
That’s it…believe it or not…they need very little else.
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?”
But it often 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 issue 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) have ACEs that they’ve clearly never healed from.
They are still wounded little children walking around in adult 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 emotionally unavailable.
They often won’t 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.
It’s as simple as 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 these can be overcome 🙂
Camp 2 is the people who didn’t score on the quiz.
I’ve been asked so many times this week…
“But Christina, none of those things on the list happened to me, so why do I still have problems with A, B and C?”
Well, as I explained last week, 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 here.
Many Lovelies 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 Lovely.
This feels like distance and/or coldness which the child will interpret to mean something the matter with them.
They’ll feel bad or sad or wrong for having these Love-needs.
They might even feel shame.
Remember, the child never blames the parent – they blame themselves.
They make themselves wrong.
They’ll believe that they are 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, that can go on to cause all kinds of problems later in life.
I talk about this in my short E-book:-
Why do I have low self-esteem and what can I do about it?
You can buy it here.
School can be brutal when you’re ‘different’ or struggle academically.
This can definitely lead to low self-esteem and other issues.
It’s estimated that 75% of homeless people are dyslexic.
So our schooldays simply can’t be ignored.
I’ve been told by many 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 usually the cause of the unhappiness in my low self-esteem clients.
Current figures show that up to 85% of the world’s population suffers from low self-esteem, so something is going wrong somewhere.
I firmly believe that EVERYONE should have therapy.
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, far from it.
A few short months can clear up so much of your old baggage and set you on a completely different path.
Your career, relationships and overall happiness 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 baggage?
I’m here when you’re ready.
Much Love
Christina xx