What They Teach Us
The adverse childhood experiences (ACE) studies show the link between childhood stress and trauma, and later life illness and challenge. For a deep understanding of this, you can take our education classes. This research has been a tremendous help in educating people about seemingly unrelated chronic physical and psychological conditions with common roots in our physiological stress response, often beginning in early life. These chronic conditions are often badly managed by the conventional medical system, with people believing they are structurally damaged, or gaslit that it is all in their head. The ACE studies allow us to know what we experience is real. Once people know this, and realise the medical system falls short, it opens the possibility for them to find their way to mind-body medicine, which can help us heal in an empowered way.
So, these studies are a way to legitimise our mind and body symptoms, and to think about them in a more holistic way instead of 30 scary diagnoses that disempower us and can re-traumatise us. What the ACE studies tell us in simple terms is that a mind and body in a chronic state of protection over a long period of time, will have mental, emotional and physical symptoms, due to our stress response being designed to be time limited, not on full time. Over time it will be catabolic, meaning our organs and systems will not work well until we resolve this protective state here and now, which we are all innately designed to, no matter what our history has been.
What They Do Not Teach Us
One of my mentors Dr Scott Kauffman recently echoed my own thoughts, that ACE studies too much focus on the pathology and not enough research on the possibility of flourishing. The ACE studies do not include that we have the power to shift out of that chronic state of protection and that there, with time, space and appropriate support - our body can self-heal. This constant focus on pathology in much of psychology and science feeds our brain’s natural bias to the negative and we can get fixated on ‘what’s wrong’, when healing comes from noticing and nourishing all that is right in us already. Then building more of what we do want and need in our daily lives and our communities. When we do this for others from our heart (not from an empty cup or in a boundary-less way; from compassion that has boundaries) we further heal ourselves. Nowhere in the studies was it added that each human being (and indeed mammal) is designed to resolve their stress responses and return to a state of rest, repair and possibility. There is so much evidence to support this. Indigenous and spiritual wisdom has also shown us our capacity to adapt and heal for thousands of years.
In psychological terms, working from my own field of depth psychology; we are meant to encounter challenge in life in order to grow. So even though symptoms are very hard and often life changing in these conditions - they are often messengers and profound agents of change. They draw our attention inwards so we can get curious about our inner and outer environment. If we are ready to; we all have the choice to grow and change when we live in a place with relative safety, food, and shelter.
Unfortunately, the mental health system and the conventional health system are in the business of treating symptoms. Don’t get me wrong, both are a miracle for acute care. But what the symptom focus model has done is imprinted in us a deep fear of our body, of our symptoms, and with that, a fear of our traumas. That somehow, they are the brokenness in us to be ‘treated’ so the symptoms of it can ‘go away’. This is a sad and pretty shaming meaning to make of a process that yes looks and feels like an emergency at that start, but really is a signal of emergence and growth when we are held safely enough to get curious about what is alive in our mind-body; our emotions, needs, different parts of us, our gifts and our authenticity.
What They Miss Out - Context
Another of my teachers; Dr James Gordon, said to us in our training, "trauma and challenge are a part of life, not apart from life”. I really appreciate this as we need to stop treating trauma and ACEs like something undesirable that are separate from the rest of life. To see them more as part of life on this planet due to our current value and power systems, that we all need to radically accept (not approve of) so we can work with reality and bring about collective healing. Dr Gordon has seen time and again on a large scale from their global programs, that trauma integrates given time, space, and community support. It is not some ‘thing’ that needs us to retreat from life and treat it like a curse and obsess about fixing it. We need to turn towards it in ourselves, allow it to come up between one another in relationships of all kinds, so it can be witnessed, integrated, released and be seen and soothed in unique ways for each of us. And also learn to live at the same time as we heal, together. This is a kind of community and collective somatic healing that will allow for deeper change over generations.
So much in our Western society is about identifying pathology and getting rid of the symptoms to re-engage as ‘normal’ with the very systems that are causing harm. The people I work with emerge different after their recovery, wanting to add to the collective change by leading with values of kindness, partnership, and cooperation. Trauma is a soil in which compassion and wisdom grow, when we stop treating it like some plague to get rid of. Accepting it as part of a shared collective experience also cuts the isolation, we can feel from looking at ACE’s and thinking this is just individual. This can bring about shame, when in truth the ACE studies were and continue to reflect our wider environment, systems, and disconnection from nature. So, it is important we widen our lens from our own individual situation. Yes, our history is often immensely painful AND we are not alone in that on earth at this time. It it is a rite of passage for humans to grow home to connection with nature after a devastating legacy of domination and colonialism.
The Innate Ability to Adapt
As Darwin said, survival is about adapting, not being the fittest. It is the people that can adapt to where they find themselves that will flourish. Highly sensitive people (HSP’s) have more adaptable nervous systems, so really are primed to heal, despite often having adapted very strongly to protect themselves due to adversity. Once that environment changes, and people are taught how to influence their own internal environment - these people are very capable of growth and change. '
Learning about ACEs allowed me to pull the threads of my 12 confusing diagnoses into a coherent whole that allowed me to know the truth that I was currently stuck in a state of protection, and that it was entirely possible to grow home to a state of rest and repair. It allowed me to let go of all the labels of illnesses and trauma too as I took it down to the deepest root truth; that my system protected me as it was designed to, nothing wrong or bad or shameful. But that my stress response system had become very over sensitised and was firing off constantly from perceived danger and from erroneously predicting future danger, which was causing very serious and real symptoms; autoimmune disease, CFS/ME, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, interstitial cystitis, food intolerance, chemical sensitivity, depression, panic attacks, severe anxiety, suicidal ideation. Ultimately these symptoms were messengers and sign posts towards what needed my kind attention.
I had to stop throwing grenades at symptoms to ‘get rid of them’. This rarely works with HSP’s as we are being called to heal more deeply than this. It needed my curiosity about what in my daily life I could build to embody a state of rest and repair, and what in my daily life blocked that state. For example, what personality patterns, unmet needs, emotions, physical and emotional triggers that I needed to respond to in new ways to teach my nervous system I was safer here and now, and was I being authentic. I was able to begin to turn towards what I found in my body and life moment by moment with compassion, curiosity, and with a growing kit of gentle resources to see, soothe, and help those echoes of the past be held here in kind awareness. I realised I could and indeed needed to do this as part of life, not apart from life, as obsessive healing is a trap. I still have triggers, challenges, and unless I decapitate myself, I will always have mind-body effects, they just don’t scare me anymore and they pass easily.
Commonly, our culture has groomed us into constantly looking for ways to improve our circumstances and ourselves, either by changing ourselves or our environment. Big Wellness and social media therapy feed into this a lot. Self-improvement has become increasingly self-focused, sometimes an obsession, leading to a lot of neuroticism, which is a trait correlated with anxiety and illness. How do you think a child or person would feel if the only thing they heard all day was constant suggestions of improvements? Do you think they would feel able to rest and repair? Do you think that they would feel loved, safe and accepted for who and what they are? Noticing this habit reveals to us how we are spending time and energy creating tension and self-rejection in ourselves in pursuit of 'healing trauma'. The tension made from rejecting our current situation and grasping/reaching for some imagined other something. If we come at our healing in this way, and use our ACE scores to justify needing to do this, we will continue to send messages inwards that something is ‘wrong’ with us, which is the opposite of safety.
The Practice Of Learning To Flourish
This is why I invite my clients to view the positive changes stemming from our practices in Befriend as side effects, not goals. If we do this - the practices we explore in daily life can turn into something nourishing and safety creating, rather than a painful hunt for progress and improvements. Over time, this does transform our approach to life too.
I will always be grateful for the aha moments that learning about ACEs brought me. But alongside this individual knowledge I needed to stop personalising planetary challenges as personal failing or sign of brokenness, and instead let it open me up to the practice of self-compassion that allows us all to acknowledge our legitimate pain (but not turn it into a self defeating story we cannot write a new chapter of), know that pain is part of being human, we all struggle, and extend kindness to all parts of us and all beings on our planet. When we do that, we bring down suffering and can accept reality more to work with it.
I can reassure someone deeply that they can heal after trauma, but really, we need to turn towards that scared part who feels broken or isolated, and whisper to them that we will not keep leaving them alone in pursuit of 'self-improvement' or reduce them to an ACE score. That we will instead tend and befriend them one moment at a time in daily life until they know the truth of their wholeness. That will happen at the pace of trust, in unique ways for each mind, body and being. We are also not built to do this alone. We are built to flourish with nature and community who both hold up a mirror for us to see the truth of our wholeness and humanity, to allow us to accept our seasons of love, pain, loss, death and rebirth as part of life, and walk each other home.
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