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10.02.2022 / 14:09
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A Psychologist’s Guide to Adverse Childhood Experiences and What We Do About Them
I’m sure, by now, most of you have heard of ACEs, otherwise known as adverse childhood experiences. The term was first coined by the Kaiser Permanente health care organization in Southern California and referred to any incidents in childhood that may result in trauma or any other type of difficulty. To us, with our 2022 sensibilities, this seems obvious. But into the mid-1980s, the connection between emotional experiences and health was seen as unscientific. It was downright pseudoscience. This means there were so many generations before our own that believed their emotional experiences had no impact on their health. That makes all the holiday arguments make a little more sense, right? However, now we have an almost universal understanding that our experiences can shape our emotions which can create real change in our biology. And that experiencing adversity at any point in life, particularly in childhood, can impact health outcomes long-term.