Quick Thought #13 – More Trauma Makes More Problems More Likely, and This is Trauma

All of the caveats aside about ACE scores that I’ve written about before, (tl;dr – Yes the more childhood traumas you’ve had, the more likely you will deal with various issues as an adult, but it’s not a set fate for everyone.)

I think we can, however, accept that children who dealt with more traumatic events are more likely to suffer from depression, have issues with addiction and a variety of other poor outcomes.

What we may not realize, is that every child, and adult for that matter, has been dealing with major life upheaval, sudden, forced changes in our day to day lives, stress and the anxiety of not know what is coming, at a minimum. We can add that many children are also dealing with loss of someone they know, the trauma of dealing with racism and other issues, their parents losing jobs, etc.

In short, that ACE score calculator just keeps getting ticked off more and more. Just about everyone has added one, some as many as 3-4, in the last 3-4 months.

There is no question that this is going to lead to more people dealing with poor outcomes, unless we can get people to help, and resources, as soon as possible. Can we? I don’t know, but we probably should really be thinking about it before we end up with an even worse epidemic of addiction, depression and suicide.

Secondly, I have a question for anyone who truly believes that “everything happens for a reason”, or that trauma is designed to teach us and help us grow. If that were true, how do you understand ACE scores? Wouldn’t more trauma in childhood give us stronger, and more resilient adults? Because that’s not at all what we see in reality.