Resilient Systems Needed & What Dr. Felitti Said

Day 9, Day 8, Day 7/6, Days 5, Day 4,  Day 3, Day 2, Day 1/Intro Note: Please forgive grammar errors/typos which are all mine.

Oprah’s 60 Minutes mention of the ACE study was kind of a 20th-anniversary nod to ACE study co-principals, Dr. Robert Anda and Dr. Vincent Felitti. Two decades after the ACE study was published Oprah Winfrey is talking about it on 6o Minutes and many are now saying TIPPING POINT.

It’s #ACEs everywhere.

I wonder what Anda and Felitti are thinking and feeling? Are they delighted, deliriously giddy or shaking their heads saying, “What took so long?” I’m not sure.

But respectfully, it’s about more than them (and they’ve been saying that as well).

It’s about us.

All of us.

We the people.

It’s about health and well-being and reframing our understanding of personal and public health. Adverse childhood experiences are not just personal experiences (though they are that, as well).

The presence or absence of ACEs has an influence on all humans. It’s like cholesterol or blood pressure or oxygen. The amount we do or don’t have, especially during childhood, matters.

Period.

For all of us who are humans.

We don’t experience things entirely and exactly the same, but there’s enough evidence to notice trends.

Dr. Vincent Felitti wrote, in a chapter on The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic.

“The findings from the ACE Study provide a remarkable insight into how we become what we are as individuals and as a nation. They are important medically, socially and economically. Indeed, they have given us reason to reconsider the very structure of medical, public health and social services practices in America and other countries.”

It’s not a small thing.

I believe the statement above is true but I didn’t come to this ACEs awareness information as a doctor or as a public health professional.

I came to it as a trauma-mama-survivor-writer. I came to it as someone seeking relief from being post-traumatically stressed and post-traumatically pissed off. I came across it tired because few things seemed to address causes of pain or longer-term solutions for individuals as well as family or social systems.

The only approach seemed to be clinical, medical, and ineffective. Or painful. Like many others, my journey felt pretty individual and isolated even though I was one of the millions of others feeling just as alone.

I thought I had something missing me.

It felt like I was showering in molasses and could never get a clean or fresh start or pick up the pace of my self-improvement plans.

It was all diagnosing, labeling, treating symptoms and trying to reconcile living with lack.

None of that got at causes, provided context or empowered me to learn what I’d not known.

To me, it just seemed that the world was easy for others and that was something was wrong with me for lacking that easy-going ease.

That’s why the ACE study was so huge for me on a personal level and why I go on about it all of the time.

It gave me a wider perspective and helped me understand huge numbers of people with similar issues all at the same time. For many of us, there’s been one approach for addiction, one specialist to deal with sexual abuse. Maybe we’ve had some information about neglect, dysfunction, abuse, absent or destructive parents but it tended to be as though those are singular experiences rather than combined, complex and cumulative.

Maybe we’ve had some grip on how poverty and patriarchy stack the deck against some and how racism means that even those without any ACEs live with discrimination, danger, and injustice. But there’s never been a way to look at so much all at the time and to get statistics that give both data and distance.

It’s radical and life-changing for so many of us in both our personal and professional work.

That is still true two decades after the ACE study was published.

We have been able to childhood adversity under the microscope rather than only looking at fragments of individual experiences.

The ACE study helped me understand population health as opposed to personal hope and by making my struggles less personal it also made me more hopeful as well. I’m so grateful and relieved.

It helped me stop spending all my time and energy obsessing over my own life, attitude, shortcomings, scars, and even my healing. It’s not that those things weren’t and aren’t important, but that is only a small slice of a bigger solution.

I needed to learn and know about different things. Safety, joy, trust, intimacy, health in order to be a good-enough parent or partner.

This is a totally different approach.

And I needed others to be with who could support and mentor me as well as others I could be with who got it from the inside.

It’s about recovering from having been unsafe as a child but there’s a bigger picture. It’s about all kids and adults being and feeling safe or safe-enough. It’s about humans being visible, validated and valued.

Yes, my nervous system needed (needs) changing, nurturing and TLC. But that’s symptom management and that only helps short-term. We need systems to change and systems change in order to promote well-being across the board in ways we do not yet as a culture.

Dr. Felitti wrote:

“The findings of the ACE Study provide a credible basis for a new paradigm of medical, public health, and social service practice…”

And while he said that in reference to “starting with a biopsychosocial evaluation of all patients in at the outset of all ongoing medical care” I think it’s bad-ass and on target overall statement.

“The findings of the ACE Study provide a credible basis for a new paradigm of medical, public health, and social service practice…”

It’s worth repeating. It’s worth working for.

Let’s make resilient medical, public health and social service practices and watch how much more resilient individuals, families, and communities are as a result.

#ACEs #traumainformed #informedbytraumasurvivors