People Who Have Endured These 10 Traumas Are 80% More Likely To Have Health Issues, Says Research
The mind and body are deeply connected, especially when it comes to trauma.
Katy Smith | Canva Since I was seven years old, I’ve struggled with my weight, and I never knew why. I rode my bike everywhere and ate the same things other ’90s kids ate. Still, my metabolism held onto every ounce. At 12, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which meant my body was attacking its own thyroid.
I took medication. I went gluten-free. I studied nutrition. I fixed my leaky gut. I fasted and worked out. Beyond a temporary fix, nothing helped — until I started intensive trauma therapy.
Thanks to a psychologist who specialized in developmental trauma, I learned that my body was not a machine filled with isolated parts. It was a living, vulnerable organism that had been shaped by its environment.
And between the ages of seven and 18, said environment was chaotic. Studies prove that childhood trauma seriously impacts your health. Yet most medical doctors won’t ask about your childhood during an annual check-up. Or, y’know, ever.
In 1995, Dr. Vincent Felitti published a study about the link between health issues and adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. While working at an obesity clinic, Dr. Felitti noticed that patients who experienced childhood trauma often could not lose weight, no matter what they did. It was as if their bodies were actively working against them.
Since then, multiple studies have found that people who endured ACEs were 80% more likely to have health issues in adulthood. These health issues often include autoimmune diseases, heart disease, diabetes, chronic pain, sleep disorders, asthma, organ failure, substance abuse, and cancer.
How many of these traumatic events did you endure as a kid? The ACEs questionnaire consists of 10 traumatic events. It asks adults to tally up how many of them they experienced before the age of 18.
If you endured these 10 traumas in life, you’re 80% more likely to have health issues:
1. You didn’t have enough food, wore dirty clothes, or had no one to protect or take care of you
2. You lost a parent through divorce, death, or abandonment
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3. You lived with someone who was depressed, mentally ill, or had attempted suicide
4. You lived with someone who abused drugs or alcohol
5. The adults in your household were physically violent toward each other or threatened to hurt each other
6. The adults in your household were physically violent toward you
7. The adults in your household swore at you or insulted you
8. You lived with someone who went to jail or prison
9. You felt as though no one in your family loved you or thought you were special
10. You experienced abuse from an adult or someone at least five years older than you
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The more ACEs you endured, the more likely you are to struggle with the aforementioned health issues — and 17% of adults will report four ACEs or more.
My own score is a little convoluted, granted my older brother was the primary source of my trauma (not my parents and technically not an adult). Still, he had undiagnosed, unmedicated bipolar disorder, and things got so bad, I ended up with a disorder of my own: one of the dissociative variety.
If siblings count, my score is an eight out of 10. I guess that explains the thyroid problem.
Why do ACEs wreak so much havoc on our bodies? In her book called The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris explores exactly that.
Dr. Burke Harris is a pediatrician, the former Surgeon General of California, and one of the first doctors to incorporate ACEs into her treatment plans for patients. For decades, she’s been researching the correlation between childhood trauma and health problems:
“Toxic stress response can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity […] without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress‑response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress‑related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.”
In other words, when your nervous system is overloaded with stress during your developmental years, it impacts the growth and chemistry of your brain, body, hormones, and immune system.
Dr. Burke Harris also noticed a correlation between childhood adversity and ADHD, because if a kid is constantly in fight-or-flight, how can you expect them to sit in a chair and focus on a dumb math equation?
Through early identification and intervention, Dr. Burke Harris found that she could prevent and reverse toxic childhood stress before it snowballed into health issues in adulthood.
But how do adults heal from their childhood trauma? After all, we can’t go back and intervene now. Dr. Burke Harris wrote:
“Sleep, mental health, healthy relationships, exercise, nutrition, and mindfulness — we saw in our patients that these six things were critical for healing. […] Fundamentally, they all targeted the underlying biological mechanism — a dysregulated stress-response system and the neurologic, endocrine, and immune disruptions that ensued.”
To heal from my childhood trauma and show my body that it’s no longer at risk, I’ve implemented the following practices into my life:
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is scientifically proven to help the brain process and heal from traumatic memories.
- Going to sleep at 9 p.m. and waking up by 6 a.m. which regulates my circadian rhythm and ensures I get enough rest.
- Meditating every morning for at least three minutes.
- Moving my body to complete the stress cycle through walking, weight training, yoga, and somatic exercise.
- Starting the day with protein coffee to reduce cortisol. (I recently learned that fasting is not a good idea if you’re a woman, especially a traumatized one.)
- Keeping two journals: one for a daily gratitude practice and one for ticked-off rants.
- Processing difficult emotions and memories using the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), also known as tapping.
- Reducing stress in my career as much as possible by working remotely and utilizing deep work.
- Starting a vegetable garden and eating as many fresh, whole foods as I can.
- Prioritizing relationships with the people who make me feel safe in my body, and drawing strict boundaries with the people who don’t.
I’ve learned that you can’t fix the first several chapters of your story — but you can change the ending.
If you or somebody that you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, there is a way to get help. Call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or text "HELLO" to 741741 to be connected with the Crisis Text Line.
Maria Cassano is a writer, editor, and journalist whose work has appeared on NBC, Bustle, CNN, The Daily Beast, Food & Wine, and Allure, among others.
