Adverse Childhood Experiences: What You Carry Without Knowing

As an adult now, I can look back and identify a handful of moments that carried more weight than I realized at the time. A moment of violence I witnessed as a child. Being accused of something I didn't do by someone whose opinion meant everything to me. A season where the ground fell out from under us and stability disappeared overnight.

These weren't dramatic movie scenes. They were quiet fractures. And they shaped how I saw myself, how I saw the world, and how I moved through both for years. I didn't have language for any of it until much later. I just thought that was life. I thought everyone carried that kind of weight.

Turns out, a lot of people do. But not everyone knows what they're carrying. And almost nobody talks about it.

What are Adverse Childhood Experiences?

In the late 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente conducted one of the largest studies ever done on the relationship between childhood adversity and long-term health outcomes. It was called the ACE Study. They surveyed over 17,000 adults and asked them about specific difficult experiences they had before the age of 18.

The study identified ten categories of adverse childhood experiences, divided into three groups. The first group is abuse: physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse. The second group is neglect: physical neglect and emotional neglect. The third group is household dysfunction: a parent with mental illness, a parent with substance abuse, domestic violence in the home, parental separation or divorce, and having an incarcerated family member.

Each category you experienced counts as one point on your ACE score. The higher your score, the greater the statistical likelihood of certain health and mental health outcomes later in life. But here's the thing that often gets lost in the conversation: you don't need a high score for it to matter. Even one or two ACEs can shape the way your nervous system develops. They can change the way you respond to stress, conflict, intimacy, and trust. The number isn't the point. The impact is.

How ACEs show up in adulthood

Most people who experienced ACEs don't walk around thinking of themselves as trauma survivors. They just notice that certain things feel harder than they should. Trusting people. Saying no. Relaxing when nothing is wrong. Receiving a compliment without deflecting it. Sitting still without needing to be productive.

Here are some of the most common ways ACEs show up in adult life, often without the person connecting them back to childhood.

Hypervigilance. You scan rooms for danger. You read tone and body language obsessively. You're always bracing for the other shoe to drop. This isn't anxiety in the abstract. It's a nervous system that learned early to stay on alert because the environment wasn't safe.

Difficulty trusting. If the people who were supposed to protect you were also the ones who hurt you, trust becomes a complicated equation. You might test people before letting them in. You might keep everyone at arm's length. You might trust too quickly and then feel blindsided when things go wrong.

Shame. Not guilt, which says “I did something wrong.” Shame, which says “I am something wrong.” ACEs often plant a deep belief that you are fundamentally broken, unworthy, or too much. That belief doesn't announce itself. It just quietly runs your decisions.

People-pleasing. When your safety depended on keeping someone else calm or happy, you learn to monitor other people's emotions before your own. That pattern doesn't disappear when you grow up. It just shows up at work, in friendships, in your marriage.

Emotional numbness. Sometimes the brain's best strategy for surviving an overwhelming environment is to stop feeling altogether. You might describe yourself as “just not that emotional.” But the truth is, you learned to shut it down because feeling wasn't safe.

Relationship patterns. You might find yourself drawn to people who feel familiar, not because they're good for you but because your nervous system recognizes them. Chaos can feel like home. Unavailability can feel like love. These patterns aren't random. They're echoes.

The body keeps the score

One of the most important things the ACE research revealed is that childhood adversity doesn't just live in your memory. It lives in your body. The stress response system that developed when you were young doesn't reset itself automatically when the environment changes. If your nervous system was shaped by unpredictability, conflict, or fear, it carries that wiring into adulthood.

This is why you can be sitting in a perfectly safe room and still feel like something bad is about to happen. Your rational brain knows you're fine. But your nervous system is still operating from an old map. It hasn't gotten the update that you're not in danger anymore.

This is not a character flaw. It's not weakness. It's biology. Your body did exactly what it needed to do to keep you safe. The problem is that the strategies that protected you then are now getting in the way of the life you want to live.

You don't need a high score for it to count

There's a tendency when people first learn about ACEs to compare their score to others. To think that because they “only” had one or two, their experience doesn't qualify as real adversity. Or to dismiss their own pain because someone else had it worse.

But trauma isn't a competition. A single experience of violence, betrayal, or instability can reshape a child's developing brain. What matters isn't the number on the scale. What matters is how those experiences landed in your specific body, in your specific context, with whatever support you did or didn't have around you at the time.

If something from your childhood is still shaping the way you think, feel, or relate to others, it counts. Full stop.

This is the work we do in therapy

When I work with clients who are beginning to connect their present struggles to their past, the work isn't about reliving every painful moment. It's about understanding the patterns that formed in response to those moments. It's about helping the nervous system catch up to the present.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the most effective tools for this kind of work. It helps the brain reprocess memories that are still stored as if they're happening right now. It doesn't erase the memory. It changes the way your body holds it, so that the past stops hijacking the present.

Trauma-informed therapy, more broadly, means that we approach every conversation with an understanding that your reactions make sense in light of what you've been through. We're not trying to fix you. We're trying to help you understand the survival strategies you built and decide which ones are still serving you and which ones you're ready to let go of.

This is some of the most meaningful work I get to do. Watching someone realize that they're not broken, that their responses make sense, that there's a reason they are the way they are. That realization alone changes things. And from there, real healing becomes possible.

You don't have to carry it alone

If any of this resonates, you don't need to have it all figured out before reaching out. You don't need to know your ACE score. You don't need to have the perfect words for what happened. You just need to be willing to start the conversation.

A free 15-minute consultation is a good place to begin. No pressure. Just a chance to talk about what's been sitting with you and see if this kind of work feels right.

Joseph Addy

MDiv, RP (Qualifying), CSAT · Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) at Addy Psychotherapy in Etobicoke. Specializing in men's mental health, sex addiction recovery, and trauma.