The Adverse Childhood Experiences study was a huge research study conducted in the USA that has traced the impact of very difficult childhood experiences into adulthood. For those who have faced these challenges, we want to explore what the potential impacts are in marriage and how to best respond so that you can create or keep a happy, content marriage.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

The ACE study wanted to explore the effects of childhood abuse and neglect on later life. It included over 17000 participants and further follow up studies continue to add to the original findings[i].

The study looked at ten different forms of adverse childhood experience (ACE), split into three categories:

Abuse

Neglect

Household challenges

Under abuse they looked at emotions, physical and/or sexual abuse. Under neglect they looked for emotional and/or physical neglect. And there were five household challenges:

Mother treated violently

Substance abuse in the household

Mental illness in the household

Parental separation or divorce

Household member incarcerated

Initial Findings

Almost two thirds of the surveyed adults reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more ACEs. ACEs are also often experienced together- if you experience one of the ten factors you are much more likely to have experienced at least one more[ii].

So how do these early experiences impact the rest of your life? ACEs are found to lead to a huge range of negative outcomes in adult life including damage to physical and mental health, dangerous or unhealthy lifestyle choices, and reduced life potential.

Now we need to unpack the impact of ACEs a little more but I want to pause to make a point first. Our goal here is not to point out damaged goods or to make anyone feel like they are somehow permanently emotionally crippled or, in the context of our marriage podcast, that they will make a terrible spouse. Not at all. There are as many wonderful people with ACEs as there are without. However, by acknowledging the potential impact of ACEs, at least now a couple knows how and why some of the current challenges may have developed and they can create some specific and targeted goals for healing.

Allow me to illustrate from the physical realm. Imagine I had a set of challenging and unexplainable physical health problems. After a lot of struggle and problems and doctoring it came out that I had been drinking from a polluted water source. Now I know that I need to stop drinking that water and also find out what was in the water. Once I know that I need to understand what the pollutants were and how they have impacted my health. And then I can take steps towards dealing with those symptoms in order to restore my health.

Same with ACEs. Once I understand that my present struggles are tied to my childhood experiences, I can begin to face those things in order to pursue healing.

The ACE Pyramid

One of the things the researchers discovered is that there were a potential set of negative changes that built one upon another. They charted this out as a pyramid because you have many people at the bottom and few at the top. In other words, the further up the pyramid you go the less likely you are to be affected unless you’ve had very severe ACEs.

The base level of the pyramid is the adverse childhood experiences themselves.

The next level up is disrupted development. So children with ACEs experience poor physical and mental development due to abuse, trauma or neglect.

The next level from there is social, emotional and cognitive impairment. Some of those children as adults will manifest poor coping skills, attachment disorders, mental illness, and cognitive impairment.

Next, some of them will go on to adopt health-risk behaviors. Risky behaviors such as smoking, alcohol use or promiscuity. Often adopted as coping mechanisms to help them survive the difficult circumstances they find themselves in.