Early in my prevention career, I attended an annual employee training. I was new with the company and had only met a handful of my coworkers at that time. The training was a full day over multiple “necessary” topics.
We’ve all been there.
The room was PACKED and I felt a little overwhelmed. It’s funny, but people often think of me as extraordinarily outgoing, and I definitely can be. However, I find public events (where I have no control) bring on a lot of anxiety. I’m not great at small talk, and social situations can be chock-full. Give me depth, honesty, or philosophical inquiry, and I could swim in that all day long, though.
At one point during the day, we did a session on ACEs. For those of you who may not know, ACEs are Adverse Childhood Experiences and have been a BIG ticket item in mental health trainings and presentations for several years now. It’s funny because I remember the first time I heard of ACEs and an interesting conversation I had with the researcher about the implications of the study. I went home that night and read as much as I could about ACEs, because that is who I am as a person. Curious and wanting to be knowledgeable on my own.
Back to this session, the trainer was engaging, funny, and full of energy. I liked him as an instructor. I thought he was doing a great job keeping us involved and on topic. Then, he hands out a “self-assessment” sheet and has us self-identify various traumas or disadvantages we have. I understood the intention. Let’s demonstrate that we can’t simply look at those around us and know what they have experienced or where they have come from. It is a well-meaning approach. One I have seen time and again.
The thing was that after we completed the surveys, he began to ask for people to share their scores. I started to shift in my seat as numbers higher than mine began to inch down and closer to my own score. Finally, we were asked who had the lowest score. One guess who it ended up being.
He pushes past this moment and circles back to his point trying to bring the room back to the purpose, but I feel them, eyes looking at me. Side glances, though they may have been soft, they graze over my face and there are these unforgettable looks. Pity.
Here I sit with my new coworkers, and they all now feel sorry for me. How wonderful for me. That trainer lost me for the rest of his session. He “outed” me and left me on the line to dry out on my own. It was careless, inconsiderate, and quite frankly humiliating.
Beyond how I felt as a person, ACEs have been misused and misinterpreted since their inception. I sit in session after session where someone talks about it as a screening tool, or indicator, or lifelong trauma, blah blah blah. I’m gonna call it what it is, a Mental Health TREND that has been a fear appeal to try and scare people into realizing that bad things can do damage in ways we may not understand over time. ACEs are not comprehensive, and they should not be used to Label people.
I have been told time and again that I will not amount to anything because of the traumas I endured as a child. I have been told that I would die by suicide. I have been told that I would not be able to hold down a regular job, and I have been told who I can only ever dream of being, because things that were out of my control when I was a child happened, and they will continue to happen to me until the day I die.
I am who I am because of my unwillingness to give in to what others decided my life and future should look like. I have done amazing things because I know people like me are capable, and I want to be sure we see each other achieve dreams others can’t imagine for us. I am capable. I am strong and I have fought.
ACEs and similar approaches are a cop out for some of the MH folx. Because things are more complicated than we can comprehend, and people feel safe when they have a checklist. If only my life fit neatly into a checklist. People can fall apart after traumas, but people can also come together and find resolve. I have sat in strength after some of the hardest times of my life, and many of those times, when I did, I didn’t find myself sitting alone.
Be aware of the impacts of trauma, but know that we are more than the things that happened to us. Sometimes we are stubborn as shit and simply here to prove a point because you said we couldn’t.
To learn more about ACEs and their misapplication (from the researchers who created the study):
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