Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)

In the mid-1990s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente provided irrefutable evidence that childhood trauma is a contributing factor to 7/10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. The more significant your trauma, and the more of it (compound trauma), exponentially affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed (replicated). As you age into your teenage and young adulthood, continued exposure to trauma triples your likelihood of developing heart disease and lung cancer and can reduce your life expectancy by 20 years. 

What is childhood trauma? 

Things like abuse (physical, sexual, verbal, psycho-emotional), neglect, growing up with a parent who struggles with mental illness or substance dependence, parental incarceration, divorce, parental domestic violence, bullying, and inner-city violence are all traumas. Trauma keeps us in a constant fight or flight mode and this exasperates anxiety, panic disorder, OCD, depression, and other mental health disorders. 

It’s amazing to think that trauma that we may have experienced as children can affect our adult lives in such a physical way.  Processing your trauma can help. We here at Harper Therapy use multiple modalities or tools that are highly effective when it comes to trauma and processing trauma. 

Give us a call today at 814-434-3639 to start your path to healing.