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Certain types of childhood trauma leave a mark.
There are all kinds of childhood trauma, but we've learned that abuse, neglect, and a few other factors can sort of squish together to change the way a person exists. Here's a commonly understood list of 10 Adverse Childhood Experiences:
1. Physical Abuse
2. Emotional Abuse
3. Sexual Abuse
4. Physical Neglect
5. Emotional Neglect
6. Mental Illness (of a family member, care giver, etc.)
7. Incarcerated family member (usually an immediate family member)
8. Witness to domestic violence
9. Substance Use/Abuse
10. Divorce
For example, "physical abuse" isn't "one time, mom spanked me." It's chronic non-normative physical abuse.
Folks who have experienced 3 or more of these have materially higher cortisol levels than the baseline population. People with 4 or more are something like 20x more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system. If you're female with an ACEs score of 4 or more, your DNA ages materially faster. ACEs overall impact your health - higher ACEs scores correlate strongly with reduced cardiovascular health.
In essence, folks who have experienced a certain amount of extreme trauma in their early lives are basically revving their body's engine on redline and it just burns them up faster.
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