The two biggest myths about ACEs science are: MYTH #1 — That it’s just about the 10 ACEs in the ACE Study — the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study . It’s about sooooo much more than that. MYTH #2 — And that it’s just about ACEs…adverse childhood experiences. These two myths are intertwined. The ACE Study issued the first of its 70+ publications in 1998, and for many people it was the lightning bolt, the grand “aha” moment, the unexpected doorway into a blazing new...

Kindergarten teacher Erica Nunemaker ripped down the clip chart she used for behavior management in her classroom. Children moved their clip up for good behavior and down for bad behavior. Nunemaker realized the same students were moving down every day. The clip was a public display of the student’s failure, and children weren’t learning how to fix their behavior. “I’ve noticed that a lot of times we discipline them and tell them that’s not right ... but then we don’t give them a solution to...

Tracy Franke, principal of Darrington Elementary School, a K-8 school with 300 students, had heard about CLEAR, and called Dr. Christopher Blodgett, who runs the program, to arrange a visit from Turner. “We were hurting,” says Franke. “Our students and staff needed some tools to get through the trauma.”

Self-Healing Communities: A Transformational Process Model for Improving Intergenerational Health Laura Porter, Kimberly Martin, PhD, and Robert Anda, MD, MS Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, June 2016 http://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2016/06/self-healing-communities.html

[ Ed. note: Following is a media release published yesterday by Mathematica Policy Research. This follows on the heals of the report, "Self-Healing Communities" that Laura Porter, Dr. Robert Anda and WHO wrote for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Both reports and executive summaries are attached to this blog post. Both reports are significant, because they show that community ACEs initiatives -- with "modest investments and limited staff" -- are solving some of our most intractable...

In 2015, Dr. Beth Pletcher, a pediatrician and associate professor specializing in genetics, was at the annual conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Washington D.C. when she heard two speakers that forever changed her work with medical students. Dr. Beth Pletcher “I went to two talks on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that were so mind-boggling to me that I decided on my drive back to New Jersey that I had to do something about it,”says Pletcher, director of the Division...

By Tammy Ayer, June 21, 2019 Yakima Herald-Republic The woman’s weight loss was impressive. In 51 weeks, she went from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. But she regained it even faster, which perplexed Dr. Vincent J. Felitti . She was just one of the approximately 50 percent of the patients at his weight-loss clinic in San Diego who regained what they lost, Felitti recalled at Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences on Friday. “Look at the photo on the left, a little girl of age 8,” he said...

The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACEs), conducted by Dr. Vince Felitti of Kaizer Permanente and Dr. Robert Anda of the Center for Disease Control, was a groundbreaking study when it’s findings were released in 1998, and it confirmed what nonviolence advocates, social service and health care providers had witnessed for decades–violence is bad for your health. ACEs provided a wealth of information to illustrate how deeply our individual and community health is impacted by trauma. [For...

The 2019 Academy on Violence and Abuse Global Health Summit will be October 3-4, 2019 at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota . Keynote Address from Dr. Vincent Felitti : "Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Their Relationship to Adult Well-being, Addiction, Disease, and Premature Death" ACEs Connection Network founder/editor Jane Stevens will receive an AVA Change Maker award and give an address: "Origins of ACEs Connection and the Future" Check out the full agenda and...

He says: Addiction shouldn’t be called “addiction”. It should be called “ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking”. He says: Ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking (what traditionalists call addiction) is a normal response to the adversity experienced in childhood, just like bleeding is a normal response to being stabbed. He says: The solution to changing the illegal or unhealthy ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking behavior of opioid addiction is to address a person’s adverse childhood...

A new policy brief (attached) issued this week by the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) forcefully develops the case for trauma-informed approaches to address the opioid crisis—to prevent and treat addiction—based on strong evidence that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are at the root of the crisis. CTIPP is a national organization that advocates for trauma-informed prevention and treatment programs at the federal, state and local levels. Successful strategies to...

For most people with serious substance use disorders, understanding the connection between our habits and our histories of childhood trauma is essential to recovery. In a perfect world (hell, in a halfway decent world) drug treatment would be trauma-informed, yet some 90 percent of treatment facilities still operate as they did in the 1980s, marching every patient through the first five steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. For those who don't know, that means filling notebooks with self-lacerating...

In his groundbreaking book , In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction , trauma and addiction expert Dr. Gabor Maté writes, “There are almost as many addictions as there are people.” ACEs Connection founder and publisher Jane Stevens read that quote as a springboard to asking Maté to define addiction and explain whether or not it is always rooted in adverse childhood experiences. Maté, along with filmmaker Michelle Esrick and Saturday Night Live star Darrell Hammond,...

Karen Clemmer, the Northwest community facilitator with ACEs Connection, was already deeply interested in the CDC/Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study when she and a colleague from the Child Parent Institute were invited to lunch by ACEs Connection founder and publisher Jane Stevens in 2012. But that lunch meeting changed everything. Karen Clemmer “Jane helped us see a bigger world,” says Clemmer. “She came with a much wider lens. She didn’t look only at Sonoma County, she...

A newly developed factsheet, “Trauma-Informed Nutrition: Recognizing the Relationship between Adversity, Chronic Disease, and Nutritional Health” has just been released. This factsheet is intended for Registered Dietitians (RDs) and was designed to support and describe the connection between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), the impacts of trauma and its relationship to chronic disease, and trauma-informed nutrition practices. This factsheet was developed through a collaborative...

The ACE Study reveals how typically unrecognized adverse childhood experiences are not only common, but causally underlie a number of the most common causes of adult social malfunction, biomedical disease, and premature death. Moreover, it enables one to see that the Public Health Problem is often an individual’s attempted Solution to childhood experiences about which we keep ourselves unaware. A renowned physician and researcher, Dr. Vincent J. Felitti is one of the world’s foremost experts...

Santa Rosa, CA, resident Lisa Marden watches her 15-month-old baby gleefully play with magic markers and relays how she’s been coping with feeling anxious. (We're using a pseudonym to protect the family's privacy.) “I’m just super stressed out with everything, and as soon as I eat anything, I get nauseous, so I’ve been eating snacks instead of meals,” she explains to Liz George, a field nurse with the Maternal/Child Field Nursing team of Sonoma County, CA, who has been seeing Marden on home...

Rick Griffin knows a lot about hope – how to understand it, instill it, develop it. Griffin is the director of training and curriculum development for the non-profit Community Resilience Initiative (CRI) in Walla Walla, Washington. Walla Walla’s Lincoln High was the subject of a 2015 film, “Paper Tigers,” by the late Jamie Redford, about how the school principal, Jim Sporleder, adopted an ACEs-informed approach that positively transformed the school as well as the surrounding community.

Former PACEs Connection employees Dana Brown (L) with Vincent Felitti, MD, co-author of the 1998 Adverse Childhood Experiences study, and Carey Sipp (R) in San Diego in January, 2024. The last few months have been quite challenging, but we pushed, persevered, and didn’t give up hope. The “we” is Carey Sipp and Dana Brown. We were long-time staff members of PACEs Connection determined to reinstate the website and the resources and information we provide to communities after the platform went...