Day three of my journey of sobriety. I’m doing a ton of reading so I can learn more about myself and my struggle with AUD “alcohol use disorder,” and I ran into some information about ACEs “adverse childhood experiences” and I about shit my pants. FFS! I never had a chance. I have four ACEs, the worst ones being sexually molested as a child and raped as a adolescent. I’ve been in therapy for the last six months and I can’t wait to talk to my therapist about this concept of ACEs.
From an article in The Verge:
“For example, one study of nearly 10,000 people found that those with four or more of these types of “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs) have a risk of alcoholism that is seven times greater than those with none. Similarly, boys who have four or more ACEs are nearly five times more likely to inject drugs than those with none.”
My question is: Am I late to this terminology or is it something recent?
Being sexually violated has messed up my life in so many ways. Nearly every day is a struggle.
It’s been around for some time, wonderful research that has fueled a trauma-informed care movement in social work and elsewhere but it’s been gaining exposure and application in new fields lately. There is sooooo much good stuff out there on this! Glad you’re learning about it. It can be a game changer. Look up trauma-informed care - there’s a whole world of research and information waiting for you! Great post and thank you for the honest and vulnerable share.
Ultimately the take away for me is that the words we use matter. How we talk to our selves in our thoughts matters immensely and can change the course of our next step, whether we decide to put that bottle down or pick it up. If we are down on ourselves, critical and our self-talk is negative, it can be a trigger for shame and anger or other emotional responses that have been reasons to drink - to stop that internal voice so we don’t have to feel that emotion. I can only speak for myself, but making connections between my trauma and how I treat myself in my self-talk matters. It’s a reflection of our feelings of self worth. That’s ALL tied to traumatic experiences we have had and most frequently but not always in childhood. If I’m not making sense please feel free to ask questions. It’s and area where I have some formal training and I’m just recently starting to apply it to myself (imagine that!). I’m also working with a therapist regarding trauma and it’s impact on my AUD. I hope I haven’t overloaded your feed here, but I’m here if you want to discuss anything more. I’ll just leave one more gem. I encourage you to explore the work of Brené Brown. Her website is great, her books changed my life. And by the way she’s been sober for something like 20 years. Here’s her TED talk:
Thank you very much for all the info. Reading through all the material has been eye-opening for sure. I took the quiz and my score is 8. Much work lies ahead, but I’m here for it. I’m here.
Awesome! We gotta do the work to get better. I am grateful for you, because taking another look at all this information has helped me, too. For real. I booked a therapy appointment and I have it in a couple hours to talk about some of what I’ve written here with you because I think there’s more work I need and want (the key is want) to do. There’s always more work but it gets to the point where we are sort of looking forward to it! So thank you.
Oh and I rewatched that TED talk with Brene and I can’t recommend it enough. It was such a good reminder to me as to why I want to be sober and to connect with others. Powerful.
I had never heard this before, and read up on it this morning.
It was a real eye opener that I needed to break through a mental block I was having- on my beginning stages of true recovery work. Thank you for sharing
