Recently I learned about Adverse Childhood Experiences, also known as ACEs. Are you familiar with the term?

ACEs are traumatic or stressful experiences that have a heavy impact on children at the time, and the effects can continue throughout their lives.

I searched online for a simple definition and found one on the CDC website. “ACEs can include violence, abuse, and growing up in a family with mental health or substance use problems. Toxic stress from ACEs can change brain development and affect how the body responds to stress. ACEs are linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance misuse in adulthood.”

Leaving home at age six to live at a boarding school was traumatic, and it still affects me many years later. As I’m sharing my childhood stories now, I’ve discovered that many people who grew up in the U.S. also lived through ACEs.

Believe it or not, it’s comforting to know it wasn’t only my life at boarding school or as an MK that was hard. If my parents had stayed in California (which, at the time, I thought was heaven!) things wouldn’t have been perfect either.

Throughout my life, I’ve found community, understanding, and empathy among friends who’ve been through similar emotional struggles even though our circumstances were vastly different. Other people who’ve told me they relate to this are:

• Missionaries’ kids (MKs)
• Preacher’s kids (PKs)
• Third culture kids (TCKs) — those who are raised in another country or culture
• Kids who attended Catholic school or another strict institution
• Those who moved a lot within the country, region, or in the same city
• Kids raised in a dysfunctional family (which includes pretty much all of us, right?!)

MKs and Mental Illness

Another MK friend, Michele Phoenix, studied extensively about ACEs in missionaries’ kids. She’s published this article that I’m sharing with you today. While it’s specifically about MKs, I realize many others can relate to various aspects of ACEs and mental illness.

On her website, Michele explains, “I have had nearly thirty years of ministry to Missionaries’ Kids (MKs). As an MK Advocate, I get to engage every day in a work I love with families and young people whose joys, fears, and challenges look an awful lot like mine did. Speaking at churches, conferences, and international MK schools. Developing new resources for the MK-Care world to use.”

Click here to read Michele’s article titled, “A Primer for Parents on MKs & Mental Illness.”

Link it to your life

Which aspects of your childhood were challenging? What events in your adult life have added to that? How have you found healing from ACEs? What ways have you found to manage mental, emotional, and physical stress in your life now? How might it be possible to flourish in spite of past trauma?

Father, Thank you for the healing and comfort you bring to us. Please help each one who reads this to feel your tender love and find strength in you today.

To read more about my life in boarding school in Nigeria, click here.