Understanding the life history of the people you serve, no matter what services you provide will help your services be more effective. Asking about their personal experiences with adversity will build your relationships and understanding your own experiences will help build your empathy and ability to respond. Knowing how those experiences have an impact, and the variety of responses, will frame the services you provide to truly meet peoples’ needs.
Four Ways the ACEs Findings Make A Difference
- Provides a better understanding of why children and families make the choices they do and why they react a certain way
- Helps to inform services/practices
- Promotes/reinforces strength based approach
- Problem behaviors recognized as ways of coping
How can we build resilience to mitigate the effects of ACEs?
- It is important to build the capabilities of caregivers and strengthen the communities that together will form the environment of relationships that are essential to children's lifelong learning, health and behavior.
- Provide safe, nurturing relationships
- Understand coping strategies
- Identify and reinforcing child and family strengths
- What has helped the individual to “not be bothered” by their experience?
- Enhance knowledge (parenting skills)
- Identify and access supports - Informal and natural; who do they go to in times of need?
- Provide Evidence Based Programs/treatments or promising practices (age and developmental appropriate)
- Identify ACEs and provide protective/promotive family and community experiences and enhance resilience before the child develops impairment (e.g. to maintain child feeling safe, lovable, capable, meaningful; to make sense out of the adversity and how to cope; to enable parent availability to support the child, etc.).
- Identify ACEs and impairment and provide intervention for impairment, before it leads to unhealthy coping or negative outcomes. Screening for cumulative risk across categories (not just the major identified adversity) is important for developing a trauma-informed intervention plan. Trauma-focused cognitive- behavioral therapies for individuals or groups are available to treat impairment, PTSD, depression, loss, internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, etc.
- Take a trauma-informed approach to dealing with unhealthy coping strategies and illness, such as assessing for trauma which may have led to impairment which the unhealthy strategies are being used to cope with or which exacerbate illness.
- Check out the ACEsConnection website, an online network where you’ll find articles, blog posts, opportunities to connect with professionals from around the world. They’ve published a Roadmap to Resilience that features best practices from around the country. Maine was involved in building this Roadmap!
