Adverse childhood experiences and associations with long-term health outcomes

Adverse Childhood Experiences

A female colleague of mine was subjected to sexual abuse as young children, and she suffered severe emotional trauma as a result of that abuse. "Gloria," was unlucky to have an alcoholic father, who would come home late at night, very drunk, go into her room, fondle her, suck her little breasts, and insist that she play with his private parts. In my own childhood I was beaten repeatedly by my mother for wetting the bed. I didn't realize until fairly recently that I have had emotional problems based on those regular beatings with my mother's clenched fist (although sometimes she used a branch off a tree outside out house).

Gloria

The adverse childhood experiences that Gloria had did not involve sexual intercourse, but they did involve criminal behavior on the part of her alcoholic father. Her father and mother owned a convenience store in Los Angeles, and starting early in the afternoon her father would drink beer. Later as the evening wore on, he switched to vodka and went to neighborhood bars with his drinking buddies, getting himself very drunk before he came home.

"I would wrap myself up in blankets and shudder when I heard him come home," Gloria explained. "He would go into the kitchen first, get something out of the refrigerator to eat, and then next, almost every time, he would enter my bedroom. I tried locking the door one night but he was in a rage and kicked the door so the locking device was rendered useless."

Then he would take off his pants and lie in Gloria's bed and begin touching her. "I always cried when he started," she remembered. "He would kiss me hard and his alcohol breath would be so horrible I would come close to throwing up. He unbuttoned my nightgown and put his filthy hands all over me, including in my vagina. Sometimes he would ejaculate just from abusing me. It went on for three or four years."

The adverse childhood experience led to social, emotional and cognitive impairment for Gloria; throughout high school she was extremely shy around males, and turned down numerous invitations for dates from nice boys simply because she had a stigma about the male animal. She had nightmares about her father; she couldn't stand near anyone chewing "Spearmint" flavored gum (her father chewed it before abusing her, thinking he was masking the alcohol). Today she is 33 and she feels that her father "ruined" her; the only health risk factor she appears to have is being overweight. She eats to feed her insecurity. She says she eats to stay fat so no men will want to ask her out. That may be in a scientific gap between "social, emotional and cognitive impairment" and "Adoption of Health-risk behaviors"

Bed-Wetting

The more punishment I received for wetting the bed, the harder is was to get through a night without wetting the bed. My mom did not know how to handle it. She bought a metal sheet to put under my regular sheet, and if water touched the metal sheet, an alarm went off. So I was there in the dark of the night making a loud alarm sound, and mom came running to my bedside and began pounding me with both fists. I was terrified to go to sleep at all. I was denied water starting late afternoon but when I brushed my teeth I sucked water out of the brush, I was so thirsty. My social emotional and cognitive impairment was that I could not go to a friend's house for a sleep-over; I could not go camping with the cub scouts; fear that I would wet my bed prevented me from some of the socialization young boys enjoy. Later in my 20s, I still hated my mother for how she handled this. As to health-risk behaviors, after I turned 18 I ran away from home and began drinking heavily; I made friends with heavy drinkers and crashed my car one night while driving drunk. I thought I was rebelling against my mom but in fact I was engaged in risky behaviors. I have settled down a lot since then but I don't think I am fully psychologically "normal" even to this date.