Take an ACE test to determine how childhood trauma impacted your heart health.
For those who have no idea how this works, here is a good explanation but skip the first 5 paragraphs because they are useless and gushy. It gets a lot better after that, I promise. On a side note, this is what I’m saying about female self-infantilization being in vogue. It’s as if there were a compulsion to present oneself as a total ditz before saying anything of value.
“how childhood trauma impacted your heart health”
I got a two (and one of those was kind of marginal but I felt weird not having any yes answers by that point I’d probably scale it back to a 1.5). I’m a little bummed that there’s no scale of what’s concerning or dangerous or whatever…. What are you supposed to do with your number?
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Right. Mine is 4 and I want to know the meaning.
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I got a zero on the test and know exactly what it means. This test is worthless.
It fails at quantifying “childhood traumas” because, with the sole exception of sexual abuse, it ignores all trauma that doesn’t occur within the immediate household. What about factors like bullying, social rejection by peers, etc.?
It makes the not necessarily true medical claim that “the rougher your childhood…the higher your risk for later health problems.” That blanket statement simply isn’t correct.
As Cliff said, it doesn’t even give you a scale (which would be inaccurate, anyway) to compare the numbers to (i.e., “3 equals 15% increased risk, 4 equals…”).
I hate to be a downer, but I can’t say often enough that most “medical” articles written for lay readers are garbage. They aren’t even good for a laugh, because they misinform readers without a medical background.
I recently took a 25-question online “heart age” test to determine “how old your heart is in health terms rather than your chronological age.” Guess what? My “heart age” turned out to be “37” — exactly the correct age, if you reverse the numbers.
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People don’t get bullied or rejected by peers if there is no emotional abuse at home.
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“don’t get bullied or rejected by peers if there is no emotional abuse at home”
I don’t buy this as a blanket rule. It totally doesn’t account for those cases where home experience and school experience are very different.
Home was sometimes chaotic but I always felt completely accepted and normal, school was a straightjacket where my normal behavior made me weird. To use a not-exact analogy I was maybe a little like a child from an immigrant home where normal home country behavior marked me out as weird in the new society.
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“People don’t get bullied or rejected by peers if there is no emotional abuse at home.”
Sure they do. Apples and oranges don’t always go together.
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Nope. Roles are assigned at home. This is why all attempts by schools to put an end to bullying fail. It’s not the school’s job. You can’t repair at school what’s broken at home.
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Actually, the reason I liked school is that it assigned a different role than the one I had at home. Or no role. I saw it on the first day: their default expectation was that we’d take healthy roles. I thought fine, that’s great, I’ll take a healthy role. I want to, and they want me to, so obviously we will all be happiest if I just do it. This of course must mean home life was not a complete disaster. But still.
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“Roles are assigned at home.”
But they don’t always determine what happens in the larger world — the blanket assumption that “the beginning determines the end” just isn’t psychologically valid.
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That’s actually the greatest problem faced in education today. Nobody has the courage to state that kids don’t come off a conveyor belt. They come to school dragging a whole family history with them. And that’s why they all perform differently and have all sorts of issues. Educators are expected to fix problems they didn’t cause.
It’s a bit of a pet peeve.
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I would take a middle ground here. There was weirdness at home but not at school. That was one of the things school taught me, non-weirdness. It didn’t mean I was invulnerable to bullying, but the influence of school made me less so.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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