Adverse Childhood Experiences
The ACE questionnaire asks about 10 categories of childhood adversity. Understanding your ACE score helps contextualize patterns in your health, relationships, and mental wellbeing, and points toward what kind of support might be most helpful.
Did a parent or other adult in your household often swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you, or act in a way that made you afraid you might be physically hurt?
Did a parent or other adult in your household often push, grab, slap, or throw something at you, or ever hit you hard enough to leave marks or cause injury?
Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever touch or fondle you sexually, attempt sexual intercourse, or actually have sexual intercourse with you?
Did you often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special, or that your family didn’t look out for each other?
Did you often feel that you didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, or had no one to protect you, or that your parents were too impaired to care for you?
Was your mother or stepmother often pushed, grabbed, slapped, kicked, or physically threatened, or repeatedly hit or threatened with a gun or knife?
Did you live with anyone who had a problem with drinking or using street drugs?
Was a household member depressed, mentally ill, or did a household member attempt suicide?
Were your parents ever separated or divorced?
Did a household member go to prison?
Your results
Score interpretation
ACEs are common and consequential
The original ACE study found that adverse childhood experiences are far more common than most people assume. Nearly two-thirds of study participants reported at least one ACE. More than one in five reported three or more.
ACEs don’t cause harm in a simple, deterministic way. They increase risk, through chronic stress, disrupted development, and the coping strategies we develop to survive difficult environments.
At ACE scores of 4 or higher, research shows meaningfully elevated rates of depression, anxiety, substance use, chronic illness, and relationship difficulties compared to those with ACE scores of 0.
ACEs appear to have a dose-response relationship: more ACEs generally correlate with greater risk. But this is about probabilities, not destiny. Protective factors, especially stable relationships, matter enormously.
Therapy, particularly trauma-informed approaches, has strong evidence for reducing the downstream effects of adverse childhood experiences. Understanding your ACE score is the beginning, not the end of the story.
What happened to you is not who you are.
Understanding the roots of your patterns is the beginning of real change. If your ACE score prompted questions you want to explore, Dr. Claney offers trauma-informed individual therapy for adults. Schedule a free consultation to talk about what might help.
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