Childhood Trauma Screening for Adults with CPTSD

Getting to the Root of Adverse Childhood Experiences at Icarus

Are you concerned that your experience of trauma exposure is even further back in your history than you might have thought? Adverse childhood experiences are extremely common, but you might have never stopped to consider how they impact CPTSD. A quick childhood trauma screening will help you identify issues in your formative years.

But how do adverse childhood experiences impact your life now? This is where our childhood trauma screening for adults will be of such help.

There are several categories that ACEs can fall into: abuse of any kind, neglect, domestic violence, substance abuse and mental illness in the home, parental separation, or incarceration of a family member. This trauma exposure can lead to psychological issues and the development of a stress disorder.

Icarus Behavioral Health in New Mexico can help you get to the bottom of childhood experiences with a robust and comprehensive treatment program. Keep reading to learn more about how ACEs impact your adult life with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Trauma Exposure and the Link to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Unfortunately, childhood trauma exposure is more common than most people think, which can influence the development of PTSD later in life. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, more than two-thirds of children report at least one traumatic incident before they hit the tender age of sixteen.

Even more problematic is the evidence that one in seven children experience either abuse or neglect each year — and SAMHSA believes that this figure underestimates the real toll of children exposed to these traumatic events. With all of this in mind, it makes sense that more people would struggle with CPTSD than initially thought.

According to recent research, moderate to severe child abuse leads to an inability to regulate emotions and indicates higher levels of PTSD. The more symptoms of PTSD and emotional dysregulation present, the worse people performed on task accuracy during the experiment.

The problem is that many people aren’t sure whether they experienced trauma in their formative years. What counts as traumatic enough to influence a long-term mental health issue such as PTSD or complex PTSD?

Trauma Screening to Identify Adverse Childhood Experiences

The first thing your treatment team may want to assess is whether you experienced any of the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that can cause post-traumatic stress reactions later down the road, even if you don’t think they had a long-term impact on your mental health.

Generally speaking, there are ten main buckets that traumatic events fall into which range from covering physical abuse and substance abuse to sexual abuse and instability in the home. This brief screening allows you to pinpoint traumatic events that occurred in your home before the age of ten.

1. Did an adult in the home swear at you, insult you, or threaten you to the point that you feared for your safety?
2. Did an adult in the home ever hit, push, grab, or throw things at you? Did they ever hit hard enough to leave a mark?
3. Did someone at least five years older than you touch you, fondle you, or force you to touch them sexually? Did they ever force you to have sex of any kind with them?
4. Did you ever feel that you weren’t loved, supported, or cared for by your family members?
5. Did you often feel like there wasn’t enough supervision in your home? This could apply to not having enough food to eat, having to wear dirty clothes to school, or simply not having anyone around to protect you. It could be caused by a parent who was too high or drunk to take adequate care of you.
6. Did you ever witness physical violence against your mother or mother figure?
7. Did you live with someone who had an alcohol or drug problem of any kind?
8. Did anyone in your house have a mental health issue like depression, attempt suicide, or become hospitalized for their mental health?
9. Did your parents separate or get divorced?
10. Did a family member ever go to jail or bounce in and out of jail during your formative years?

Scoring Your Trauma Screening Results

As you can see, the umbrella of what constitutes adverse experiences is rather wide. If you answered yes to even one of the above categories, then you have experienced trauma before the young age of ten which can have an impact on your mental health here and now.

Let’s cover a way you can score this screening process to determine how child trauma impacts you in the present day.

For each question that you answered yes, you will now score it on a scale of one to five depending on how much that experience impacts you right now. A one indicates that you never think about it and it maintains little to no bearing on your daily life. A five indicates that it is always present in the back of your mind.

Take a moment to go back through and rate each question based on this scale. If you notice that you have higher scores in many areas, it might be time to consider seeking help for posttraumatic stress to alleviate your trauma symptoms.

Impact of Childhood Abuse on Long-Term Outcomes

With your scale in mind, it’s now time to turn your attention to trauma-related symptoms. Identifying children who have experienced child trauma is relatively simple: a yes or no answer to the questions in the screening is fairly clear-cut. However, you also have to weigh the long-term impact as not everyone will respond to trauma in the same way.

In other words, how does your experience of child and family trauma exposure impact you?

Take a moment to inventory the results of the screening tool above. If you have ever been through any of the below experiences, it could be related to the events covered in the screening tool:

• Attended substance abuse treatment
• Were admitted to a mental health facility
• Required help from a crisis center
• Been in jail for more than a week
• Attempted suicide

Think about what precipitated these events and see if you can find a link to the traumatic experiences of your childhood. Many people who are involved with adolescent psychiatry are there as a response to trauma reactions.

Keep in mind that every particular child will experience symptoms differently. Just because none of the situations apply to you doesn’t negate your history of ACEs or impact your ability to develop C-PTSD in the future. These are just benchmarks to help you assess the degree to which you were impacted as a teen or young adult.

Trauma Symptom Checklist to Identify Long-Term Impacts

According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in six adults will experience four or more of the ACEs on the screening above. Even more alarming, five of the top ten leading causes of death are brought on by adverse childhood experiences. Recognizing and reducing them could have a significant impact.

So how can you spot the symptoms that child welfare might be on the line?

Here are a few of the psychological and emotional impacts on a child’s functioning:

• Anger, irritability, or aggression issues
• Anxiety and irrational fears
• Excessive guilt or shame
• Difficulty sleeping or chronic fatigue
• Difficulty concentrating

When a child (or an adult) enters into therapy, a clinical assessment is the first step toward evaluating the impact of ACEs. The toxic stress of being surrounded by domestic violence, community violence, and interpersonal violence as well as other experiences can lead to PTSD.

Getting Help for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and ACEs

You aren’t alone if you find that the symptoms of childhood trauma and ACEs might impact you more than you initially thought. The good news is that there are plenty of evidence-based treatments that you can participate in to mitigate the long-term impact of trauma symptoms.

These situations don’t always have to cause extreme distress.

If you scored high on this trauma assessment or other tools proposed by your treatment team, then you may want to investigate new and proven methods to cope with trauma. For example, you may take part in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy to try to recategorize the way that trauma impacts you.

Of course, you can also deal with intrusive memories through cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, and mindfulness practices. Triggers and flashbacks can be mitigated using a wide array of treatments that provide you with coping skills.

Let Icarus in New Mexico Help You Overcome Childhood Trauma

Whether you grew up with household dysfunction or experienced natural disasters, our experienced team of clinicians can provide you with a comprehensive assessment to determine the extent to which ACEs impact functioning in the present day. From here, we can come up with a customized treatment plan with evidence-based options to mitigate your symptoms.

Icarus Behavioral Health in New Mexico provides you with the perfect level of support from residential care to intensive outpatient programs. All it takes is a quick call to our enrollment team to verify your insurance benefits and learn more about our program.

We’re ready and waiting to welcome you into our comfortable facility so that you can start healing!

References

1. Understanding child trauma. SAMHSA. (n.d.).
2. Powers, A., Etkin, A., Gyurak, A., Bradley, B., & Jovanovic, T. (2015). Associations Between Childhood Abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and Implicit Emotion Regulation Deficits: Evidence From a Low-Income, Inner-City Population. Psychiatry, 78(3), 251–264.
3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
4. Nelson, C. A., Scott, R. D., Bhutta, Z. A., Harris, N. B., Danese, A., & Samara, M. (2020). Adversity in childhood is linked to mental and physical health throughout life. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 371, m3048.
5. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (US). Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services. Rockville (MD): Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US); 2014. (Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series, No. 57.) Chapter 3, Understanding the Impact of Trauma. Available from: