The education no one gave you about your childhood and how this is showing up for you RIGHT NOW.

Have you ever wondered why you keep repeating the same relationship patterns, despite your best intentions to change? The answer might be hidden in your childhood experiences.

The revolutionary concept of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) reveals how early trauma shapes our adult relationships, health, and emotional patterns. This eye-opening episode breaks down exactly what ACEs are – from physical and emotional neglect to witnessing domestic violence – and explains how these experiences literally rewire our developing brains.

I share the startling research showing how higher ACE scores correlate with increased risks of depression, addiction, and even chronic illness. But this isn't just about understanding the problem – it's about recognizing these patterns as perfectly logical adaptations that once kept you safe.

Discover the four attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized) and how they manifest in your romantic relationships. If you've ever wondered why conflicts with your partner feel so triggering, or why you struggle to maintain intimacy, this knowledge will transform your understanding of yourself and your relationships.

What makes this episode truly special is the message of hope. Through personal stories, including my own journey with seven ACEs and professional experience helping women heal from severe trauma, I demonstrate that transformation is absolutely possible. Your past does not have to define your future.

This isn't about blaming your parents or caregivers. It's about understanding, compassion, and reclaiming your power to create the deep, meaningful connections your soul craves. Are you ready to break the cycle and transform your relationships? This episode is your first step toward healing.

ACE's TEST: ACE Test: Do You Have Childhood Trauma? | Psych Central

ATTACHMENT QUIZ: Free Attachment Style Test | The Attachment Project

Chapters

• 0:04 Introduction to Childhood Trauma
• 0:43 Understanding Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
• 3:10 Health Impacts of Childhood Trauma
• 7:49 Healing is Possible: Success Stories
• 13:20 Trauma-Informed Practice Explained
• 16:40 Attachment Styles and Relationships
• 22:39 Moving Forward and Finding Support

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Hi everybody and welcome back. Now. I'm pretty disappointed in myself that I did not do an episode on this sooner, because I just automatically think that everybody gets taught this, but actually you don't. So I'm going to break down exactly what you need to know, as a woman, about your childhood in order to understand where you are now in your relationships. Okay, so I'm going to talk through what's called ACEs, which are adverse childhood experiences. So I will be talking about distressing events throughout this episode and I'll be talking about attachment styles and how that is mirroring your relationships.

Speaker 1: 0:38

Now, today is going to be such a juicy juicy one, so let's dive straight in. So let's talk about adverse childhood experiences. So this is actually a test that you can take and it's widely recognized. Now it doesn't include every single trauma that you'll ever experience as a child on there, but it's a really good baseline to understand. This was like created back in the 90s by Kaiser Permanente, and he just decided to bring together a way to measure the stuff that happened in childhood and then reflect on people as adults to see the health changes. So when we're talking about the health changes, we are talking about illness. You know physical ailments, okay.

Speaker 1: 1:22

So the first test was released with 10 aces and that was physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect. Now, physical abuse and physical neglect are obviously really different. So physical abuse is actual physical harm or threat of physical harm. Physical neglect is not meeting that child's needs physically. So are they washed, are they kept well, are they in a good state of hygiene, that type of stuff. And then we have emotional neglect as well. This is where we are talking more around narcissist parents as an extreme example, but also like emotional neglect, where we had emotional needs that were not met by our primary caregivers. When we talk about primary caregivers, we are talking about mother and father or, if you were adopted, the mother father role that was in your life, if you didn't have mum or dad, but you had a grandmother, grandfather it's about the maternal and paternal people in your life at that time throughout your childhood. Okay, the others are parents who are alcoholic, or caregiver who is an alcoholic, witnessing or involved in domestic violence, so violence within the home, and that can take many different forms. Again, we're talking about physical, verbal, sexual and coercive control as well, which is basically manipulating people to do what you want them to do, and yeah, that's a big topic that we're not going to go into today, but just an overview of what that is A family member that has been put in prison and a family member who has been diagnosed with mental health illness and finally experiencing the divorce of parents.

Speaker 1: 2:57

This was an amazing study, guys. It was one of its kind back in the 90s, right? So imagine going through this fucking life like and not get into like the 1990s and not understanding what trauma is okay. So when we this was originally recognized and they were doing the research, it was two-thirds of people who have experienced one ACE. So, yeah, I personally will say that this is bullshit and that everybody will experience at least one ACE, but one in five people will experience more than three ACEs. Right, based on this old list, because it has been extended now to include other things, basically I would say that I have experienced seven, so I score quite highly on that on that list. And guess what? Thyroid problems, diabetes, these types of things are really common health problems that come alongside people with high levels of high scoring aces. And, like I said, guys, this is a test that you can do online and you can explore it more in depth if you want to, and when we are experiencing high level of ACEs.

Speaker 1: 4:08

This actually has a major impact on the young person's ability to learn. The sensory input is basically perceived as a threat with the amygdala. So as we're young and we're developing, we are supposed to be exposed to things very, very gently so in the first three years of our life. This is why we need to literally be like little velcro babies to our mother and we need to allow our amygdala to be exposed to small, small stresses in a place where we can really co-regulate with mum. Okay. And if we do not have that, especially in the first three years, let alone in the first eight years, then we are going to basically start to release the stress hormone cortisol. We're going to fight, fright, fight, flight, fawn, freeze okay, we've all heard of that. It's all part of our nervous system. It's all part of our nervous system regulation, and this is what happens when we're having high levels of this stuff.

Speaker 1: 5:02

We become very dysregulated as children, and this is what happens when we're having high levels of this stuff. We become very dysregulated as children and this is what we're seeing in our, in our children who are being diagnosed with ADHD, when you look at the signs and symptoms of ADHD. You're looking at a very dysregulated child and instead of thinking about what is the dysregulation, has their amygdala been exposed to high levels of stress too early on, which could literally be like at nine months. When mum goes back to work, they are put into a daycare with strangers. This can cause that, and I and I'm not here to shame anybody and I'm not here to tell anybody about their parenting choices. I'm really, really not. But you can't argue with facts and you can't argue with science, and I'm here to educate you so you can make the best facts. And you can't argue with science, and I'm here to educate you so you can make the best decision for you. And sometimes we just don't have a choice, and that is fine. But if you have this knowledge, then you know exactly what's going on with your child.

Speaker 1: 5:52

What happened to you as a child, right? If you're a woman sat here with ADHD, thinking holy shit, you might want to go back and speak to mum and dad about who took care of you between the ages of zero and three and also look at your relationship with mum and dad. Is it a healthy relationship? Did they meet your needs emotionally, physically, did they give you the comfort when you needed it? This is all so much in the early stages of life, where you're learning how to stay alive. That's it you're.

Speaker 1: 6:18

You know we forget. We have such a modern and complicated life right now that we actually fucking forget our body's primary goal is to keep us alive and that is what our subconscious does. That's what our nervous system does. It's constantly looking for the threat and, like I said, if the amygdala is a little bit wonkadoo, then it's going to think that threats are threats when they're not threats, if that makes sense. And something to recognize is that within the ACEs, we're having those big life events, but we're also having, like that, emotional abuse. The physical abuse and don't forget, the threat is enough to trigger our nervous system. Okay. And when we're having stressful situations, positive neural pathways are not developed and this can be very slow. Instead, what we do is we end up in stressful situations that reinforce the threat and the danger response instead of the positive one.

Speaker 1: 7:15

So this is when, like I see people who are being diagnosed with ADHD and I get really, really fucking angry because I'm like this child is clearly dysregulated, this woman is clearly dysregulated and what people are doing is they're not asking what the cause of the dysregulation is and what happened like what happened to you, like not what's wrong with you, and it's. It's always the same with western medicine it's always about what's wrong with you. Well, no, it's actually about what happened to you and that's causing this level of dysregulation. To actually truly help the root cause, not just provide medication and hope for the fucking best, that's how the pharmacy and big pharma are fucking working right now to basically at like drug our children, who are very dysregulated, and that we do not know long term how that is going to impact on them as adults, which is a really fucking scary place to be right. So if you are a parent with a child that is exhibiting ADHD, I'm really, really sorry that that you're having that experience, but it's very, very common. I don't think that all these children would be getting these diagnoses if it wasn't a common problem, and I just really advise that you seek emotional support alongside any medication to address the root cause, because we don't know how this will affect them as adults.

Speaker 1: 8:35

And now I've gone off on a complete fucking tangent. Right, let's get back to ACEs. Tangent right, let's get back to aces. So the interesting thing about aces basically it's really fascinating. So they found that the more aces you have, the more negative outcomes you'll have later in life. So as your ace score increases, your risk for various health problems and relationship problems happen as well. They go up. So for, with an ace of a score of four or more, you are two times more likely to smoke, four times more likely to develop depression, seven times more likely to become an alcoholic and 12 times more likely to have an attempted suicide. So, as somebody who has experienced seven, I have developed depression. I no longer drink alcohol because I have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol where I would binge drink and I have attempted suicide. And also I socially smoked, but never like as an addiction. So, yeah, you can probably say, based on me, these things are right and you might be looking at your life going, holy fuck, okay, this kind of makes sense, and here I want to emphasize that your ACEs score is not your destiny. Okay, this is just information to simply understand yourself better.

Speaker 1: 9:50

I've worked with women with high ACE scores who have developed incredible resilience and created beautiful lives and relationships like I've worked at. I've worked with women like one of like favorite, favorite success stories of all time was I started working with this woman and I love her dearly and I still think about her to this day. And when I met her, she was a heroin addict and she was living in a tent with a partner who was highly abusive. I remember being in a field up to my knees in fucking mud being like where are you Get out of the fucking tent, let's go in. Only because I was so worried about her anyway, I got her in the car, I took her back to like the center that I worked so that she could have a shower, she could have changed her clothes, that type of stuff, and this is where we had this really meaningful conversation about what does she need to do to change.

Speaker 1: 10:37

Now this woman scored really really high on the aces, okay, and what we did, with the right support, was we got her off um heroin, so we got her onto methadone so that she could stop shoplifting and getting caught by the police in order to feed her addiction. And I'm not gonna lie, the system was really fucking hard to keep her on that prescription and the amount of times I had to have disagreements with doctors and things who just really did not understand that. She is a person with extreme trauma and maintaining a prescription is really difficult for her was really hard. So eventually we managed to get her very stable on that. We ended up putting her into a hostel which she stuck out for months and it was. It was like Beirut in there. I used to dread going in there to see her because it was just, it wasn't. It was a hostel where anybody could be there, so if you're on drugs, if you're on alcohol, all of this stuff.

Speaker 1: 11:32

So she was constantly surrounded by temptation, but she had the right emotional support around her and she had multiple people working with her. Right, I was not the saving grace in this and I wasn't the person that was the sole hero of the story, but I played a very big part in it and what we did was like we got into it and she disclosed so much sexual abuse, emotional abuse, all of this stuff from her family and we started to work on it. We started to work on it, we started to talk about it, we started to release the shame around it. We started to release the shame about her lifestyle and, you know, got her to understand that the choices that she made was out of survival, not because she's a bad person, and obviously it was way more complicated than that. But by the time that we finished working together, she had moved into her own one bedroom place on her own, she was coming off her final dose of methadone. She had a job, she had made a connection with her son, she was back in contact with her grandchildren and she was able to see her grandchildren every single week because she had shown for the last six, eight months that she had been completely clean.

Speaker 1: 12:41

Now this is an extreme example. You might think, fucking hell, kirstie, that doesn't even resonate with me. Like, how, like you know a woman living in a tent? That ain't me. And I know it's not you because you're a high achieving boss, babe. And the truth is your addiction lies in something else. Your addiction lies in that high achievement or hiding behind that shield of being this career babe. That has it all together. But inside you're really, really struggling with relationships and that's okay. That's okay. We all have shields. Some of us are more outwardly escaping than others, but people, everyone is escaping.

Speaker 1: 13:18

If you're listening to this podcast, I can promise you you're listening to this podcast. I can promise you you're a lot better than the 90% of the fucking population, because a lot of people do not want to look at their stuff. So I want to give you, I don't know, kudos oh, that's such an American fucking word, isn't it? But I do. I want to just say to you like amazing, you're listening to this fucking podcast, you're, you're prioritizing, you're educating yourself. This is amazing. And if you're curious about the ACEs score, I'll put the link in the description below and take it in a safe, quiet place where you can process your feelings afterwards. The point isn't to label yourself or to blame your parents and I'm not here to bash parents, because I totally believe that they did what they could with the resources available to them, even if it wasn't good enough. Okay, because we have to caveat that, even if it wasn't fucking good enough, it's okay to say that as well.

Speaker 1: 14:10

And now let's talk about how this might be showing up in your life now, especially your relationship, and how you use your voice. If you do discover you have a high a score. Please know two things first, you're not alone. Two, healing is possible. Understanding is the step to transformation. Right, we've got to be the self-aware person if we're going to do that. So how is aces showing up in our life and why does this matter for you? Now? This research is wild. You know, the higher the score, the your health problems. So you might be experiencing those mental health problems now, the difficulties in your relationships. You might find that your nervous system experiences stress and just cannot deal with relationships. You're struggling to regulate your emotions. You don't trust other people. Your comfort with intimacy and vulnerability is fucking zero. You might even take risk taking behavior.

Speaker 1: 15:07

This is me. This was me in my teenage years. I did very dangerous stuff and, like, when I've gone into a period of like rapid change, I've not I've like lost the plot and I always taken like risk-taking behaviors in times where things feel very, very unsettled and unstable and this is a really common thing as well. So, for example, when we had locked down and I just couldn't face the thought of going into another lockdown for a second time in COVID, I panic, bought a candle and got my nipples pierced. Time in COVID, I panic, bought a candle and got my nipples pierced. Like. This is my, this is my story. I tell everyone. I'm like, like, like, what the fuck? Like what was I thinking? It's risk taking behavior. I felt like I needed to do an act of rebellion. I needed to do something to gain some sort of control.

Speaker 1: 15:54

Right, this is where you take those risks and you know it's a great that you are that woman who is crushing it at work, but that is taking away from your intimate relationships. These are your childhood protective patterns showing up. Your brain learned that speaking up isn't safe or my needs don't matter. And then you know this is often where we are leading into these physical health problems inflammation, autoimmune disease. You've got thyroid problems, you've got the cortisol belly where you can't lose weight from your belly, and it's just yeah, it's.

Speaker 1: 16:28

It's just really fucking overwhelming when you're in this situation and you might just think, well, this is how life is meant to be. Well, it's fucking not. It's fucking not. And the beautiful truth is you can understand this. You can understand how your past shaped you, but you don't have to let them define your future.

Speaker 1: 16:46

Now, that sounds so cheesy and cliche but honestly, it's the truth because realistically realistically, the amount of trauma I experienced, the amount of significant events I had, the amount of aces I have like I should be a strung out mental health drug addict with multiple problems, but I'm not because I did the work. And now I look at my family and I see these issues playing out left, right and center and I can promise you, I sit here and I think, thank god, I am not like a lot of my family, or I don't have coping mechanisms like a lot of my family, or I don't do this, or I don't do that because I did the work, and that doesn't make me better than my family, by the way, or me putting them down. I'm just very grateful I could see things from a different perspective and break the cycle now and me. Breaking the cycle helps them, helps and it will help my children but, more importantly, helps them to realize things don't have to be this way.

Speaker 1: 17:43

Okay, now I'm going to talk quickly about trauma-informed practice, because you probably see this on everybody's fucking Instagram bios, which makes me laugh, because these people are not trauma-informed. You cannot take a fucking one-hour class and call yourself trauma-informed. This is literally changing your entire approach to people. Okay, this is understanding the widespread impact of trauma and understanding the potential path for healing. You don't learn that in an hour. What you do is you learn it in 12 years of fucking experience, like I've got right.

Speaker 1: 18:14

So, yeah, as you can tell, get my hair off a little bit about this night, oh best, calm down, but calm down my nervous system. But yeah, the core principles are safety, creating environments where people feel physically and emotionally safe, like I've had the most horrific disclosures from people because they feel safe and that's it. And I will hold people without judgment, without negativity, because I've fucking heard it all. Man, if we I've worked in a women's prison, I've heard it all and more. Like, if I can work with a murderer, I promise you whatever you did is never that bad. Okay, I can. You know what I mean. I'm being dramatic now, but literally I there's no judgment here. It's always a beautiful, safe space.

Speaker 1: 19:00

Trustworthiness I'm not going to tell, I'm not going to speak about your shit. Confidentiality is a real thing. It's fucking cast iron and I want to make sure that you understand how I work and that comes from being very direct and very transparent. Choice I'm always going to give you choice. You don't have to change. I can give you the offer. I can walk with you and hold your hand, but the choice is yours and you are always in control when we're working together. Collaboration we're making the decisions together.

Speaker 1: 19:28

I'm never going to sit there and write you an action plan that you don't think is a good idea, because otherwise you're not going to do it. And then what's the point of me doing it and wasting my time or wasting your time and you're going to think I'm a dickhead because I'm going to make you do all the stuff you don't want to do. Yeah, empowerment I'm always focusing on strength and skills and I always give a lot of positive feedback when I feel like it's due. Now I don't, I'm not that coach who'll go. Oh my god, you're so amazing. Oh my god, I'm just not that person. I'm not. But if you do something and I'm like fucking hell, that's amazing. Like I had a client last night and I ended the call and I was like you are doing an incredible job. And I say it and I fucking mean it okay, because I'm not gonna. I, I, there's no gaining from telling people lies. Yeah, no, no gaining from telling people fucking lies, right? So I'm never gonna tell lies.

Speaker 1: 20:21

Um, so, yeah, the trauma informed stuff is basically building on aces. So in the 90s was all about the aces, 2000s the aces, and then now we're coming into this trauma-informed practice about working with people directly, and then we're starting to see this roll out in our social workers police places like that who could really fucking do with it to be honest, to deal with, because they deal with traumatized people all the time and when we start to approach healing from this perspective, we stop going. It goes back to that thing. Instead of what's wrong with you, it's about what happened to you. It's looking at problematic behaviors like people pleasing perfectionism, emotional detachment, like they're not character flaws, they are just perfectly logical responses to what you experience. Your amazing brain did exactly what it needed to to protect you then, but like every fucking system, like fucking apple, has an update. Your microsoft has an update. You need to have an update. Your car has an mot. We all need an update. Right, we all need to update because these old patterns are really keeping you stuck now those that kept you safe before and now the same strategies that are keeping you from deep connection in your relationships, because you're an adult now and you get to take care of your vulnerability right Now.

Speaker 1: 21:40

I can talk forever on this, but I'm going to move on to attachment styles, because everybody needs to understand what their attachment style is. I will put a quiz in the show description below. Everyone should have heard of attachment styles and this comes from, basically, a theory called attachment theory, pioneered by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. This is back in the day which, basically, they did a lot of experimentation with babies and mums in in situations and it was really, really interesting about the attachment style as it changes across culture as well. So this is really important to be aware of, like different like, because I remember they compared this study to something in Japan. But yeah, it was really really interesting the difference in the results, okay. So I'm talking to those western western countries right now. It may be different in your country, okay, if you're listening internationally, but I'm talking mainly about western people, western civilization when we are talking about this. I don't know why I said civilization, but basically this is the bond that you form with your primary caregiver in childhood and this creates a blueprint for your relationships throughout life. So there are four main attachment styles the secure one, the fucking jackpot. This is when your caregivers consistently meet your needs and securely attached people find it very easy to form close relationships and maintain healthy boundaries.

Speaker 1: 23:08

Next up, anxious attachment style. This develops when caregivers were inconsistent as adults anxiously attach. People often worry about abandonment. They constantly seek reassurance and may appear quite clingy in relationships or very, very intense. Hello, like I'm the anxious attachment babe. I have done a lot of work to move more into a secure attachment because your attachment can change over time and I did go from avoiding an anxious avoidant to just anxious and now I'm working towards secure, and you can do this alone or in a relationship. Now, avoidant attachment this is where the caregivers were constantly unresponsive or just dismissive. Avoidantly attached adults value independence over intimacy and may struggle to be really vulnerable. Basically, oh, this is a great way to explain it.

Speaker 1: 23:59

So when we have an anxious attachment and we have an argument with our partner, the anxious attachment person is going to like try and bring them very, very close together. They're going to try and bring them like. They're going to try and want to chase after the partner, pull them in and just reconnect and have that reassurance. An avoidant attachment style will need to have space and time away from that person. Often what we find in relationships is that anxious attachment style and avoidant often come together. So when you're having an argument with your partner and he's like I just need time to process. You're. You're you're having an argument with your partner and he's like I just need time to process. You're like inside, screaming your nervous system's going off the wall because that's not giving you the reassurance and this is where a lot of oh God arguments can happen between that. But you can absolutely work with your attachment styles when you know what they are and know that like he can say stuff to reassure you and still take space and it can all still feel pretty safe. But yeah, this is something I talk about with my one-to-one clients a lot.

Speaker 1: 24:57

Finally, we have the disorganized attachment. This is when this develops, when caregivers who are frightening or abusive. It combines anxious and avoiding characteristics that can create a periodic relationship pattern and it also includes aspects of secure as well, because you can jump between all different things. Disorganized attachment can be quite tricky to treat, but it's not untreatable. It's just because it changes and mutates depending on the situation and your attachment style isn't fixed. Like I said, it was shaped by our childhood experiences and you can develop a more secure attachment style as you go through. Now this is really important. You could take practical steps now. You can understand your ACES questionnaire, you can do the attachment quiz, you can reach a point of compassion with yourself and realize that your responses and patterns were made perfect, you know, made perfect sense back when what happened to you happened.

Speaker 1: 25:56

You may not even fucking remember it, right, because your brain isn't always going to be there, it isn't always going to remember every single thing. Now your subconscious brain remembers everything, but your conscious brain, like, will actively block out painful memories for us. Because why our brain is so fucking good at protecting us and making sure that we are like feeling safe? Okay, because, let's face it, if we're flooded with emotions, we're not going to be able to run away from a tiger. Right, we need to like, that's how our brain is like storing our emotions. I've had memories be completely blocked and then unblock and come forward for me to deal with when the time was right. And, like I've said before, I don't remember large chunks of my uh, childhood and that doesn't really fucking bother me anymore.

Speaker 1: 26:41

Next up, professional support. Guess who's here, baby, I am. I am currently opening my reborn mentorship again. I do have limited spaces, but I've opened it up again and I promise you guys, there is nothing like the reborn mentorship. You'll never find anything like it on the fucking market, because what I do with you in a three-month period, which is an intense three months, is we get into the detail of your childhood the relationship with your mother, the relationship with your father, the intimacy problems that you are having in intimate relationships and also, if there's a need, we can explore sexual abuse as well.

Speaker 1: 27:17

Now, reborn is beautiful. I absolutely love it. I think it's just the most beautiful container to be a part of, and I've put quite a few clients through it now and I just think about their transformation and it's absolutely insane. You can always check out on my Instagram the fucking testimonials and stuff I get, which are all the time because the work I do actually works, because we're not talking about things just from a logical perspective. We're talking about things from the body and from a spiritual practice as well, which, yeah, nobody else is doing, babe, nobody else is doing. I am your one-stop shop and I promise you I can mold and I can shape to anything that you fucking need because of my 12 years of experience. That makes me actually trauma-informed, not an hour-long class. And also I want you to just be patient with yourself.

Speaker 1: 28:02

Healing isn't linear. It's about undoing patterns that have been with you for decades, and it takes time. Celebrate your progress, no matter how small it seems, and remember understanding your childhood experiences isn't about blaming your parents. We're not bashing anyone. We're not even bashing our younger version of ourselves. We are offering forgiveness to everybody and we are reclaiming our power and creating relationships that our soul truly fucking craves. Now, with all that being said, I'm going to draw this to a close. This has been a fucking epic podcast, if I do say so myself. If you loved it, if you enjoyed it, please do give me a shout out, do share on your social media, let me know what you think, and I will see you very soon. Lots of love.