Healing Forward: How Helpers with ACEs Can Build Resilient Lives
There's a peculiar phenomenon that occurs when you step into the world of helping. Whether you're a therapist, nurse, caseworker, teacher, or the person who answers the phone at 2 AM when someone in crisis calls, you entered this field to do some good, perhaps to mend something that felt broken in the world. But sometimes, the job feels heavier than expected. For many helpers, this weight has been carried long before they donned the badge, name tag, lanyard, or the "how-can-I-help-you" smile.
This is about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) - those events that occur when you're small and vulnerable, with little say in how the story unfolds. It's about how those early narratives weave their way into your work, your body, and your capacity to continue this job without unraveling.
But don't worry, this isn't a sad story. It's a tale of resilience, illustrating how helpers—even the tired, burnt-out, and questioning-everything ones—can care for themselves while caring for others.
A Quick, Messy History of ACEs
ACEs became a Big Deal in the late 1990s when researchers Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda started looking at how childhood trauma affects adult health. They asked thousands of people about ten categories of adversity—things like abuse, neglect, substance use in the home, parental separation, and mental illness in the family. Then they compared those experiences with health outcomes later in life (Felitti et al., 1998).
What they found was horrifying but not surprising: the more ACEs you have, the higher your risk for just about everything bad—heart disease, diabetes, depression, addiction, risky behaviors, even premature death (Merrick et al., 2019).
It was groundbreaking at the time, but if you’d asked anyone who grew up in a chaotic home, they could have told you for free: what happens to you as a kid doesn’t stay in the past. It follows you. It shapes you.
And for a lot of people, it sends them straight into helping professions.
Why So Many Helpers Have High ACE Scores
It seems that helping professions are filled with individuals with complex childhoods, and research supports this observation. A systematic review found that health and social care workers frequently report ACEs, often more so than the general population. Social workers, nurses, mental health providers, and emergency responders all tend to have higher-than-average childhood adversity scores (Mercer et al., 2023).
Why is this the case? Perhaps those who've experienced harm develop a deep drive to prevent others from enduring the same. Maybe they possess finely tuned empathy, able to detect pain and distress like a radio set to the frequency of suffering. Or perhaps, and this is the challenging part, they're simply accustomed to crisis.
Growing up in a chaotic home makes the emotional turbulence of a high-stress helping job feel familiar. This familiarity is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it enhances job performance—you notice signs others might miss and can sit with someone on their worst day without flinching. On the other hand, it can lead to burnout, boundary erosion, and compassion fatigue, as the work isn't just work; it stirs up unresolved, deeper issues.
The Impact of ACEs on Helping Professionals
1. The Body Remembers
Even if you've built a whole life atop your childhood experiences, your nervous system still clings to those original blueprints. High ACE scores are linked to chronic stress responses, making your body more prone to anxiety, exhaustion, immune issues, and good old-fashioned burnout.
But here's the kicker: the very behaviors and neural adaptations that once protected you can become obstacles when the threats are gone. In the face of early adversity, our brains adapt to survive—heightening alertness, quickening stress responses, and sharpening the instinct to detect danger. These adaptations are lifesaving in chaotic environments.
However, when the environment changes—when safety replaces danger—these ingrained responses can become maladaptive. The hyper-vigilance that once kept you safe may now lead to anxiety in everyday situations. The quick-trigger stress response that helped you navigate threats might now result in exhaustion and burnout in a stable setting. Essentially, your nervous system continues to run outdated defense programs, reacting to past threats that no longer exist.
Understanding this shift is crucial for helpers. Recognizing that your body's lingering responses are remnants of past survival strategies can be the first step toward healing. It opens the door to developing new patterns that align with your current reality—strategies that promote well-being, resilience, and a thriving life beyond mere survival.
2. Over-Identification with Clients: The Savior Complex
Growing up feeling unseen or unheard can foster a deep-seated desire to be the rescuer in adulthood. This "savior complex" manifests as an overwhelming need to fix or rescue others, often at the expense of one's own well-being. In the realm of helping professionals, this can lead to over-identification with clients, blurring the lines between empathy and personal responsibility.
Individuals with a savior complex may:
Neglect Personal Boundaries: Prioritizing others' needs over their own, leading to emotional and physical exhaustion.
Experience Frustration: Feeling inadequate or frustrated when unable to "save" someone, impacting their self-worth.
Enable Dependency: Creating reliance in clients, hindering their autonomy and growth.
This compulsion often stems from unresolved past traumas or a need for validation, driving individuals to seek purpose through rescuing others.
3. The Boundary Problem: When Saying 'No' Feels Impossible
Adverse childhood experiences can teach individuals that love is conditional or that their needs are secondary. As adults, this often translates into difficulty setting boundaries. Helpers may struggle to say no, take on too much, and equate their worth with how much they give, leading to:
Emotional Exhaustion: Constantly extending oneself without respite.
Resentment: Feeling unappreciated or taken advantage of due to overcommitment.
Identity Loss: Basing self-worth solely on the ability to help, neglecting personal needs and desires.
This lack of boundaries not only harms the helper but can also negatively impact the quality of care provided to those they aim to assist.
4. The Burnout Accelerator: When Past and Present Stress Collide
Individuals with high ACE scores often have heightened baseline stress levels. When combined with the demands of high-stakes, emotionally taxing professions, this creates a perfect storm for burnout. Without effective strategies to regulate, recover, and decompress, burnout becomes not just a possibility but an inevitability.
Burnout manifests as:
Physical Symptoms: Chronic fatigue, headaches, and susceptibility to illnesses.
Emotional Symptoms: Detachment, irritability, and feelings of helplessness.
Professional Consequences: Reduced performance, absenteeism, and high turnover rates.
Research indicates that helping professionals with a history of ACEs are at a higher risk of developing negative professional quality of life outcomes, including burnout and secondary traumatic stress.
Recognizing these patterns is crucial for implementing self-care strategies and organizational support systems to mitigate burnout risks.
So, What Can Be Done?
(No, Quitting Everything and Moving to a Cabin Isn’t Your Only Option)
1. Get Serious About Self-Care (The Real Kind, Not the Instagram Kind)
Therapy. Even if you think you don’t “need” it. Especially if you think you don’t need it.
Regulation strategies. Yoga, deep breathing, mindfulness—it’s about retraining your nervous system, not just chilling out.
Boundaries. Saying no is self-respect in action. Practice it.
2. Trauma-Informed Workplaces Need to Exist
Advocating for trauma-responsive policies in helping professions is a game-changer.
Organizations should train leaders on how to recognize trauma responses in staff and make wellness part of the culture, not an afterthought (Esaki, 2019).
3. Peer Support and Community Matter
You are not alone in this. Find other helpers who get it.
Support groups for professionals with high ACEs can be life-saving.
Mentorship and supervision should include conversations about personal history and its influence on work.
4. Redefine Success
Your worth is not tied to how many people you help.
You can only give what you have. If you’re running on empty, rest.
Final Thoughts: You Deserve the Same Care You Give
Helping others is noble work. But being good at it doesn’t mean you have to carry the whole world on your shoulders. Your past is part of you, but it doesn’t have to run the show. You are not just what happened to you. You are also what you build, what you heal, what you learn to hold gently.
Take care of yourself. The world needs helpers—but not the kind that self-destruct.
Reflection Questions
What drew you to your profession? Do you see connections between your past experiences and your work?
What parts of your job feel heavier than they should? Are there any patterns that might be tied to your own history?
How do you know when you’re nearing burnout? What are the warning signs in your body, mind, and emotions?
What boundaries feel hardest for you to set? Why do you think that is?
What’s one small but meaningful change you can make to protect your well-being in this work?
Who supports you? If you don’t have a clear answer, where can you start building that support system?
