A young girl talks to a therapist on a couch

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Quick Summary

  • The Clancy children case sent me down a rabbit hole thinking about childhood stress and how it physically lives in our bodies long after we grow up.
  • I have spent four years actually trying to heal from a high ACE score and I want to share what genuinely helped versus what was just expensive noise.
  • Somatic therapy, breathwork, sleep, and real community moved the needle for me way more than any supplement or thirty-day program ever did.

I have been following the Clancy children case like a lot of people have this week, and honestly I had to step away from my phone multiple times because it was just a lot. If you haven't been following it, it's been all over the news and social media and it involves the deaths of young kids in circumstances that are still being investigated. I'm not here to cover the crime story itself. But something happened when I was reading about it that I couldn't shake. I started thinking about my own childhood. About stress. About how the things that happen to us when we're young don't just live in our memories. They live in our bodies.

I know that sounds like a leap. But hear me out. A few years ago I went through something that cracked me wide open, health-wise. I was dealing with chronic fatigue, gut issues, and this low-grade anxiety that I had just decided was normal life. My doctor at the time basically shrugged. And then I found a therapist who specialized in somatic work, and she introduced me to the concept of childhood adversity and how it literally rewires your nervous system. That was the first time I understood why I felt the way I did. Stories like the Clancy case are heartbreaking in the most obvious ways. But they also remind me that surviving a difficult childhood, even one that is nowhere near that extreme, leaves marks. Real, physical marks.

So today I want to talk about that. About childhood trauma, the nervous system, and what actually helps versus what is mostly noise. Because I have tried a lot of things. Some worked. Some were a complete waste of money and time. Let me just walk you through what I have learned.

The ACE Score and Why It Changed How I Think About My Health

Have you ever heard of the ACE study? ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences. It was this massive study done in the late 1990s by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, and it essentially found that the more difficult experiences you had as a kid, the higher your risk of a staggering list of health problems as an adult. Heart disease. Autoimmune conditions. Depression. Addiction. Even early death.

I took the ACE questionnaire maybe three years ago on a random Tuesday night and I scored a four. Which is considered high. And I sat there kind of stunned because I had always told myself my childhood was fine. Not great, but fine. The questionnaire made me reckon with the fact that fine is doing a lot of heavy lifting sometimes.

The questions cover things like emotional neglect, physical abuse, having a parent with mental illness, witnessing domestic violence, and several others. Each yes is one point. A score of four or more is where the research starts showing significantly elevated health risks. And honestly, finding this out was both validating and terrifying at the same time. Validating because suddenly my body's behavior made sense. Terrifying because I realized I had been carrying this without knowing it.

The thing is, the ACE score isn't a doom sentence. That's the part people get wrong. It's information. And information is where you start.

What Chronic Stress Actually Does to a Child's Body

Here's the thing about kids and stress. Adults have a fully developed prefrontal cortex that helps regulate emotional responses. Kids don't. Not even close. The brain is still building itself well into our mid-twenties. So when a child is exposed to prolonged or extreme stress, their developing nervous system adapts to that environment. It learns to stay in a state of high alert. Because in that environment, high alert was survival.

Practical. But then you grow up. And your nervous system is still running that same survival program even when there's no threat. This is why so many adults who had hard childhoods describe feeling like they're always waiting for something to go wrong. Always bracing. I felt this for years and thought I was just a pessimistic person. Turns out my nervous system was doing exactly what it had been trained to do.

The physiological effects are real and measurable. Chronically elevated cortisol disrupts sleep, increases inflammation, messes with digestion, suppresses the immune system. And because it happens gradually over years, it doesn't feel like a crisis. It just feels like being you. Sound familiar?

This is also why I get frustrated when people act like childhood trauma is purely a mental health issue. No. It is a whole body issue. Your muscles hold tension differently. Your heart rate variability is lower. Your gut is more reactive. All of it is connected.

The Gut-Trauma Connection Nobody Talked About Until Recently

This one genuinely surprised me when I first started digging into it. The gut and the brain are in constant communication via the vagus nerve. And when your nervous system is chronically dysregulated, your gut knows. It absolutely knows.

I spent years dealing with bloating, constipation that would randomly flip to diarrhea, and this persistent feeling of nausea in stressful situations. Doctors tested me for everything and found nothing. The diagnosis was IBS, which sometimes feels like a polite way of saying we don't know what's wrong with you.

What I found was that when I started working on my nervous system specifically, not just my diet, my gut started to calm down. Slowly. Very slowly. But it did. Research into the gut-brain axis has exploded in the last decade and scientists are finding that the microbiome of people with high ACE scores looks different from those without. Inflammation markers are higher. The gut lining can be compromised. This stuff is not in your head. Well, technically some of it is. But you know what I mean.

I added fermented foods, reduced ultra-processed stuff, and worked with a registered dietitian who understood trauma-informed nutrition. That combination helped more than any probiotic supplement I had thrown money at before.

What Healing Actually Looks Like (It's Slower Than You Think)

Okay so this is the part where I have to be really honest. Healing from childhood adversity is not a six-week program. It is not a supplement stack. It is not journaling for thirty days straight. It is slow, nonlinear, and sometimes you feel worse before you feel better because you are finally actually feeling things.

Here is what has genuinely moved the needle for me over about four years of consistent effort. Somatic therapy. This is different from regular talk therapy in that it pays attention to what's happening in your body during the session. Where do you feel tension? What happens in your chest when you talk about that memory? It sounds weird until you try it and then it sounds like the most obvious thing in the world.

Breathwork. I was skeptical. Very skeptical. I thought it was woo-adjacent nonsense. But slow diaphragmatic breathing directly activates the parasympathetic nervous system. There is good research behind this. I do about ten minutes in the morning before I look at my phone and it has changed the tone of my entire day in a way that is hard to overstate.

Sleep. Non-negotiable. When you're running on cortisol, sleep is constantly disrupted. Prioritizing sleep hygiene, actual boring sleep hygiene like consistent wake times and a cool dark room, helped regulate my mood in ways that took me by surprise.

And community. This one is underrated and also uncomfortable if your nervous system learned to see relationships as a source of danger rather than safety. But co-regulation is real. Being around calm, safe people literally helps your nervous system downshift. It takes time to trust that but it works.

What Works vs What Doesn't

Let me just be direct because I think you deserve that.

What actually works: somatic therapy or EMDR for trauma processing, consistent breathwork practices, sleep prioritization, movement that feels good rather than punishing (I walk a lot, I stopped treating exercise like penance), whole food eating with an emphasis on the gut, and building actual safe relationships slowly over time.

What is overrated or doesn't work the way people say: meditation apps as a standalone fix (they can help but they are not therapy), supplements like ashwagandha and magnesium (they can play a small supporting role but they will not rewire your nervous system), detox programs (not a thing, your liver exists), and honestly a lot of the trauma content on social media that makes you feel seen but doesn't actually move you forward. I consumed so much of that content and felt validated and then still felt terrible. Validation without action is just a comfortable place to stay stuck.

The thing is, there is a whole industry built around selling easy solutions to hard problems. And when you're exhausted and struggling, easy solutions are very appealing. I bought the courses and the supplements and the books. Some books were great. Most of it was expensive noise.

What changed my life was slow, boring, consistent work with actual professionals who knew what they were doing. That's not a satisfying answer but it's the true one.

Closing Thoughts

Cases like what happened with the Clancy children are devastating in ways that are hard to sit with. And I think one thing that can come out of collective grief over something like this is a renewed commitment to understanding what children carry, what they survive, and what that survival costs them long term.

If you grew up in a difficult situation, you are not broken. Your body made adaptations that made sense at the time. The work is in slowly, gently teaching your system that it doesn't have to stay in survival mode forever. That is possible. I am living proof that it is possible, even if I still have hard days.

Have you ever looked into your own ACE score or thought about how your childhood shaped your health? I would genuinely love to hear about it in the comments. Not because I have all the answers but because I think a lot of us are carrying this alone and we really don't have to be.