Adverse Childhood Experiences
RAFT (Recovery/Reconnection and Floatation Therapy)
Our exclusive approach to ACE’s and Trauma recovery.
Adverse childhood experiences (ACE’s) can stay with us well past childhood impacting how we live, love and operate on a day to day basis. In childhood we make decisions about ourselves, other people and the world in general before we have the cognitive capacity (thinking ability) to challenge these decisions.
Unfortunately these adverse early life experiences can enable us to encode (store) emotions and beliefs that are less than helpful when it comes to establishing a sense of self, often giving us a fragmented internal operating system which leaves us more vulnerable to abuse (physical, emotional, financial, sexual etc).
ACE’s have a direct link to adult struggles with mental and physical health,
There are 10 types of childhood trauma measured in the ACE Study. Five are personal — physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect. Five are related to other family members: a parent who’s an alcoholic, a mother who’s a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, and the disappearance of a parent through divorce, death or abandonment. Each type of trauma counts as one. So a person who’s been physically abused, with one alcoholic parent, and a mother who was beaten up has an ACE score of three.
There are, of course, many other types of childhood trauma — racism, bullying, watching a sibling being abused, losing a caregiver (grandmother, mother, grandfather, etc.), homelessness, surviving and recovering from a severe accident, witnessing a father being abused by a mother, witnessing a grandmother abusing a father, involvement with the foster care system, involvement with the juvenile justice system, etc.
The most important thing to remember is that the ACE score is meant as a guideline: If you experienced other types of toxic stress over months or years, then those would likely increase your risk of health consequences.
Research states an ACE score of 4 or more increases the risk of heart disease 3-fold and Type 2 diabetes 4-fold.
People with an ACE score of 4 or more are 6 times more likely to smoke and 14 times more likely to have experienced violence in the last 12 months
Increasing ACE score associated with increased and early alcohol and drug misuse, one study suggests with each additional ACE the rate of prescription drug use increases by 62%
ACEs in any category increased the risk of attempted suicide by 2- to 5-fold. ACE score of 6 or more increases risk by 25%
People with an ACE score of 6 or more have a life expectancy of 20 years less than those with a score of 0 because of illness, violence and suicide.
So how can we help?
Our exclusive RAFT programme will support you to establish a sense of self and be focussed on the things you would like in your life, rather than the things you are trying to avoid..
By using pschosensory and the latest neuroscientific approaches to connecting the body and the mind we remove the emotional drivers from the physical and mental memories where they have been harvested.
Our 2.5hr programme includes a 1 hour 1-1 session with our highly skilled and qualified therapist Vivian McKinnon followed by a 60 minute floatation session.
RAFT works by removing the emotional components and identifying the learnings of these experiences to create new neuropathways and remove the pain of the past, when you deal with the root cause there is no longer a focus on managing symptoms.