Thursday, October 8, 2009

The ACE Pyramid- How Abusive Parents Kill their Children


The ACE pyramid shows how abuse can stress a child into choosing behaviors that affect their physical and emotional well-being as an adult.
The stress a child experiences when exposed to abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction, often causes social, emotional, or cognitive impairment. This means they begin to act, feel, or think in ways that are other than the norm. They can become anxious, detatched, depressed, or hyper-aroused. This can lead the child to adopt behaviors that for the moment seems to soothe their stress (smoking, drinking), or excite them (drugs, risky behavior), but has long-term damaging effects.
In the pursuit of immediate relief from stress, the child's long-term health is compromised, resulting in disease (lung cancer, COPD, liver failure, ect.), disability (injuries from risky behavior), and social problems (emotional problems, detachment, depression). This, in turn, can result in early death. A child that was born with great potential and promise, later dies prematurely because of the stress inflicted by dysfunctional or abusive adults.
The greatest risk to a child's health is not the flu. The greatest risk to a child's health is having abusive or dysfunctional parents.
If you had an abusive childhood, you need to take steps to overcome. Face the fact that attempting to overcome stress through smoking, drinking, drugs, or promiscuity is just a attempt to cope with something that won't work. It is just a quick ticket to a premature death.
The first step in overcoming is to ask God for help. Get on your face before God and confess your anger, your unbelief, and cry out to God for help. Tell God your attempts to cope don't work. Ask Him to reveal Himself to you. He will.
The above pyramid is from the acestudy@cdc.gov.

1 comment:

  1. this makes a lot of sense, explains a lot of otherwise senseless choices i see being made by people around me. i can look back and see where some of my own stupid choices came from. i have to thank God that i gave my life to Him before it was completly ruined.

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