Childhood Trauma Assessment | Counselling & Psychotherapy Services

Childhood Trauma

You’ve come to this page to understand the impact of adverse events in childhood on you as an adult.

If you’re an adult who has survived any form of child abuse (e.g., neglect, emotional and psychological abuse, physical or sexual abuse) then this is a good place to start to determine your need for a navigator to help you process the leftover pain from those experiences.

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We often understate the relevance of our childhood experiences on our adult lives. Many survivors don’t want to talk about their childhood because they don’t wish to blame their parents, who may also be damaged from their own infancy. As young people, we try to ‘draw a line in the sand’ and just move on as if it never happened. But that doesn’t work in the end.

Did you know?

Your negative thinking pattern is unique to you and will often be associated with experiences from the past and your expectations of the future. This means that the solution to negative thinking needs to be designed specifically for you.

Personality and emotional wounds from childhood require healing and may act as a barrier to success in your adult life – at least until they are resolved. For example, compared to people who have not been abused, adults who have experienced adverse childhood experiences are:

Twice as likely to smoke.

Five times as likely to have depression.

Seven times more likely to be alcoholic

Ten times more likely to take illicit drugs.

Twelve times more likely to attempt suicide.

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The good news is that many survivors learn to soothe and heal in adult life. Reparenting is one of the major strategies we use for improvement and healing. However, there is no quick fix. But it may be possible to learn how to bring the pain inside you down to a manageable size and to release the shame and self-blame, that limits you in your adult life.

Many young people travel overseas to get as far away from their dysfunctional families as possible. This strategy aims to get free of triggers that lead to increased pain and collapse in adult survivors. But being expatriate in a foreign country while dealing with the fallout of child abuse can be frightening, lonely and difficult. This is because it’s easy to feel isolated when overseas. There is very little professional or even community support available for this kind of problem – especially in Asia. Expats networks are small and often work-related, making it difficult to be honest and vulnerable with others. Gossip is always a factor that tends to worry expats. In fact, given that most expats go overseas for employment, this sort of anxiety poses a real barrier to seeking help.

If you are experiencing pain from childhood trauma then complete the quick, easy and confidential checklist below. It will help you determine if you need to take further action and how urgently to act.

Resources

Am I in pain because of my childhood?

ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EVENTS CHECKLIST

This quick checklist will ask you to reflect on your experiences as a child and the quality of the parenting you received in childhood. You answer each question by considering what happened to you as you were growing up, during the first 18 years of life.

The quiz is 10 questions and you simply read each statement and answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to each one.

At the end of the quiz, you’ll get a result which will be a number out of 10. A result below 4 suggests you may not be in any immediate need for help. A result of 4 or more suggests that you may need help to navigate your way through the pain to a place where you can soothe and heal. The higher the number of your result, the more important it is that you seek out help.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire provided here is called the ACE-Q. It is used by mental health professionals to determine what level of support is needed for an adult who has experienced adverse childhood events.

This checklist and your results do not replace the advice of a medical doctor. This checklist does not diagnose you with trauma. Instead, it helps you decide whether you need to seek help. To receive a clinical diagnosis of trauma or PTSD, please see a clinical mental health professional and follow their advice.

Please avoid completing this test for someone else. You won’t be able to accurately decide on that person’s trauma if you complete the test yourself on their behalf.

Taking this test is completely confidential. We don’t record results and we can’t trace results back to individuals. We do retain information on the number of visitors who complete the test and what range of distress they had. This helps us to develop new programs and online tools in the future.

Reference: Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0749-3797(98)00017-8

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