Seminar Series 12: Lecture 6 - Jane Stevens

How ACEs and the 'Theory of Everything' Can Help Build Healthy Communities

We’re entering an age that might be the modern equivalent of the Renaissance, a new understanding about ourselves, why we behave the way we do, and how we can solve our most intractable problems, such as poverty, chronic disease, mental illness, and violence. Some people call this new understanding the “theory of everything”, a “unified science” of human development. This understanding will have a profound impact on our lives, and already is, in astounding ways. 

The five parts of this “theory of everything” are the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) and subsequent ACE surveys and studies (epidemiology); how toxic stress from ACEs affects the brain (neurobiology) and the body (biomedical consequences of toxic stress); how ACEs are passed from one generation to the next (epigenetic consequences of toxic stress); and resilience research, which takes advantage of the brain being plastic and the body wanting to heal. Based on this research, people, organizations and communities are putting into place trauma-informed and resilience-building practices that are already showing remarkable results, as long as those practices integrate an understanding of ACEs.  

The ACEs Connection Network serves a community of nearly 8,000 members from 40 countries who are implementing — or thinking about implementing — trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on ACEs research. By developing community-based groups and by doing case studies of communities that are becoming trauma-informed, the ACEs Connection Network provides information on how to lay a foundation to start down the road of becoming a trauma-informed community.