Trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event that has happened in someone’s life. This can range from an accident, rape, or a natural disaster. Trauma can have lasting effects on your mental, physical, and emotional health. It can affect how your feel about yourself and others and cause increased risk of developing a mental health condition including depression, anxiety, or PTSD. Trauma can affect your physical health by triggering endocrine and immune problems leading to increased risk of chronic illness including chronic autoimmune illnesses, heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, or cancer. It can result in many physical reactions including fatigue or exhaustion, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, or insomnia. Spiritual well being can be affected because the individual could feel that they are being punished or abandoned by God, lose faith, decrease participation in religious activities, or feel a loss of meaning and purpose for living. Social well-being can be effected because it can cause an individual to withdraw from family and friends leading to isolation. The emotional distressed experienced can also make it difficult to relate to others.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACES) are potentially traumatic events that occur in a childhood and can include violence, abuse, and growing up in a family with mental health or substance use problems. ACES can have several long term impacts of adverse childhood experiences. It can change the brain development and affect how the body responds to stress. Additionally, ACES are linked to several chronic health problems, both physical illnesses and mental illnesses. It can cause chronic health conditions including depression, COPD, asthma, kidney disease, stroke, coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Health risk behaviors that can result from ACES include smoking, drinking, and other forms of substance abuse. Socioeconomic challenges that may be impacted include unemployment status, education level, and health insurance. Preventing ACES can help children to thrive and potentially prevent the chronic health conditions, risky behaviors, unemployment, low education levels and prevent ACES from being passed on from one generation to the next.

I will apply the Trauma- Informed Care (TIC) principles to my future nursing practice to help to prevent and identify ACES. I will anticipate and recognize current risks for ACES in patients who are children and understand the history of ACES in adults. I will establish rapport with my patients so that I am able to fully engage with the patient and get all of the information that I would need to properly care for the patient. I will respect the patient and their boundaries on what they are comfortable talking about. Additionally, I will treat my patients as actual people who I care about by taking my time with them and allowing them to feel heard and valued. Allowing the patient to be in control of these difficult conversations can also help. Overall, being aware of TIC in my practice will help to prevent and identify ACES in my patients.