Welcome to Back from the Abyss. This is a place for stories of hope and healing, recovery, and redemption.

And I'm Dr. Craig Hecock.

In general, I'm not a big fan of psychiatric rating scales.

Unless it's named the Y-box, and that would be the Yale Brown obsessive-compulsive scale.

However, I recently added a rating scale to my intake paperwork, and I found it incredibly

helpful in getting a read on the depth and breadth of my new patient's childhood trauma history.

It's called the Ace, the Adverse Childhood Experience Scale, and it turns out to be a very

powerful predictor of lifelong psychological and psychiatric challenges. And perhaps

most interestingly, the ACE score is a strong predictor of chronic medical illness.

It has 10 yes, no questions, with 10 being the highest possible trauma score.

Today's storyteller Rachel, she scored a four on the ace, which initially doesn't

sound that bad, but a score of four or higher is strongly predictive of chronic depression,

anxiety, addiction, suicidality, autoimmune illness, diabetes, chronic pain, asthma, arthritis,

gastrointestinal illness, cardiovascular disease,

and more. And today we hear how her childhood abuse led not only to chronic depression,

disabling anxiety, and suicidality, but also to years of horrific gastrointestinal symptoms

and unending bouts of hives.

Rachel's abuse was buried by the protective mechanism of dissociative amnesia.

As Rachel wrote to me, quote,

the only way I could continue to live with no way out, with no one to tell,

with no words even to describe what was happening to me,

was to forget what was happening to me.

...