to wonder if therapist baby trauma (ACE) theory is true?

[LaMaG]

I am mid 40s with kids and have always had a weight problem, not obese exactly but always battling the bulge. About a year ago I joined an expensive long term weight loss plan with CBT built in to explore why I do what I do. I realised the extent that food is used to deal with emotions and talked a lot about triggers etc. My CBT therapist believes I have a mental block about something, maybe I don't know but something is causing me to continuously fill the void. I talked a bit about my not very unusual childhood and how I always liked my food, but she pushed it a bit and was asking about ACE (adverse childhood experiences). She seems to think something happened to me when very young that caused the stress which prompted the stress/food issue I now have.

A few weeks ago I began an alternative medicine course to work on my stress, and all was going well until the therapist last week started to talk about there was a deep seated energy flow block in my organs (or something like that!) and she believed it was from an ACE and when I said no I had a normal childhood etc, she pushed it a bit saying it may be something from babyhood I don't remember. Both therapists used very similar language.

My instinct would be to dismiss this as airy fairy BS but the truth is something DID happen, when I was very little and I always dismissed it as I was too young. Neither therapist could have known this. Its really rattled me, I feel like I'm questioning everything about my life and I have no one from that time to reassure me as to the details.

Please can anyone tell me if this is a line therapists are using with everyone these days, or did they sense something real? AIBU to be upset by this?

I've recently had therapy and this was not suggested to me. My stress & low mood are very situational & nothing untoward happened to me when I was very young.

I think think it's bollocks tbh. I've been to two therapists (not very good ones in retrospect) who also kept trying that childhood trauma route. It seems like a cheap trick to orchestrate a placebo effect by forcing clients to believe that a certain incident caused all their problems, and because the therapist was instrumental in "unearthing" this issue, you see them as part of the cure. The vast majority of people experience at least one ACE by middle-age so purely statistically, any therapist can uncover something if they push hard enough.

(FWIW my issue was panic disorder, phobias and anxiety. It turns out that all that was caused by undiagnosed ADHD and possible autism. Had fuck all to do with a single incident in childhood, but of course a lot of thing were perceived as traumatising because I didn't know I was ND. None of those therapists even though of screening for neurodiversity and instead kept pushing the "root cause in childhood" narrative).

I think that things in babyhood can definitely affect you. I also think that many parents struggle with their own emotional regulation which can cause them to have difficulty regulating their children. Eating is an incredibly common regulation strategy which is available to children from a young age and means they do not need to rely on someone else for regulation/comfort. So while ACEs can obviously have a big impact, they are not the only way people develop (previously functional but now) unhelpful ways of managing their emotions. I’m skeptical about energy therapies so I can’t comment on that part.

I think it's appropriate for them to ask about childhood experiences but I don't think it's right that they have said they 'think there is something', that is straying dangerously close to the discredited recovered memory type work. OP, first of all ACEs are incredibly common unfortunately and have a big impact on us. So it's worth understanding your own experiences through your own lens, and maybe even your parents childhood experiences through your own lens. Sometimes when someone has experienced neglect and emotional neglect or not been adequately cared for they are not aware of 'what they missed out on', or the need to attach to parents or our own shame about not feeling loveable overwhelms the possibility that parents might not actually have been good enough for us (for their own reasons). Don't let them rush you, you are the expert in your own experiences and you will discover it, with sensitive help that doesn't make assumptions about you.

I think it can well be true..why wouldn’t it? I had hypnosis years ago to deal with panic attacks and ended up having a memory about being in a cot and unable to breathe. Had a totally different therapy this past year and again some physical memories came up about struggling to breathe in a fog of cigarette smoke at around the same age.

ACEs came from a study in the US and are a useful way of thinking about the effect of childhood trauma, and how to address these issues with building resilience. Amazing book by the surgeon general of California on it and TED talk by Dr Nadine Burk Harris. Things that happen as a baby and even in utero can have a biological effect on a person.

However it sounds like both therapists used language that felt quite leading and unhelpful for you, and that might be useful to let them know if you continue working together. A person is a sum of lots of experiences rather than one event!

Thanks so much everyone for your helpful responses here. I feel a bit better about things, I was just a bit shook last week when I had that therapy. I was starting to worry I was somehow "damaged".

Hi op I'm a social worker and ACES forms part of our theoretical understanding alongside psychology and psychiatry for example. It is completely genuine and a vast amount of research has been done in this area for a long time and it's been proven. You should take a look at some of the studies it basically helps you to understand the person you have become or things like your resilience and risk factors for other things.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovIJ3dsNk&pp=ygUNdGVkIHRhbGsgYWNlcw%3D%3D

Above is a link to the ted talk about it, worth a watch.