Trauma In Social Work

With my past social work experience I understand that trauma can affect many people in different ways. Traumatic life experiences can vary with everyone and their way of coping and reacting. I worked a children services for about two years. I have been able to witness the effects of trauma on a lot of the children I worked with. For example, I had to remove 5 children from their mother. Their mother was using meth at the time leaving the oldest child, who was thirteen years old, taking care of the youngest. The mother was in an abusive relationship with their father. The father was very emotionally abusing by threatening the kids and mother. Removing the children from their mother was a traumatic life experience.

The authors defined trauma

The score gives an individual their risk level of developing a mental, physical and/or social risk. So, an individual with a high number of ACEs has a higher risk of mental, physical, and social risk/problems.

During the Wisconsin Behavioral Risk Factor Survey, they asked a series of questions in regard to trauma. They asked 10 questions of the following: recurrent physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, alcohol and/or drug abuser in household, incarcerated household member, household member who was chronically depressed, violence between adults in the home, and parental separation or divorce (O’Connor, C., et al., 2012). It is stated in the Wisconsin BRFS that they did not include two neglect questions that are in the original ACEs questions. The Wisconsin’s BRFS’s results shown a high connection between traumatic experiences in childhood and mental health struggles in adulthood (O’Connor, C., et al., 2012). Wisconsin’s BRFS also discovered that adults with more ACEs are scientifically more likely to smoke cigarettes and increased likelihood of heavy drinking as the ACE score increase (O’Connor, C., et al.,