Briefly
Ask when your body started feeling like this and most people can name a date: the accident, the pregnancy, the year the business nearly went under. The date is real. It is almost never the whole story.
Bodies do not keep a diary of events. They keep a running total. Every demand asks the nervous system to adjust, and every adjustment was meant to be temporary.
It is the total, rather than any single item on it, that tends to show up years later as tension, broken sleep or fatigue.
What follows is what the research shows about that accumulation, and just as importantly what it does not predict about any one person.
Why is it so rarely one big thing?
Ask someone when their body started feeling like this and you will usually get a date. The car accident. The pregnancy. The week the business nearly went under. The date is useful, and it is almost never the whole account.
Bodies do not keep a diary of events. They keep a running total. Every demand that asks the nervous system to mobilise is met with an adjustment: muscles recruited, hormones tuned, breath lifted higher into the chest. Each adjustment is intelligent. Each was meant to be temporary. What accumulates is not the events; it is the adaptations that never fully stood down.
Which is why the honest answer to what caused this is so often unsatisfying: not one thing, but many, arriving in instalments across years.
What did the Kaiser and CDC researchers actually find?
The most-cited evidence here began with a question nobody set out to ask. At a Kaiser Permanente health appraisal service in San Diego, Vincent Felitti noticed that adults leaving a weight programme often described difficult childhoods. With Robert Anda at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he posted a questionnaire on seven categories of childhood adversity to 13,494 adults; 9,508 replied.
The finding was not that adversity is bad for you. Everybody knew that. The finding was the shape of the relationship. Risk rose with the count: against people reporting none of the seven, those reporting four or more carried four- to twelvefold increased risks for alcoholism, drug misuse, depression and attempted suicide (American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998). Read that figure carefully, because it sets the terms for every number that follows: it describes risk across a large group, never an individual’s fate. A high count is not a diagnosis and not a prophecy.
The gradient has been checked at scale since, with the same caveat attached. Karen Hughes and colleagues pooled 37 studies covering 253,719 people and found it holds internationally, graded honestly: strongest for problematic drug use and interpersonal violence, weak or modest for physical inactivity, excess weight and diabetes (The Lancet Public Health, 2017). Nor is it rare: the CDC reports that 63.9% of 264,882 American adults recalled at least one such experience, with comparable levels in a national Australian survey (MMWR, 2023; Medical Journal of Australia, 2023).
Does a high count predict anything about you?
The short answer is no.
Robert Anda, who helped build the score, wrote a paper in 2020 for the express purpose of saying so. The count, he and his co-authors argued, is a crude measure of cumulative childhood stress that varies widely from person to person, with no reference standard and no threshold for clinical decisions. A research and surveillance instrument was being pressed into service as a screening one, and findings describing populations were being assigned to individuals (American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2020).
Then it was measured directly. Jessie Baldwin, Avshalom Caspi and colleagues applied ACE counts in two birth cohorts raised twenty years and twenty thousand kilometres apart: E-Risk in Britain and Dunedin in New Zealand. Counts forecast average differences between groups, as the original research implies. At the level of one person they performed barely above a coin toss, with areas under the curve of roughly 0.58 to 0.60, where 0.50 is chance (JAMA Pediatrics, 2021). Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child adds that a high count is at most a rough first flag that someone may benefit from support; people who have faced significant adversity, the Center is careful to say, are not irreparably damaged.
Adversity is also only half of what can be counted. Among 6,188 Wisconsin adults asked about seven positive childhood experiences, those reporting six or seven had markedly lower odds of depression or poor mental health than those reporting two or fewer, at every level of adverse experience (Bethell and colleagues, JAMA Pediatrics, 2019).
How does something from decades ago still show up in a body?
The proposed pathway is not storage. Nothing is filed away intact, waiting. Bruce McEwen described a body that holds stability by changing, allostasis, and pays for prolonged changing with wear, which he called allostatic load. Applying that frame to early adversity, Andrea Danese and McEwen set out what has been observed in groups of children exposed to abuse and neglect: greater activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, raised markers of inflammation, and differences in the developing prefrontal cortex (Physiology & Behavior, 2012). In the Dunedin birth cohort, adults harmed or neglected as children showed a graded rise in clinically relevant C-reactive protein at age 32, surviving adjustment for co-occurring early risks, adult stress and adult health behaviour (PNAS, 2007).
Harvard’s Center adds the variable that decides which way this goes: not the size of the event, but whether the response was buffered. Prolonged strong activation with nobody steady to help settle it is what the Center calls toxic stress; the same severity, buffered, is described as tolerable, and the developing system recovers.
None of this says a given adult’s held shoulders were caused by their childhood. It says the road from accumulated load to a differently calibrated nervous system is real, and measurable across populations.
What about the load that never made anyone’s list?
No questionnaire counts the decade spent caring for a parent who was dying slowly, or fifteen years of a job that was fine, genuinely fine, and asked a person to be slightly braced for eight hours a day.
Bracing is the part that gets missed, because it does not feel like an event. It feels like a posture. Shoulders sitting a centimetre higher than they need to. A jaw that meets rather than rests. Held for an afternoon, none of it matters. Held for a decade of afternoons, it becomes a setting.
Kara Hannibal and Mark Bishop, reviewing the physiology for Physical Therapy in 2014, describe how a prolonged or exaggerated stress response perpetuates disturbed cortisol regulation, inflammation and pain, leaving behind a sensitised stress response: readily recruited, quicker to fire, slower to stand down.
Victoria’s Better Health Channel gives the ordinary version: physical reactions to distressing events are normal, and for most people begin to ease within a few weeks. The interesting question is what has happened when easing has quietly stopped being the default.
Where does the story itself belong?
With you. And, if you would like company with it, with a psychologist, a counsellor or your GP.
Dr Ari is a Doctor of Chiropractic, not a psychologist, and that distinction is scope rather than modesty. What the care works with is the physical side of what has been carried; it is not psychological therapy, and no claim is made here that it treats trauma as a diagnosed condition. What can be attended to is narrower and physical: the pattern of defence and tension a long story has left behind, and how a nervous system that learned to stay ready is running now.
The Better Health Channel’s guidance on timing is worth having: if distress is still strong more than about a month after an event, or if sleep, relationships or ordinary functioning are affected, speak with a GP, psychologist or counsellor. Lifeline is on 13 11 14. One kind of support is for the story. The other is for the body that carried it.
How does Diskin Life approach accumulated load?
Nothing here is concluded from a single account. Understanding is assembled from three witnesses, and nothing is settled until they agree.
The first witness is measurement. The Life Assessment brings careful baseline testing plus seven extraordinary measures, so that a load nobody can feel directly still leaves a visible trace.
The second witness is you: what you notice, what the day costs you, and what you would spend the capacity on if you had it, weighed against what you actually value.
The third witness is Dr Ari’s interpretation, formed across 40+ years and 25,000+ clients, so that a pattern is read against a long view.
Where the three agree, there is something worth acting on. Where they disagree, that is a reason to look again rather than to conclude.
Care itself is gentle Nervous System Adjustments: light, precise contacts that cue the nervous system rather than forcing it, with the body doing the work. They sit inside the 3 Pulse Integration Process, whose Life Assessment, Life Upgrade and Life Momentum are interdependent, each strengthening the others. The 13 Vitality By Design presentations sit alongside, four themes in sequence: Respond Better, Move Better, Eat Better, Think Better. Everyone begins with a free, no-obligation Discovery Session: a conversation with Dr Ari, and nothing else happens at that visit.
What this cannot show
Nearly all of this evidence is observational, and much of it retrospective. Association is not causation: adversity travels alongside poverty, disrupted schooling and inherited risk. The ACE count awards a single point to events of wildly different severity, duration and timing, which is why its own authors describe it as a population measure. Every odds ratio and every count in this article describes risk across large groups; none is a diagnosis, and none is a prophecy about a life.
The physiological findings are group averages too: no test can tell an individual that their inflammation, guarding or pain came from their childhood.
Most importantly: no manual care has been shown to treat trauma as a diagnosed condition, and that is not claimed here. The best-evidenced support for trauma-related distress is psychological therapy, a different intervention studied in different populations and delivered by a different profession. Nothing in that literature transfers to Chiropractic care. What can honestly be said is that load accumulates, that accumulation leaves physical patterns across populations, and that those patterns are worth attending to alongside, never instead of, the care the story deserves.
What to hold on to
Life’s load rarely arrives as one event. It arrives in instalments, and the body keeps a running total rather than a diary.
The ACE research found a dose-response across populations, from a 1998 study of 9,508 adults to a pooled analysis of 253,719 people. Those figures describe risk across large groups, never an individual’s fate.
A high count is not a diagnosis, not a prophecy and not a fault. Tested directly, counts predict group averages well and individuals barely better than chance.
Protective childhood experiences count too, at every level of adversity.
The plausible pathway is allostatic load: a stress system calibrated to stay ready, with traces measurable decades later.
The story belongs with you and, where wanted, with a psychologist or GP. Chiropractic care does not resolve, release or process trauma; what it attends to is the physical pattern left behind.
General information only, not a diagnosis or personal health advice. If any of this is live for you, please also speak with your GP.