When “Triggers” Aren’t Just a Trend: Healing ACEs with Functional, Root-Cause Care

Let’s talk about a term that’s been dragged through pop culture mud: “triggers.” Once a valid way to describe a response to unresolved trauma, it’s now become shorthand for mild discomfort. But if you’ve truly been triggered, if you’ve ever found yourself spiraling from a sound, a smell, a look, or a sentence, you know it’s not a punchline. It’s real. It’s physical. It can knock the wind out of you.

And for many, those reactions are rooted in something deeper called ACEs—Adverse Childhood Experiences. These are more than just bad memories. They’re formative events that shape your brain, your body, your coping mechanisms, and your view of the world.

What Are ACEs?

ACEs are defined as potentially traumatic events that happen before age 18. Abuse. Neglect. Parental mental illness. Substance use in the home. Incarceration. Divorce. Even community violence or poverty. There’s a simple 10-question ACE score you can take (Google it—it’s everywhere), but don’t let the simplicity fool you. Research shows that the higher your ACE score, the higher your risk for:

• Anxiety

• Depression

• Chronic illness

• Addiction

• Autoimmune disorders

• Cardiovascular disease

• Difficulty with trust and emotional regulation

Why? Because ACEs directly affect the parts of your brain responsible for executive function, emotional regulation, impulse control, and stress response. This isn’t just a psychological issue, this is brain development. And unless we address the biological, somatic, and neurological impacts, therapy alone won’t fully resolve it.

ACEs Are Not Your Identity. They’re Just a Chapter.

Here’s what I want you to hear loud and clear: just because you’ve been through something doesn’t mean you’re broken. You survived. You adapted. And now, it’s time to heal in a way that goes deeper than surface-level symptom management.

At Wildly Well and through the programs I've helped build and facilitate in our clinic, we believe in a whole-person approach to trauma and healing. We don’t put band-aids on bullet wounds. We aim to combine:

• Root-cause functional medicine

• Somatic healing modalities like craniosacral, movement, and nervous system regulation

• Targeted therapies like EMDR, CBT, and EFT

• Brain-based interventions like TMS, NeuroFeedback, and neurostimulation

• Nutrition and cellular health support

Because trauma isn’t just “in your head.” It lives in your body, your cells, your gut, and your cortisol patterns, and healing requires a team.

Healing Doesn’t Mean You’ll Never Get Triggered Again

Here’s the deal: even after you’ve done the work (and you know what I mean), triggers can still show up. That doesn’t mean you’re broken again, it means you’re being given a chance to practice resilience with your new tools.

You already survived the worst of it. Now, you get to show your brain and body a different response.

Sometimes your “disorder” isn’t a disorder at all. It’s an unresolved root cause wearing a diagnostic label. You don’t need more coping skills for something that could actually resolve once the real work is done.

The Takeaway

If you’ve ever felt like the pieces don’t quite fit, like your symptoms are being treated without anyone asking why, or if you’ve felt dismissed, over-medicated, or misdiagnosed, you’re not alone. You’re also not stuck.

You are allowed to question the narrative that says, “This is just who you are now.”

You are allowed to want more than survival, you deserve to thrive.

Let’s do trauma recovery like it actually matters—because it does.