(This blog posted on PACEs Connection on April 12, 2026.)

Emerging Research on Positive Adult Experiences Offers New Hope for Survivors of Trauma and Adversity

In the PACEs Connection community, we write and talk a lot about what infants and children need to thrive. Safe relationships. Consistent connection. A sense of belonging. The science of Positive Childhood Experiences — PCEs — has shown us that these early building blocks shape brain development, buffer the impact of adversity, and even help prevent adult mental illness.

But what about adults? What happens when those early positive experiences were missing — or when life’s adversities never stopped, and/or arrived later, in the form of toxic relationships — romantic, workplace, or otherwise — loss, trauma, or other sources of continuous toxic stress?

Positive Adult Experiences — PAEs — function remarkably similarly to Positive Childhood Experiences — PCEs

Emerging research published by the National Institutes of Health and Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry offers a powerful and hopeful answer: positive experiences don’t stop mattering after childhood. Positive Adult Experiences — PAEs — function remarkably similarly to PCEs, reducing depression and anxiety, promoting resilience, and helping to buffer the impact of early adversity — even when adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were high and positive childhood experiences were few.

“Healing — and preventing more adversity — are not just for children,” said Jamie Huysman, PsyD, LCSW, Founder and Executive Director of the STAR Network Foundation. “Adults who have experienced trauma — whether in childhood or later in life — can experience genuine turning points when they find safe, consistent, accepting community. The brain remains responsive to positive experiences across the entire lifespan. That is not just hopeful. That is science.”

Key positive adult experiences identified in the research include social connection and feeling genuinely understood and valued; mentorship and personal growth; community belonging and purposeful work; and active emotional healing — the kind of deep, courageous work that actively recovering survivors of toxic and abusive relationships know all too well.

“Positive childhood and adult experiences can become their own protective factors. That shift in the trajectory of a life — toward connection, belonging, and hope — has a way of attracting more of the positive. It can help break generational cycles of abuse, neglect, addiction, and the sometimes learned behaviors of helplessness and hopelessness. Healing in one generation plants seeds of healthy relationships and outcomes for the next,” offers Carey Sipp, author of “The TurnAround Mom”, a book on reparenting oneself and breaking generational cycles of addiction, neglect, and abuse.

“Through decades of my own recovery and in years of volunteer work with fellow survivors, I’ve seen firsthand the healing that comes from adults learning to trust and be accepted by each other, to commiserate, share experience, strength, and hope, and to learn to laugh together,” said Sipp, Interim Editor-at-Large and Director of Upstream Strategies at PACEs Connection.

Studies show that adults with more PCEs experience measurably less depression and anxiety. While these experiences tend to have a stronger impact on younger adults, their benefits extend across the lifespan. And unlike the early years — when children depend entirely on the adults around them to provide positive experiences — adults can actively seek them out, build them, and offer them to one another.

Setting Sail for Mental Health Awareness Month

The STAR Network Foundation is putting that science into practice in a decidedly memorable way this May — with the All STAR Cruise, departing Miami on Friday, May 1, 2026, and bringing together Survivors of Toxic and Abusive Relationships (STARs), healers, advocates, and community members for four days of connection, conversation, and renewal at sea — returning early Monday, May 4.

A special gathering at the Atlantis resort in Nassau on Saturday, May 2, will feature STAR Network International Ambassador Richard Grannon leading raw, thought-provoking discussions on trauma recovery, building resilience, and reclaiming your life — conversations designed not just to inform, but to transform.

“Every moment of genuine connection aboard that ship is the science in action,” said Huysman. “When a survivor feels truly seen, truly heard, truly safe — that is a positive adult experience. That is healing. And those moments add up.”

“For the PACEs Connection community, whose work centers on understanding both the adverse and the positive experiences that shape human lives across the lifespan, the All STAR Community Cruise represents something larger than a weekend getaway. It is a living demonstration that healing is possible — and that no survivor has to walk that path alone,” said Huysman.

For more information about the All STAR Cruise, visit: https://lnkd.in/duWJKYcV

Key Research Links

• PCEs as turning points for adult mental health after childhood adversity — Frontiers in Public Health (2023): https://www.frontiersin.org/jo…bh.2023.1223953/full
• PCEs and learned helplessness/optimism — Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2023): https://www.frontiersin.org/jo…ha.2023.1249529/full
• PCE landmark study — Bethell et al., JAMA Pediatrics (2019): https://jamanetwork.com/journa…/fullarticle/2749336
• PCEs and adult outcomes systematic review — PMC: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10528145/
• Science Friday overview — accessible reading for general audiences: https://www.sciencefriday.com/…ences-mental-health/

About the STAR Network Foundation

The STAR Network Foundation is a worldwide 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to the support, treatment, and prevention of attachment disorders and narcissistic abuse. Through its free peer-to-peer, anonymous meetings each weekday, annual Scars to STARs Day Summit (coming up May 22; free registration is here), and community initiatives, STAR Network makes safe, consistent, accepting connection available worldwide to Survivors of Toxic and Abusive Relationships and complex PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

About PACEs Connection

PACEs Connection — PACEs stands for Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences — is a  62,425 member global network advancing the science of positive and adverse childhood experiences to prevent and heal trauma, build resilience, and support flourishing communities worldwide. For more information contact Dana Brown, Interim Executive Director, at dana.pacescommunities@gmail.com; or Carey Sipp, Interim Editor-at-Large and Director of Upstream Strategies and Relationships, at carey.pacescommunities@gmail.com

(Published on PACEs Connection on May 16, 2026)

Photo from May 13, 2026 of Ben David, chief executive officer of the New Hanover County Community Justice Center; Elaine Miller-Karas, key creator of the Community Resiliency Model (CRM) and co-founder of Trauma Resource Institute; J’vanete Skiba, director, New Hanover County Resiliency Task Force; myself, and Casey Gwinn, founder, Alliance for Hope International, co-founder, Camp Hope, on break at a strategic planning session for the New Hanover County Community Justice Center. Elaine visited Wilmington and Raleigh, North Carolina, from California to meet with business leaders and CRM trainers in the region and dropped by the planning session to meet Ben, Casey, and Catherine Johnson, president of Alliance for Hope International. This photo represents a few of the hundreds of thousands of people working upstream to prevent and heal trauma, to create the positive childhood and community experiences that help prevent next-generation trauma. Their work — and that of their predecessors over generations, including that of grandparents, teachers, coaches, neighbors, family friends, and more who have provided safe, stable, nurturing environments  for newborns and children enduring trauma — is a major reason why high ACE scores do not automatically equate, at the individual level, to negative outcomes. Your work — our work — matters!)

Reading the 1998 ACE Study in 1999, freaking out, doubling down on self-care

About 27 years ago, when I first learned about the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) via the 1998 ACE Study, I was so devastated by my ACE score that I wept — and put the study in a drawer.

Fortunately, I’d already increased my activity in several supportive communities following a divorce, as I sought help rearing my two precious children as a single working mom.

About three years later, I took the ACE study out of the drawer. Brain science had come out with a lot more information on neuroplasticity — how we’re not “stuck” with the brain we’re born with, or that might have been harmed by ACEs. I started doing more research and writing on parenting, health, brain health, recovering from trauma, and ultimately, ACEs, and then positive and adverse childhood experiences (PACEs) science.

Reparenting and parenting

Fast forward through years of reparenting myself as I parented my children — with the belief that we needed to be in healthy communities where they could have as much exposure as possible to happy, healthy families and adults modeling great relationships. I encouraged my kids to be glad they had “other mothers and fathers” — lots of strong, positive influences in their lives.This was 20 years before the Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) study of 2019. But when it was published, it was deeply affirming of how relying on a “village” and asking for help, as instinct guided, had been the right habit.

We were NOT our ACE scores. My high ACEs didn’t mean I was doomed — as I’d so feared when I first read the 1998 study. And low ACEs didn’t mean anyone was “out of the woods.” We all need as many PCEs as possible.

Here is a truth I want every person with a high ACE score to hear: a high ACE score is not a death sentence. It is not a destiny. The ACEs study measures population-level risk — and at the population level, the implications are sobering. But populations are made up of individuals. And individuals have agency. There are outliers. There always have been.

The 2019 PCEs study and many subsequent studies on the power of PCEs affirm what many of us had already lived: positive childhood and community experiences are buffering and protective; that they can and do change trajectories. For people without those buffers — facing greater poverty, isolation, racism, inequity, and lack of healthcare and support — the risks the ACEs study describes are more likely to materialize. That is chief among the real injustices we must address.

For those of us who fell into or found community, who were held by neighbors and grandmothers and the parents of friends — those relationships were medicine.

I have had health challenges that line up perfectly with the assault on my developing brain and central nervous system — digestive, respiratory, and sleep issues. AND the communities my children and I were part of boosted our health and stability. Years of meditation taught me how to breathe and calmed my nervous system. My respiratory issues are now few and far between.
*My* children are now 33 and 36. Both are in terrific marriages. A first grandchild is due soon; he will be welcomed with and into tremendous love. I am in a safe, stable, nurturing relationship, surrounded by one of the most caring communities I’ve ever known.

#WeAreTheMedicine. Creating and being in community — and knowing we have agency — changes everything. Community is the preventive and antidote to trauma and the trauma of isolation, loneliness, “othering.”

People with high ACE scores are not broken. We are not necessarily destined for an early grave. The science tells us about risk. It does not tell us about about you and me!

                                                   *********************

Invitation to learn more, so much more, about positive and adverse childhood experiences on Friday, May 22nd. Register now for Scars to STARS Day, global summit on the future of ACEs Science.

Please join the PACEs Connection community by registering now for the “ACEs the Next 30 Years” Summit this Friday. We’ll be honoring the two principal co-authors of the 1998 ACE Study, Vincent Felitti, MD, and Robert Anda, MD, MS, and welcoming notable speakers including the Hon. Patrick Kennedy, co-founder of The Kennedy Forum; Melissa Merrick, PhD,  president of Prevent Child Abuse America; Diana Fishbein, PhD, founder and director of the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives; Jennifer Hays-Grudo, PhD and Amanda Sheffield Morris, PhD of the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Adversity , presenting on ACEs to PACEs —  Defining the Next Era of Prevention; Jesse Kohler, founder and president of The Change Campaign; Michael Menard, founder of United Against Childhood Trauma; Jamie Huysman, PsyD, LCSW, founder and executive director, STAR Network Foundation, and Mercie Josina DiGangi, DO, regional chair of the Child Abuse Prevention Program at Kaiser Permanente, Southern California.

Free: Register now at Scars to STARs Summit 2026 – STAR Network. (STAR stands for Survivor of Toxic Abusive Relationships) Registration is free though a donation is encouraged. Download the agenda here to learn more!

*Some 10,000 people in New Hanover County have been trained to some degree in the Community Resiliency Model (CRM), proven to help users re-regulate and increase nervous system resiliency in response to stressful situations, including natural disasters, which is of great benefit in decision-making and providing care in times of crisis.

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