The Health and Life Events (HALE) trauma and autoimmune surveys build on the 10-item Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) questionnaire. They evaluate additional kinds of adverse experiences in risk for autoimmune disease. Risk, as well as intensity and severity, is influenced by “dose” of adversity.
Taking these surveys can help identify events that may have been traumatic in your own life. It may validate hunches you have about your history. It can also suggest what you might work with in trauma therapy and other approaches that support healing nervous system perceptions of threat.
Your survey responses are important for examining effects of adversity on autoimmune diseases that have not been studied and where risk is not yet known.
These autoimmune surveys ask you to register and login. This allows for comparing autoimmune diseases specifically as they relate to different categories of adversity and to other chronic diseases. More surveys will be added.
Intro: Trauma and Autoimmune Disease Surveys
The new understanding of disease explains that life experiences interact with genes to influence gene function. This means that life experiences and other environmental exposures play an important and under-recognized role in risk for autoimmune diseases – AND that working with old traumas and healing old wounds may be helpful in reversing or reducing these impacts.
You can respond to these surveys even if you do not have an autoimmune disease. These are the same surveys as in other areas on the blog but on their own page for some autoimmune specific information in the links at the bottom of this page.
Start Here ** Add Your Health Conditions **
This key survey, formerly called the Background Survey, enables you to enter any autoimmune disease(s) you have from a list of close to 200. You can also add other chronic illnesses, physical symptoms, emotional symptoms, pain conditions and experiences of cancer. Adding your health conditions – or that you are in good health – makes it possible to look at the role of trauma more specifically as it relates to autoimmune-based illnesses. You will have the opportunity to recommend any missing health conditions to this list.
- Get Your Health Conditions Score
- Learn about Dose and Adversity in your PDF Report
- See Results in Graph formats
- Explore tools that support healing trauma and chronic health conditions
- Receive an email with links to the other, companion, surveys
For Mothers of Kids with T1D – New March 2025
I’m collaborating with psychologist Tony Madrid, PhD with this perinatal survey for mothers of children with type 1 diabetes (T1D) or antibodies for T1D, or of children in good health.
By taking the survey you help us assess the role of perinatal events in risk for type 1 diabetes to see if certain aspects of events in early life are more common than for children in good health. If so, our next step will be to evaluate a treatment approach to see if it is helpful in the prevention of T1D. Learn more in this blog post or take the survey using the button below.
Autoimmune Surveys for Adults with Chronic Illness
Adverse Babyhood Experiences (ABEs)
- Events before your 3rd birthday
- Your Mother ABEs – pregnancy, labor, your birth and more
- Your Baby ABEs – born cesarean? incubator care? sick?
- Your Father ABEs – adverse events for your biological father if you know
- Get your ABE Score and Report in PDF
- See results and graphs
ACEs and Multigenerational ACEs
I’ve created this multigenerational version of the original 10 item Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) questionnaire to provide a better sense of the role of trauma from our lineage. This is because trauma can affect risk for chronic disease across generations. These are likely risk factors for autoimmune diseases just as they are for other chronic diseases.
- Get your ACE score out of 10
- Get your Parental ACEs & assess Multigenerational risk (or skip this part)
- Get a context for your ACEs & Multigenerational ACE Report in PDF
- See results and graphs
- See results and graphs
- My grandfather had Rheumatoid arthritis and I had some surprises in my family history when I learned more as part of my healing journey
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs+)
Published July 16, 2024
- After submitting your responses view all responses in the Views & Graphs
- Look at new Adverse Childhood Experiences not in the original 10 ACEs
- Get your PDF report
Developmental Trauma: Adverse Childhood Relationship Experiences (ACREs)
- Developmental trauma from experiences with caregivers in childhood
- Experiences such as emotional abuse or neglect
- I refer to these as “Invisible ACEs” because they are easy to overlook and their effects greatly underestimated
- One of the most important contributors to chronic illness risk and symptoms
Adverse Pre-Onset Experiences (APOEs)
This adverse pre-onset experiences survey explores the role of adverse events in the period before the onset of chronic health conditions, which may affect risk as well as the timing of onset.
The survey asks about events such as injury, infections, loss, vaccines, hospitalizations and more. The survey aims to help better understand if, how and when such adverse events may have contributed to the onset.
The APOE survey includes a score for the number of different triggers you may have experienced before onset. A confirmation email provides information, links and resources along with a copy of your responses to the survey.
What is Helping on Your Healing Journey?
- Sharing what helps so that others can learn too
- What is helping on your chronic illness and conditions journey?
- Is there anything you wish you’d known?
Autoimmune Surveys: Why Does it Matter?
Autoimmune diseases are influenced by nervous system perceptions of threat following exposures to environmental stressors such as infections, chemicals, as well as physical and psychological trauma. It is not in your head.
Research in epigenetics, brain development, embryology, the cell danger response, brain plasticity and more support a new paradigm that suggests symptoms of chronic diseases, including autoimmune disease, may be more reversible than we have realized. This does not mean that symptoms are in our heads. It’s because life experiences become embedded in our bodies and affect how our genes function. This process, which occurs through epigenetics, has at least some degree of reversibility.
What You Can Do
The following posts offer tools that support healing from this new perspective of disease.
Therapies / Find a Trauma Therapist
Tips in Blog Posts for Working with Symptoms
Related Posts
Trauma and Type 1 Diabetes: Dan’s Onset Story and Symptoms (With Research That Explains It)
16 Clues About Trauma,Triggers & Flares in Chronic Illness
The Cell Danger Response: The New Disease Paradigm (Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome, ME/CFS and Beyond)
My story of how understanding trauma and nervous system perspectives has been helping me on my journey with chronic fatigue.