This post contains chronic fatigue ME/CFS surveys and a look at the role of trauma and adversity, which can be overt or subtle and covert. These ME/CFS surveys include Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and ACEs+77 (77 missing ACEs), events in Babyhood such as a difficult birth, risk factors for complex PTSD (the “ACREs” survey), soon to come survey on events occurring in the year before onset that may have been triggers for onset (including infection) and more. Help deepen your understanding of the role of adversity in shaping risk for ME/CFS with these surveys. Note that these are the same surveys I have elsewhere on the blog but this page provides some info specific to chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).
This is a companion to a detailed blog post on ME/CFS as a state of hibernation.
These surveys ask you to register and login. This allows for comparing ME/CFS specifically as it relates to different categories of adversity and to other chronic diseases. More surveys will be added in the coming year.
Introduction: Trauma and ME/CFS
The new understanding of disease explains that life experiences interact with genes to influence gene function. The research is finding that life experiences and other environmental exposures play an important and under-recognized role in risk for chronic fatigue and also for over 100 other diseases, including fibromyalgia, autoimmune diseases and more.
The evidence that trauma affects risk for ME/CFS suggests that working with old traumas and healing old wounds may be helpful in reversing or reducing the impacts of a nervous system caught in prolonged states of freeze.
Learn more in about ME/CFS as a body caught in a state of hibernation that’s not in your head.
These ME/CFS surveys include a look at babyhood events, which have not been studied yet to my knowledge.
You can respond to any and all of these surveys even if you do not have ME/CFS.
** Add Your Health Conditions **
This key survey enables you to enter chronic fatigue and / or any other chronic health conditions you have into the new research database. This makes it possible to look at the role of trauma specifically as it relates to ME/CFS.
- 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
- Confirmation email provides links to the companion surveys (also seen below)
- I share examples of how the trauma and nervous system perspective is helping me heal ME/CFS in My Story
ACEs and Multigenerational ACEs
I’ve created this multigenerational version of the original 10 question Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) survey to provide a better sense of the role of trauma in our lineage. This is because trauma can affect risk for chronic disease across generations. These are likely risk factors for ME/CFS 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 your ACEs & Multigenerational ACE Report in PDF
- See results and graphs
- I have many relatives on both sides of my family with ME/CFS. I had some surprises in my family history
ABEs: Adverse Babyhood Experiences
- 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+: More Adverse Childhood Experiences
Published July 16, 2024
- Look at new Adverse Childhood Experiences not in the original 10 ACEs
- Get your PDF report
- After submitting your responses view all responses in the Views & Graphs
ACREs: Adverse Childhood Relationship Experiences
Published July 16, 2024
- Developmental trauma from experiences with caregivers in childhood
- Experiences such as emotional abuse or neglect
- One of the most important contributors to chronic illness risk and symptoms
- I think of these as “Invisible ACEs” because they are easy to overlook and their effects greatly underestimated
APOEs: Adverse Pre-Onset Experiences
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?
Published July 16, 2024
- 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?
Why Does Understanding Trauma Matter?
Cell danger signaling research explains that chronic fatigue syndrome reflects a body caught in a metabolic state of survival. This very real, physiological state is similar to hibernation or freeze.
ME/CFS is affected 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 ME/CFS, may be more reversible than we have realized. This does not mean that chronic fatigue syndrome or other diseases are psychological or all 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, can be reversible.
You’ll find a list of tools that support healing from this new perspective of disease, at the bottom of the companion post: Part IIA: ME/CFS and How the CDR Gets Stuck.
Free Surveys Download
Read the Post in Free PDF or Kindle
You can download this post or part I below – the forms will appear momentarily.
Related Posts
I. ME/CFS and Freeze: A Metabolic State of Hibernation That is Not in Your Head
IIA. ME/CFS and The Cell Danger Response: How the CDR Gets Stuck in Freeze (Surveys)
The Cell Danger Response: The New Disease Paradigm (Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome, ME/CFS and Beyond)
I share my own story with ME/CFS in 4 posts starting here.
Heroic, brilliant, generous work compiling and simplifying all this data and making it so graphically clear and user-friendly. Thank you for your service to humanity.
Thanks so much Deborah! Glad the graphics are helpful – I had fun finding the baby bear graphics and am really wanting to make this information as accessible as I can :-)