School Counselors’ Experiences With Adverse Childhood Experiences

Abstract

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are potentially traumatic events occurring in the household or community that hold painful or distressing outcomes for children immediately and in their future (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). School counselors work with children and young adolescents suffering from negative mental health outcomes as a result of ACEs (Hunt et al., 2017; Jimenez et al., 2016; Kaess et al., 2013; Kerker et al., 2015; Koball et al., 2021; Zhang & Mersky, 2020). Further, school counselors often work with minoritized populations, who are at a greater risk for racialized trauma (Cronholm et al., 2015; Merrick et al., 2018; Thurston et al., 2018). Research has not identified the extent to which school counselors are aware of ACEs and use that knowledge to inform their practice. This study fills a gap in the literature by investigating how school counselors understand and address ACEs, using a descriptive phenomenological approach. We identified three themes and various subthemes from the data and offer discussion and implications of the research for school counselors and counselor educators.