A Fistful of ACEs
An ideological war about homelessness is raging. Many on the right say substance abuse and mental illness cause homelessness. Many on the left emphasize the cost of housing. Those factors are real, but while living among and interviewing 80 men and women who had suffered long-term homelessness in Missouri, California, and Colorado, I learned more about what both sides underestimate: the impact of ACEs (“adverse childhood experiences”).
ACEs include physical, sexual, or emotional abuse and other experiences that undermine any sense of safety and stability. Five out of six young homeless adults have been physically abused. Many have been sexually abused. Most have been otherwise neglected. Most homeless adults hold in their hands at least four ACEs, as the November 2022 issue of Lancet Public Health showed.
On the last of my four days living at a shelter in Joplin, Missouri, 48-year-old Michael told me about his baptism in church and a second baptism at a church summer camp. His memory puts that along hard times with a Hell’s Angels stepfather who punched him, made him wear a dress when he cried, and then paraded him in front of the dad’s similarly drunk pals. “That humiliated me real bad,” Michael said. He ran away from home. Time at a correctional center for teens didn’t correct him: “It was a gladiator school where I learned how to do more crimes.”
Other children lacked any religious education. Robert grew up with an alcoholic dad who put on birthday parties for him that were mostly keg celebrations. Justin thought he and his cousins who introduced him to meth in the fifth grade were Christians because they were Oklahomans: “If I was from Budapest I’d probably believe in Buddha.”
I heard about other ACEs during six days at a refuge in Springfield, Missouri. Approaching age 40, Jeremiah still vividly recalls the fire that changed his childhood at four a.m. on December 21, 1999. He was asleep on a couch in his boxers. His mom awakened him. He made it out along with his grandparents and stepdad, but she went back in for his six-year-old sister and never came out. When he tried to rescue them it was so smoky he couldn’t see where to go.
Jeremiah says he had severe depression after that. He smoked marijuana but claims it’s not a drug. “It’s manmade . . . It grows from the earth.” He moved on to opioids, starting with one Percocet, then five, then anything. “It got to where if I didn’t have a shot drawn up for me in the morning when I woke, I’d be throwing up.”
Jeremiah lived with his grandmother for a while, then with a young woman with whom he had a child. They split when he was 24 and “that really did a number on me, too, because it was like, every time I get close to somebody, I felt like they would disappear.” He stole small things from his family for years until “they wanted no part of me.” Then he stole large things from Walmart and went to prison for five years.
Then came homelessness. Jeremiah carried three backpacks and slept at strip shopping malls at night because “most of them don’t have security.” He’d find an outside outlet and plug in his cellphone and a heating blanket. He put that under him with his sleeping bag on top for warmth, “like sleeping in a house.”
On my fourth day at a rescue mission south of Los Angeles, Derek spoke of growing up with “a constant stream of men” coming in and out of the house to spend time with his mother. He liked Eddie, a man with a long green car who gave him money to go to the store. When he pleaded with his mom for money to buy a boomerang and she said no, Eddie got it for him, and a puppy as well.
Later, Eddie stopped coming. When he asked his mom why, she became angry. Derek said, “The woman who was supposed to take care of me was always hurting me.” He dropped out of school in the ninth grade, consumed and sold drugs, learned about life in jail, and served in the Marines from 1983 to 1987. Derek’s life changed when “Jesus found me,” but “I still struggle with resentment, bitterness, and hate.”
In a Colorado Springs shelter, Lance — nearing age 60 — recalled vividly what happened when he was eight years old and babysitting his two younger brothers. One put a blanket on a space heater. Lance tried to put it out with a broom and helped his brothers survive, but the whole house burned down and his dad blamed him. “That set me up for failure.”
Nevertheless, Lance became a high school catcher with hopes of turning pro until a car accident when he was 18 sent him through the front windshield. Lance couldn’t walk for a year and became a pill addict. He went from job to job and then for two decades fell into heroin addiction. Only recently has he been willing to acknowledge “the wrong choices” he made.