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Over the past few decades, there has been burgeoning interest in how leaders and organizations can support employees in the aftermath of traumatic events.1 But there is another pervasive and often hidden source of trauma that originates well before individuals enter the workforce. Childhood adversity, referred to as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), is widespread and affects the well-being of a large portion of the workforce.
Recent estimates suggest that 60% of adults worldwide have faced one ACE, and 16% have faced four or more.2 ACEs shape employees’ self-perceptions, job attitudes, behaviors, and workplace relationships, typically in ways that undermine their well-being and functioning. In light of this, we are sharing a new, evidence-based toolkit for organizations and leaders seeking to design healthier work environments that can attenuate the enduring effects of childhood adversity for their employees.
How Childhood Adversity Can Resonate in the Workplace
ACEs encompass a range of early-life hardships. They include interpersonal problems, such as abuse or neglect; household dysfunction, such as divorce, domestic violence, criminality, or substance abuse; the death of or separation from family members; and witnessing or being the victim of community violence. ACEs also include physical or mental health issues in the home and economic adversity. In short, ACEs cause both direct and indirect harm to children. Such situations are typically experienced as harsh, unpredictable, dysregulating, and shaming, and are characterized by a lack of agency and control.
ACEs lead to psychological and physiological changes that persist into adulthood. They include blunted cortisol responses to stress, or the body is not releasing cortisol as needed; heightened reactivity of the amygdala, which leads people to perceive threats where there are none; and diminished hippocampal gray matter volume, which is linked with memory impairment, cognitive and emotional difficulties, and mood disorders.3
The workplace implications of these changes mean that ACE survivors are more likely to experience low self-worth, risk aversion, turnover intentions, emotional distress, job strain, low job performance, and dismissal and are often the targets or perpetrators of workplace mistreatment. These outcomes can leave adults feeling chained to their traumatic pasts.4 As American author William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Despite the potential for poor outcomes for ACE survivors, neuroscience research has found that even adult brains can change as people learn and grow — a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity.5 While scientists once thought that the brain was largely fixed after childhood, they have since determined that the adult brain remains dynamically adaptable and is capable of forming new neural connections, strengthening or weakening existing pathways, and reorganizing functional networks. The brain can update prior learning through repeated, meaningful adult experiences that counter earlier, adverse experiences. Importantly, this means that ACE survivors’ professional experiences can themselves offer a platform for recovery. How work experiences might facilitate neuroplasticity in the brain to help people overcome the deleterious effects of ACEs is a key question we hope to answer for leaders concerned with employee well-being.
Critically, whether neuroplasticity occurs depends on the quality of an experience. It is most strongly promoted by situations that are emotionally meaningful, have a social/relational component, and repeatedly reinforce new learning, thinking, or habits. Research also shows that predictable routines, supportive social relationships, opportunities for autonomy and mastery, and experiences that reduce chronic stress all facilitate adaptive neural change. They do so by dampening hyperreactive threat responses, strengthening regulatory and executive functioning, and restoring the healthy neuroendocrine functioning needed to regulate stress and mood.
Over time, these healthy conditions enable individuals to replace survival-based responses learned in adverse and threatening environments with more flexible, regulated, and agentic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Neuroplasticity is thus a practical mechanism through which the workplace, often one of the most stable and recurrent environments in adulthood, can meaningfully contribute to recovery, resilience, and long-term well-being among ACE survivors.
It is important to acknowledge that claims about neuroplasticity are sometimes met with skepticism, particularly when they are interpreted as suggesting that the brain can be easily or rapidly “rewired” or that early adversity can be fully undone through later experiences. The evidence does not support such a simplistic view. Rather, neuroplasticity reflects a gradual, experience-dependent process that unfolds over time, varies considerably across individuals, and is shaped by factors such as chronic stress, developmental timing, and the consistency of environmental input. Importantly, plasticity does not imply erasure of earlier learning but, rather, the capacity for new neural pathways and regulatory patterns to emerge alongside the influence of earlier adaptations — and, in some cases, attenuate them. Framing neuroplasticity in this way situates it not as a promise of quick transformation but as a scientifically grounded mechanism through which sustained, supportive experiences, including those in the workplace, can incrementally support adaptive functioning among ACE survivors.6
How Healthy Workplace Experiences Lead to Positive Change
Neuroplasticity is facilitated by experiences that contradict what ACEs have led survivors’ brains and nervous systems to expect. Benevolence and stability can shift the core belief that others, especially authority figures, are harsh and unpredictable. Relationships through which survivors learn to better manage their emotions and behavior, and through which they receive validation of their feelings, can counter emotional dysregulation and shame. Those who have felt helpless and unable to act can gain confidence by being empowered to claim agency and control through their work.
Importantly, the kinds of experiences that may be seen as therapeutically corrective are recognizable hallmarks of organizational cultures that many healthy companies now strive to foster. What promotes healing and recovery for survivors of ACEs is also increasingly seen as promoting employee well-being broadly, leading to greater engagement and higher performance. Leaders and organizations play a crucial role in all this. In what follows, we’ll explain specifically how and why such positive workplace experiences can be helpful.
Reduce anxiety, fear, and defensiveness. Children who are targets of or witnesses to violence or conflict in the home may have caretakers who lack healthy emotional regulation and self-control, and they may be punished when they voice their own emotions.
Experiences with this type of caretaker as a child can foster many negative outcomes in adulthood, including a greater likelihood of being the victim or perpetrator of workplace violence
