Did you get ACED when you were a kid?
ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experience, and the odds are fairly high that you experienced one. ACEs include things like emotional abuse, neglect, parental mental illness, substance abuse, and divorce or separation of the parents.
We tend to think of those kinds of negative experiences as relatively rare. Maybe we got the hell beaten out of us by a crazed, drunk parent—but most people didn’t, right?
After all, just look at how happy everyone else seems.
But according to the CDC-Kaiser ACEs Study, 61% of adults across 25 states reported experiencing at least one ACE. And nearly 1 in 6 (16.7%) reported four or more.
The truth is, a sizable portion of the population is living with the long-term effects of unresolved trauma—including dissociation, emotional blunting, chronic anxiety, and difficulty accessing joy.
The Cultural Pressure to Be Happy
One of the strongest side effects of long-term trauma is the belief that, “Man, I must really be fucked up, because I’m just not happy. Everyone else is happy, but I’m a train wreck. In fact, I’m not even a train wreck, I’m completely off of the tracks.”
That belief is especially potent if you’re American.
American culture—especially through media and marketing—places enormous value on positivity, confidence, and personal success. Like the figures in the Three of Cups, we’re all supposed to be dancing with joy, smiling through life, bubbling over with gratitude. The message is:
“You should be happy, empowered, and in control of your life at all times.”
And if you’re not?
Then something must be seriously wrong with you.
This pressure to appear happy, even when we’re not, creates:
• Emotional dissonance: A split between what we feel and what we think we should feel.
• Shame about feeling bad: A second layer of suffering on top of the original pain.
• Social masking: We say we’re “fine” or “happy” because it’s expected—and we believe others are genuinely feeling that way (even when they aren’t).
Antidepressants and the Emotional Economy
A recent Gallup poll reported that a whopping 78% of Americans say they feel satisfied or very satisfied with their lives. The poll even bemoaned the fact that the “happiness index” was down by two points.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is among the highest consumers of antidepressants in the world.
Some people take them for serious clinical issues—but many of us take them simply to cope with lives that feel emotionally flat or chronically overwhelming.
Years ago, psychologists discovered that one of the most useless surveys in the world was asking teenage boys if they’d had sex. The overwhelming majority said, “yes, of course I have,” —even though many of them didn’t have the slightest clue how to unfasten a bra, let alone what to do next. They thought they were supposed to be having sex, because they assumed all the other boys were doing it—even though they weren’t.
In much the same way, Americans seem to be lying to pollsters about how happy we are, because we think we’re supposed to be happy.
After all, everyone else is smiling.
Even if they’re not.
We’re taking pills to create artificial happiness because we think we should be happy, even when we’re not.
Living With “Flat” Emotions
What if, instead of constantly trying to fix our feelings, we first learned to live with them?
Assuming there’s no organic brain issue involved, there’s always a reason that we’re not happy.
As Gabor Maté points out, when we suffer trauma that we can neither fight nor flee from, we dissociate. We leave our bodies. We stop feeling.
Not feeling becomes a survival mechanism—a way of coping with pain that would otherwise overwhelm and break us.
If you’re among the 61% who’ve had at least one ACE, you’ve probably experienced dissociation and emotional flatness.
If you’re in the 16% who had four or more ACEs, emotional flatness may be how you live most of the time. It’s not that we don’t want to be happy—we just don’t know how.
And that, in itself, can be traumatic, because we’ve been programmed to believe that we should be happy—even when we can’t feel it.
But we can reframe that.
Rather than chasing a happiness ideal that may not be accessible—especially after trauma—it’s possible to:
• Honor emotional flatness as a survival adaptation.
• Shift the goal from happiness to authenticity.
• Value calmness, neutrality, or quiet presence as valid emotional states.
• Find meaning not in chasing joy, but in living gently and truthfully with what is.
This doesn’t mean giving up on healing, but healing might not look like “feeling great all the time.”
It might look more like “being okay with feeling whatever I feel.”
A New Emotional Ethic: Realness Over Happiness
Ideally, we need a massive cultural shift—from:
“I must feel good in order to be okay”
to:
“I’m okay because I’m allowing myself to feel what’s true for me.”
But… yeah. Don’t hold your breath on that one.
What is possible—what’s powerful—is to make that shift within ourselves.
If you’ve had the hell beaten out of you, either physically or emotionally, as a child or as an adult, it’s okay to feel sad.
It’s okay to feel numb.
It’s not just okay—it’s rational.
That doesn’t mean we want to live there forever.
That doesn’t mean we resign ourselves to an existence without joy. But maybe healing begins when we stop pretending. When we stop performing. When we let ourselves feel—or not feel—exactly where we are.
In this new ethic:
• Sadness is not a problem.
• Numbness is a messenger.
• Joy, when it comes, is a gift—not a requirement.
Back in the 1960s the Transactional Psychology movement came up with the catch phrase: “I’m Okay, You’re Okay.”
To which Elisabeth Kubler-Ross replied: “I’m Not Okay, You’re Not Okay. And That’s Okay.”
The first step in the path seems to be honestly saying, “This is who I am. This is where I’m at. I hurt when I feel and so I try not to feel. And for right now, that’s okay.”
Just the Tarot 