Resilience Is Relational: ACEs, Ambiguous Loss, and the Responsibility to Build Stability for Children

Shannon Webb, LICSW | The Practice Library
sbwebbcounselingconsulting.org

When we talk about ACEs, Maslow, and resilience, we are not simply talking about scores or pyramids.

We are talking about childhood lived inside systems.

As children, we do not have language for structural inequality or institutional power. We only know what surrounds us, who is present, who is absent, who is safe, who is stressed, who is helping.

Resilience is not an individual trait. It is a community outcome.

Children do not “overcome” adversity alone. They develop inside relational and structural systems that either buffer instability or amplify it.

That is why early intervention and child-focused mental health work are not niche specialties. They are foundational to community health.

In the town where I grew up, incarceration shaped the social landscape. You were connected to someone inside the prison walls, or someone who worked there. That reality created visible and invisible divisions. Children absorb that long before they understand it.

Some of my childhood was hard. Some of it required awareness children should not have to carry.

And yet, I would not erase it.

Because what buffered the instability was not grit.

It was relationship.

ACEs and the Seesaw of Protection

The original Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study (Felitti et al., 1998) demonstrated what many clinicians already suspected: early exposure to abuse, neglect, parental incarceration, and household dysfunction increases long-term health and mental health risk.

ACEs increase vulnerability.

But they do not predetermine destiny.

Later research on Positive Childhood Experiences (Bethell et al., 2019) expands the picture. It shows that protective relational experiences in childhood, feeling heard, having a trusted adult, belonging in a community, are strongly associated with better adult mental and relational health outcomes, even when ACE exposure is high.

Adversity and protection coexist.

They operate like a seesaw.

ACEs add weight.
Positive relational experiences counterbalance it.

• Nearly two-thirds of adults report at least one ACE.

• One in six report four or more ACEs (CDC).

• Approximately 1 in 14 children in the U.S. has experienced parental incarceration.

These numbers are not abstract. They represent classrooms full of children.

These are not rare developmental pathways. They are common ones.

When I reflect on what buffered me, I do not think of toughness.

I think of teachers who noticed.
Church members who showed up.
Mentors who created stability.
Letters and phone calls that sustained connection with my father during incarceration.
Visits that reinforced that relationships could endure even through prison walls.

Positive childhood experiences did not erase grief.

They helped metabolize it.

Ambiguous Loss: Grief Without Closure

Pauline Boss describes ambiguous loss as grief without resolution. A parent who is incarcerated is physically absent but psychologically present. There is no funeral. No socially sanctioned mourning.

Children experiencing ambiguous loss are not simply grieving. They are developing.

Their nervous systems are forming while they are adapting to instability. Their attachment templates are shaping while roles within the family system are shifting.

Unlike adults, children do not pause development while circumstances stabilize. They grow through instability.

Children impacted by incarceration grieve routines, daily rituals, and ordinary presence. But because the parent is alive, the grief is often invisible.

Unresolved grief does not disappear.

It adapts.

Sometimes into vigilance.
Sometimes into achievement.
Sometimes into silence.

This is where relational anchors matter.

When grief is held in safe relationship, it does not calcify into shame. It becomes integrated into identity without defining it.

Maslow and the Fragility of Foundations

Maslow’s hierarchy is often depicted as a neat pyramid. In lived experience, it is far less linear.

In households shaped by incarceration and resource scarcity, foundational needs fluctuate. Food may come from a food bank. Housing may shift between apartments, relatives, or temporary spaces. Safety may feel conditional.

Children do not wait for stability to develop.

Their nervous systems adapt to the conditions present. Development continues, but it continues under strain.

Hypervigilance, premature independence, attunement to adult stress, these are not personality traits. They are adaptive responses.

Pediatric medicine plots height and weight on standardized growth charts. Deviations are monitored carefully.

There is no equivalent universal chart for social-emotional growth. While brief assessments offer some structure, they never tell the whole developmental story.

We do not routinely measure chronic hypervigilance. We do not graph cumulative shame. We do not plot relational insecurity over time.

And yet those invisible trajectories shape adult functioning just as profoundly.

Beyond Grit: Resilience Is Relational

Popular psychology often celebrates grit as the explanation for success under hardship.

Resilience research tells a different story.

Ann Masten (2014) describes resilience as “ordinary magic.” It emerges from ordinary protective systems: caregiving, schools, community structures.

Family systems theory reinforces that children do not regulate alone. They co-regulate within relational networks.

When we attribute resilience to individual toughness, we overlook the scaffolding that made survival possible.

Resilience is relational.

It is built in classrooms, living rooms, church gyms, community centers, and visiting rooms inside prison walls.

Why So Few Providers Work With Children

Despite rising youth mental health needs, the behavioral health workforce is disproportionately concentrated in adult services.

National data indicate that fewer than 4% of clinical psychologists specialize in youth mental health, and many regions, especially rural communities, face severe shortages of child-focused providers.

At the same time, approximately one in six children in the United States meets criteria for a diagnosable mental health condition.

Working with children requires systems navigation. It requires engagement with caregivers, schools, developmental stages, and family dynamics. This kind of systems-based work also requires strong clinical supervision and workforce development. It is complex work.

Many providers elect to work exclusively with adults and adults absolutely deserve support.

When early intervention is limited or unavailable, preventable distress is often carried forward into adulthood.

Schools as Stabilizing Systems

For many children navigating instability at home, school is the most consistent environment in their lives.

School-based mental health supports, wellness centers, trauma-informed educators, and mentorship programs are not luxuries. They are protective systems.

For many children, these environments become the primary site of co-regulation and belonging.

When we invest in school-based behavioral health infrastructure, we are strengthening relational buffers that research consistently shows alter life trajectories.

Longitudinal Development: Children Are Always Adjusting

Adults are given time and language to process life transitions like divorce, job loss, illness, grief.

Children move through comparable transitions while their brains are still developing. The therapeutic container itself becomes a stabilizing structure.

New grade levels every year.
Shifting peer dynamics.
Family financial instability.
Parental incarceration.
Stigma in classrooms.
Evolving identity.

Those adaptations accumulate over time.

Some children overachieve to counter stigma.
Some become fiercely self-sufficient.
Some become highly attuned to the emotional climate of every room.

Achievement can become armor.

And armor is heavy for a developing nervous system to carry.

Natural Helpers and System Navigation

Growing up, I watched my mother navigate housing offices, benefit applications, and social service systems while simultaneously helping other prison spouses do the same.

She became what social work literature would describe as a natural helper, a trusted connector embedded within community.

She held knowledge.
She translated bureaucracy.
She redistributed information.

In resource-scarce rural settings, social capital becomes currency.

Community is not sentimental.

It is structural.

Shared knowledge reduces barriers.
Relationship reduces isolation.
Collective care reduces collapse.

That exposure shaped my understanding of systems long before I had academic language for them.

Why This Matters Now

As a Child Mental Health Specialist, I do not see children as smaller adults. I see developing nervous systems embedded in systems that may or may not be stable.

Early relational investment is not charity.

It is trajectory work. And trajectory work requires alignment between assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning.

When we strengthen protective relationships for children navigating adversity, we are not only supporting individual well-being. We are influencing long-term public health, workforce stability, and community resilience.

Resilience is not accidental.

It is cultivated.

And if we understand that adversity and protection coexist, then our responsibility becomes clear:

Build stability where instability exists.
Reduce stigma where shame accumulates.
Offer mentorship where isolation takes root.
Strengthen relational anchors that counterbalance adversity.

Children do not choose the systems they are born into.

Adults shape the systems they grow within.

When we fail to invest early, the cost does not disappear. It shifts.

Untreated childhood adversity becomes adult mental health burden. Chronic hypervigilance becomes burnout. including burnout among the clinicians who are tasked with holding these systems together. Achievement armor becomes anxiety. Unaddressed grief becomes relational instability.

Early intervention is not sentimental. It is economically and socially rational.

This is why child mental health work matters.

It is not about professional preference. It is about developmental trajectory.

When we support children early, relationally and structurally, we influence communities decades later.

References

Bethell, C. D., et al. (2019). Positive childhood experiences and adult mental and relational health. JAMA Pediatrics.

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press.

Felitti, V. J., et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review.

Masten, A. S. (2014). Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development. Guilford Press.

SB Webb, LICSW | The Practice Library
Clinical supervision and consultation with integrity, structure, and relational mentorship.
sbwebbcounselingconsulting.org