Narrative coherence and emotion regulation in children exposed to Adverse Childhood Experiences

Abstract

The early exposure to Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), puts children's socio-emotional development in jeopardy and can entail long term deleterious aftermaths on their bio-psycho-social health. Although being able to integrate emotions coherently into personal narratives facilitates the elaboration of the experience and helps well-being, the prerequi-sites for narrative emotion regulation are compromised in adverse situations where the interactions with the caregivers are dysfunctional or dangerous. The current paper will address the developmental issues in narrative emotion regulation encountered by children reared in adverse environments and it will illustrate how scaffolding children to coherently integrate emotional evaluations and further perspectives in their personal narratives might help them to cope with the potentially traumatic aftermaths of ACEs.