When Helping Hurts: The Hidden Cost of ACEs in the Lives of Educators
When Helping Hurts: The Hidden Cost of ACEs in the Lives of Educators
How unaddressed trauma, compassion fatigue, and systemic absence are fueling burnout in helping professionals—and what must change.
Lisa Imel, M.Ed., Founder & CEO, EdSolutions Group
Reframing the ACEs Narrative
In the evolving discourse around trauma-informed education, the prevailing emphasis has been on understanding the adverse experiences of students. Educators are trained to identify dysregulated behavior, create emotionally safe classrooms, and apply trauma-responsive practices to student support. Yet, a critical dimension remains widely neglected: the lived experiences of the adults tasked with this emotional labor.
Many educators carry their own history of adversity—what the research defines as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)—and do so in silence. These unaddressed histories of trauma can have profound implications not only for the well-being of individual educators but for the sustainability of entire school systems. The very educators positioned to be stabilizing forces for students are often operating from a foundation of unresolved trauma, without access to the systems, structures, or daily recovery processes needed to thrive.
"You can’t be trauma-informed for students while being trauma-indifferent to staff." —Lisa Imel
This reality requires more than acknowledgment—it demands a paradigm shift in how we understand educator burnout, compassion fatigue, and the structural underpinnings of school climate and culture.
Helping Professionals and the Weight of Emotional Labor
Educators are part of what scholars and researchers term the “helping professions”—a category that includes individuals who provide care, healing, support, or direct human services. In such roles, emotional labor is not peripheral; it is central. Teachers, principals, counselors, interventionists, and support staff are consistently called upon to manage high-stress, high-stakes relational interactions, often absorbing the emotional energy of those they serve.
This constant exposure, combined with limited emotional processing time, creates conditions ripe for compassion fatigue—a term first coined by Charles Figley (1995) to describe the emotional cost of caring for others in distress. The related phenomenon of secondary traumatic stress (STS) emerges when individuals experience symptoms of trauma not from their own life events, but from repeated exposure to others’ traumatic narratives. For educators, this exposure is often chronic, unrelenting, and insufficiently addressed by existing professional support systems.
Without structures in place to manage these compounding demands, the result is often physical and emotional exhaustion, withdrawal, reactivity, and eventual disengagement—hallmarks of occupational burnout.
The Hidden Epidemic: ACEs in the Adult Workforce
The original ACE Study conducted by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente (Felitti et al., 1998) found that 64% of U.S. adults report at least one ACE, and one in six (16.7%) report four or more—placing them in the high-risk category for long-term health, relational, and mental health challenges. These experiences range from abuse and neglect to witnessing domestic violence, having a caregiver with mental illness, or growing up in a household affected by addiction or incarceration.
When applied to the field of education, the implications are staggering. With approximately 3.7 million K–12 teachers in the U.S., this means over 2.4 million educators are likely carrying at least one ACE—and more than 600,000 educatorsare in the high-risk trauma category, with four or more ACEs. These numbers do not include administrators, counselors, or classified staff, suggesting the total is likely far higher.
Despite the prevalence, conversations about ACEs in educators are often absent from district-level professional development, wellness planning, or policy conversations. Yet the correlation between unhealed trauma, stress dysregulation, and chronic workplace exhaustion is clear—and measurable.
Understanding the ACE Scale and Risk Profile
An individual’s ACE score is calculated based on a tally of ten types of early life adversity. Each category—whether related to abuse, household dysfunction, or neglect—counts as one point. The higher the score, the greater the risk of experiencing significant disruptions in health, cognitive functioning, emotional regulation, and stress tolerance.
Current population-level data reveals the following profile:
Approximately 36% of adults report a score of zero, while 26% score one, and 22% fall between two and three ACEs. It is at the threshold of four or more where we see exponential increases in risk. At this level, individuals are twice as likely to experience depression, four times as likely to suffer from alcoholism, and significantly more vulnerable to burnout, heart disease, and suicide ideation. At a score of six or higher, life expectancy is reduced by up to twenty years(CDC, 2020). Individuals with ACE scores of nine or more, while less than one percent of the population, often struggle with complex PTSD, autoimmune conditions, chronic emotional exhaustion, and severe relational disruption.
Educators with high ACE scores are thus entering emotionally charged environments where they are not only exposed to trauma through their students, but may be physiologically and emotionally primed to relive their own. These dual burdens are rarely visible—and rarely supported.
Emotional Echoes: When Educators’ Past Trauma Meets Present Demands
The intersection of personal trauma and professional exposure creates profound strain. Educators with unacknowledged ACEs may experience heightened emotional reactivity, reduced cognitive flexibility, or blurred boundaries in response to student disclosures. The emotional mirroring that occurs when a student’s trauma echoes an educator’s own unresolved experience can provoke stress responses that undermine judgment, regulation, and stamina.
"When high-ACE educators step into trauma-saturated classrooms without system-wide support, clear routines, or wellness recovery structures, we are asking them to perform emotional labor that is neurologically unsustainable over time." —Lisa Imel
These experiences are not theoretical—they are daily disruptions to emotional regulation. Here is how compassion fatigue and secondary trauma show up in the field:
A high school counselor with an ACE score of 5, after hearing yet another disclosure of abuse, begins to feel emotionally numb. She finds herself avoiding unscheduled hallway conversations and skipping lunch with colleagues—not out of disinterest, but because her emotional reserves are depleted. She wonders how much longer she can sustain this pace without breaking.
An assistant principal with an ACE score of 3—known for calm and relational leadership—becomes increasingly reactive and short-tempered with staff. The cumulative toll of conflict resolution, discipline management, and faculty crises is wearing away his core temperament. Though outwardly composed, he admits to feeling emotionally hijacked by even minor disruptions.
A fifth-grade teacher with an ACE score of 7 is deeply triggered when a student repeatedly asks why his parent disappeared. The question mirrors her own childhood loss and lingers in her mind long after the school day ends. Her confidence falters. She begins to question her emotional capacity and whether she belongs in the classroom at all.
From Compassion Fatigue to Burnout: The Structural Breakdown
Burnout in education is often mischaracterized as a failure of individual resilience. But in reality, it is frequently the consequence of chronic systemic misalignment—a mismatch between what educators are asked to do and what their systems are designed to support.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Leiter, 1997) identifies six domains that directly affect staff well-being: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values alignment. When these areas are out of balance—particularly for those with unresolved trauma—the result is not just exhaustion. It’s identity degradation.
A recent RAND Corporation report (2022) found that nearly one in four educators is considering leaving the profession, citing stress as the primary reason. This is not a temporary morale issue. It is a workforce destabilization crisis—and trauma is both a cause and an accelerant.
Compassion fatigue—once seen as an occupational inconvenience—has become a pipeline problem. Educators are walking away not because they lack dedication, but because the psychological toll has become unsustainable. And when emotional labor is undervalued, unrewarded, and unacknowledged, the profession becomes hollowed from within.
To stop the burnout spiral, we must move beyond surface-level wellness days and begin redesigning the architecture of school life. Wellness must be systemic—not performative.
When the System Isn’t Trauma-Informed for Staff
While trauma-informed education has become a core priority in many districts, the scope of that work is often narrowly applied. Most professional development centers student behaviors, student needs, and classroom practices. Rarely—if ever—are staff invited to explore how trauma might be affecting them.
There are few district-level structures that promote adult emotional processing, reflective supervision, or psychological recovery after trauma exposure. While students may have access to social-emotional learning, school counselors, or safe spaces to self-regulate, educators are expected to carry on—despite facing many of the same emotional triggers.
This misalignment reflects a deeper systemic oversight. Schools have not been built to hold space for adult healing. The absence of recovery protocols, wellness roadmaps, and emotionally intelligent leadership creates an environment in which burnout is not an exception—it’s a design flaw.
When systems are not trauma-informed for staff, they lose more than morale. They lose the relational capital, instructional continuity, and cultural coherence that effective schools rely on. And they begin to send an unspoken message to educators: Your well-being is optional. Your exhaustion is expected.
This is a leadership issue. And it’s time we treat it with the seriousness it demands.
What Must Change: From Awareness to Infrastructure
To address educator burnout at its roots, systems must move beyond programmatic solutions and toward embedded, systemic transformation. Awareness is essential, but insufficient. What is required is a commitment to operationalizing well-being, emotional safety, and trauma recovery for the adult workforce in education.
Through EdSolutions Group, several scalable frameworks have been developed to meet this need:
ACE Aware™ equips educators with the knowledge, language, and strategies to understand ACEs in themselves and others, while providing tools to manage secondary trauma and improve classroom regulation and relational safety.
Joyful Leadership Institute™ addresses burnout at the leadership level through a research-backed model that blends well-being science, purpose-driven leadership, and operational efficiency.
Parent Engagement Lab™ builds one of the most crucial—and stressful—relationships in education: the educator-parent connection. By strengthening trust and communication, this program reduces conflict, improves student support, and restores the educator’s sense of impact and clarity.
Director of Well-being District Partnership, available to a limited number of school districts for a 15 month engagement, provides embedded, strategic leadership to align wellness practices with district goals, lead implementation, and monitor cultural shifts that directly affect retention and performance.
According to Gallup (2023), schools that invest in staff well-being report up to a 30% reduction in educator turnover and a 21% increase in employee engagement. The return on investment is both human and financial.
"This is no longer a wellness initiative—it’s a workforce performance imperative." —Lisa Imel
A Call for Courageous Systems Leadership
If we are serious about supporting students impacted by trauma, we must be equally serious about supporting the educators who carry them. The emotional demands of helping professions, when layered upon unresolved adversity and system-level gaps, create conditions that are not only unsustainable—they are ethically untenable.
Leadership in this moment requires more than empathy. It requires structural clarity, cultural coherence, and a willingness to challenge the assumption that burnout is an individual failure. It is, more often than not, a systemic outcome.
"We can’t pour from an empty cup—or lead from an exhausted mind. It’s time to make space for healing in the very people we’ve asked to do the healing." —Lisa Imel
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020). Preventing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): Leveraging the best available evidence. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.
Figley, C. R. (1995). Compassion fatigue: Coping with secondary traumatic stress disorder in those who treat the traumatized. Brunner/Mazel.
Gallup. (2023). State of the global workplace report. Gallup, Inc.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). The truth about burnout: How organizations cause personal stress and what to do about it. Jossey-Bass.
National Child Traumatic Stress Network. (n.d.). Secondary traumatic stress: A fact sheet for educators.
RAND Corporation. (2022). Educator turnover: Insights and solutions. RAND Corporation.
About the Author
Lisa Imel, M.Ed., is the Founder and CEO of EdSolutions Group, Balanced Powerhouse, and the Eunoia Institute. A former principal, curriculum coordinator, and superintendent-licensed educator, she is a nationally recognized expert in systemic burnout prevention, trauma-responsive leadership, and workforce well-being. Through her signature solutions—ACE Aware™, Joyful Leadership Institute™, and the Parent Engagement Lab™—Lisa helps school systems create resilient, high-trust cultures that retain educators and elevate student outcomes.
Interested in bringing these solutions to your organization? Schedule an Executive Strategy Call to explore how EdSolutions Group can support your leadership team.
