When ACES Aren’t a Good Thing

Adverse Childhood Experiences can derail even the most gifted children

In many card games, aces are tricky because — in some card games — the ace can count as a high value card and/or a low value card. My father taught my brothers and me how to play Black Jack when we very young. According to AI on Google, “In Blackjack, an Ace can be valued as either 1 or 11, depending on which value benefits the player’s hand most; if counting it as 11 would cause the player to bust (go over 21), then the Ace is counted as 1 instead.”

The card game 21 is a variation of blackjack. The game is played using a standard 52 card deck. Aces can be counted as either a one or eleven depending on which value would best benefit the player’s hand. All the face cards in the deck each count as ten. This is what Dad taught us and called it Black Jack. We used poker chips to place our bets and no one really lost money.

Why bring this up here? Sometimes we are fortunate — like getting an Ace at just the right time in our card game competition — or in other ways — like being very smart or athletic or wealthy and full of promise — but somehow, things don’t work out the way many people expected. Sometimes that means we don’t get the support we need and sometimes we wonder why we are depressed or anxious when we were so much better off than other people we know. And many times…