Majority of adults report troubled childhoods

In a five-state swath, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 60 percent of adults reported having experienced at least one adverse childhood experience (ACEs) of verbal, physical or sexual abuse by a family member.

Though the report cautions against extrapolating the results to the country as a whole, at least in the cases of the states surveyed — Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Tennessee and Washington — the information appears to hold true.

In fact, 8.7 percent of those surveyed reported experiencing five or more ACEs, a number that the CDC says might actually be low as people tend to under-report rather than over-report.