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Wellness Corner by Dr. Gary Pace - June 2017

The incidence of chronic illness, especially nonspecific inflammatory problems, and emotional distress like depression and anxiety is currently skyrocketing in our society. Many of these illnesses have not been very responsive to conventional, pharmaceutical-based treatments.

Adverse Childhood Experiences ~ An increasing body of evidence has started to point to the long-lasting impact of trauma as a starting point for chronic illness. Studies are linking “adverse childhood experiences,” like poverty, abuse (physical, emotional, sexual), drug and alcohol use amongst caregivers with worsening health status later in life. The more trauma a child is exposed to, the more health challenges they tend to experience as adults, and the harder it is to recover.

Gabor Mate, physican and writer, states clearly: “All chronic illness has trauma at the root.” As a child, to protect from the untenable feelings from the trauma, we close down emotionally and distance ourselves from our core experience. Due to the child’s limited coping tools, we essentially cut ourselves off from our internal world in order to survive the situation. Then disease states can lodge into our being in ways that are not possible when we are tapped into our self-healing core. Normally, we may get transiently ill, but our body’s natural mechanisms will be able to throw things off.

Peter Levine the developer of Somatic Experiencing® says “the traumatic event isn’t what caused the trauma, it is the overwhelmed response to the perceived life threat that is causing an unbalanced nervous system.” And this can occur completely underneath our level of awareness.

Healing chronic illness (rather than simply managing symptoms as conventional medicine tends to do) requires getting to the root core of the trauma and bringing it to the surface. This is a fundamental principle in Integrative Medicine and in healing methods in traditional societies.

Is There a Biological Mechanism? One of the problems with the acceptance of Mind-body approaches in the modern paradigm has been inadequate understanding of clear biochemical mechanisms. The whole area of research known as psychoneuroimmunology has uncovered pathways through the neurologic and endocrine systems that seem to link emotions and physical responses. But how do these changes become permanent?

in Mind-body medicine and postulates a way for trauma to get encoded through epigenetics. Epigenetics explains the way that environmental factors actually turn genes on or off, thus affecting the way the organism operates on a physiologic level. This can be passed down through generations.

Check this out: “Research done in Europe, for example, has demonstrated that the children of concentration camp survivors: 1) inherit epigenetic imprints rooted in their parents’ concentration camp experiences and 2) are more likely to suffer from stress related disorder like anxiety. Although this tendency was previously attributed to parenting problems, further analysis has revealed that is correlates to epigenetic imprints established during war-time trauma. Epigenetic tags affecting stress hormone genes were found in both Holocaust survivors and their children, but not in control groups, similar families living outside of Europe.” (p. 201).

Trauma Stewardship ~ To take this to another level, I am currently reading a book about the r~ esults of exposure to trauma in caregivers,Trauma Stewardship, by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky. She explores how people exposed to trauma through work or family can get impacted by witnessing it or caring for others affected by it.

She lists 16 early warning signs that someone may be affected: fear, grief, sense of persecution, dissociative moments, inability to listen, chronic exhaustion/physical ailments, minimizing, inability to embrace complexity, diminished creativity, hypervigilance, a sense that one can never do enough, feeling helpless and hopeless, grandiosity, addictions, inability to emphathize/numbing, and anger and cynicism. These are ways that the psyche may be using to cope with repeated exposure to traumatic events, even if we think we are doing okay.

Conclusion:There is a lot of interesting work going on in exploring the connection between emotional trauma and physical health. Since many of our current health problems don’t respond well to our current treatments, by delving into some of these promising areas of research, we may begin to unlock some of the puzzle of chronic illness.

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