While this is not something that can easily be pinned down by medical research, it does make sense intuitively, and the improvements people see in their lives once traumatic experiences are reconciled and put to rest offers sufficient testimony to support this idea.
Regarding physical illness, however, we've always presumed a strictly material causality, something which can be singled out and directly linked to the illness, like a germ, or a deficiency. However, this view is being augmented by studies into the idea that emotional trauma can also cause the manifestation of physical illness.
What is Trauma?
Firstly, what is trauma? Many people associate major events with what we call trauma, things like sexual or physical abuse, seeing combat, and those sorts of things, but in reality, it is most often much more subtle than this, with seemingly less significant events having a lasting impression.
Psychologist Dawson Church, PhD offers a more thorough definition of a traumatizing event, outlining four key components. It is perceived as a threat to the person's physical survival. It overwhelms their coping capacity, producing a sense of powerlessness. It produces a feeling of isolation and aloneness, and it violates their expectations.
In this light, any number of ordinary childhood experiences could be considered traumatizing, and in Church's book, Psychological Trauma: Healing Its Roots in Brain, Body and Memory, he describes a patient story of an event such as this.
When I was growing up, I idolized my older brother Gary. But he was pretty rough with me. He was six years older than I was. One day when I was three and he was nine, he wanted to have a "wrestling match." He "won" by lying on top of me. I couldn't breathe and I began to panic. Gary just laughed when he saw me struggling. I almost passed out. When he rolled off me, I began to cry uncontrollably. My mother came in, and I tried to explain what happened. He told her it was nothing. I was just being a crybaby. Mom told me, "Big girls don't cry." [Source]Lissa Rankin, MD explains how a link is formed between this type of trauma and the manifestation of physical illness later on in life, explaining that emotional changes are the precursors to physical changes.
"This is not to suggest "it's all in your head." It's absolutely in your body! It's simply that the physiological changes that occur in the body as the result of unhealed trauma and its associated stress, anxiety, and depression translates into conditions in the body that make you susceptible to physical ailments." [Source]In her book, Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, Rankin dives more deeply into this issue, noting a study which backs up the connection between trauma and certain illnesses.
"In a landmark 1990 study of 17,421 patients, Kaiser Permanente and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) collaborated on the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which has resulted in over 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Patients were interviewed to determine whether they had experienced any of ten traumatizing events in childhood:
- Physical abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Physical neglect
- Emotional neglect
- Mother treated violently
- Household substance abuse
- Household mental illness
- Parental separation or divorce
- Incarcerated household member
We are in the midst of a swarm of health crises, and a holistic approach to our health would look for the interconnectedness among these major issues. The obesity epidemic, rising cancer rates, skyrocketing diabetes, rising depression and even the opioid epidemic, are all somehow related to how the mind and body work together to create the complete being.
In this paradigm it servers us well to consider a link to the emotional wellness of people, looking to create the right conditions for people to want to take good care of themselves and their bodies.
These two elements are one thing: judgement over - and subjection under.
The divide rules out recognising this - and releasing it to discernment within wholeness.
Separation trauma takes every personification of a fragmented Self. Rage and terror both. Shame and deceiving denial both.
Living out, acting out or playing out the same core conflicts as if they are new.
Un owned fear, guilt and hate all operate unchecked when un-owned.
The power struggle of narrative 'control' is the redistribution of blame... and punishment.
No matter how deeply buried and defended against exposure, truth will out - because the only thing that can hide truth is the persistent assertion of a false 'answer'.
The world is a world of false 'answers' when seeking to resolve inner conflict or lack in outer terms such as 'getting' experience or symbols of success, of self validation or self vindication in vengeance.
A broken lost or forgotten wholeness seems to birth a split off focus to 'become whole' but in terms of objects or externals.
The makeup of our personality is what we have to work with - and truly live through. Awakening responsibility is freedom from victim blame and hate - but until then blame and hate operate to rule out Self-release.
You cannot let more Life in that you are ready and willing to accept. And no one can accept what they are unwilling to give or live as the witnessing of.
The bridge between the psychic-emotional and the physical awakening, is the release of the body as a limit. This may seem like a promise for the 'ego' but the ego is the fixation in the use of the body as a limiter, separator, weapon, and limited sacrifice.
But sacrifice cannot be limited. Loss of awareness of one's being can be represented in shifting forms that are assigned levels of 'reality' within the persistence within the conditions of the loss of awareness of being. People now call it the 'matrix' and assign it to an evil will - that they 'see' in shadow forms of shifting enemies.
No one can release what they are unwilling to own and no one need persist in something that is not truly theirs and does not belong to them. Fear makes' real' until brought to light.
Sickness management allows no opening to 'healing'. Healing is not the physical. But even within the believed need to seek there, is the guidance and synchronicity that serves to bring us back into true relation.... as we are willing to live this step now.