The Relationship Between Trauma and Disease
It is well established that stress and trauma can affect our mental, emotional and physical health. This touches every part of our lives altering our attitude towards ourselves and others, our beliefs about life and the way we experience the world.
These are the noticeable manifestations of the condition of what psychology calls our subconscious. This is our basic operating system and it dictates how energy and information flows, the quality of that information carrying energy and how it is expressed. It has been estimated to account for between 95 to 99% of what goes on within us.
Just consider that for a moment… The part of you that you consider to be yourself (your conscious mind), is more or less completely unaware of the vast majority of the what goes on within you, what drives you and your motivations. But it is what makes you who you are.
Heredity
One branch of genetic research called Epigenetics has revealed that stress and trauma chemically imprints on our DNA and changes the way it expresses itself. These changes can occur immediately or with repetition over longer periods of time but can also be reversed. This information can be passed on, affecting the health of the next generation and can include non-biological/behavioral characteristics.
Emotional Trauma
We have all experienced events and situations which are emotionally traumatizing. These moments can stay with us for a very long time leaving us in an underlying state of reaction. Internally we re-live and re-feel the event, running it over and over in our minds as if it were still happening.
Essentially it is still happening inside us, holding us back to a point in time, preventing us from moving forward in our lives and affecting us on every level.
Internalised trauma consumes a lot of our energies and stays with us until we do something about it.
With time the memory of the event may fade as we try to “put it behind us” and “move on”. However, it is still there operating under the surface making it harder to cope with life and more difficult to feel joy, preventing us from living life as we would want, feeling good about ourselves and being healthy.
Prenatal Trauma
Our first experience of life is in the womb. From the moment we are conceived until birth, whatever happens to our mother also happens to us. We feel as she feels.
Her mental/emotional state, lifestyle and general health all have an influence upon us. If she is affected by a traumatic event so are we and we are held back just as she is. This can hinder our development and have far reaching consequences after we are born.
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