Christian Forums

This is a very interesting article. There appears to be a biological (not just emotional) link from our childhood emotional state, to our chronic health conditions as adults.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donna-jackson-nakazawa/childhood-trauma-leads-to_b_11154082.html

As children, repeated trauma of various kinds, whether we experienced physical or emotional abuse, or some other kind of ongoing stress,  this continuos release of cortisol (fight or flight hormone) eventually resets our normal cortisol level to a higher range and it stays there, which causes inflammation and sets us up for chronic health issues as adults. Such health issues may be diabetes, auto-immune diseases, chronic hypertension, cancer, depression.... the list goes on.

Yes, there has been  lot of research and various books on this subject over the years.  One of the "groundbreaking " books of it's time was called "The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting". If I remember correctly the author doesn't  believe  that forgiveness is necessary. Which is a shame because she does a good job at validating the abuse,  but then negates the only viable solution ?

I'm going to share a very meaningful insight which I hope will benefit someone reading this thread. So much of the research in this area  focuses on the traumas and their lingering effects. But very little focuses on the Biblical perspective of it all which is to understand that we are all born into a fallen world and all of our childhood tramaus are generational in nature. Which is to say that our parents were also born into very similar conditions unless they were unusually bestowed with enormous grace of maturity or peaceful life circumstances. But that was much more rare than we are tempted to conclude. The fact is that many, many children are born into very stressful (traumatizing) life circumstances and many of our parents embodied all sorts of evil.  And if a person does not understand this they will get stuck in resentment,self pity and unforgivness. And the cycle of that prolonges and magnifies suffering to such cosmic perportions that it can be very hard to extricate ones self from a victim  mentality. And our current system of psychological counseling often times  reinforces these distortions in perspective.

This is not to minimize the experience of people raised in severe circumstances. I was one of those children. And it's taken me a long time to gain clairity on this subject because nobody told me what I just shared with you. The Holy Spirit revealed it to me back when I was first saved and it's something that I truly lament not understanding much sooner in life.