Standard advice, pretty much. What most folks might call good advice. But... recent scientific studies say no. Why? Here's a short visual summary of research results:
See, you can tell the conscious mind to forget about it and get on with things. But the body remembers. Or as a popular book title says, The Body Keeps The Score (Amazon.com link).
The link between trauma and chronic inflammation has increasingly strong support in physiological and neuroscience research. So what are we talking about here? Why does it matter?
Because while acute inflammation is a normal response to injury, chronic inflammation is at the heart of most chronic diseases and disorders:
- Vascular disease begins with inflammatory damage in the arteries.
- Migraine is currently thought to involve (among other things) inflammation of the trigeminal nerve and surrounding blood vessels.
- Inflammatory Bowel Disease is pretty obviously related to chronic inflammation.
- Autoimmune diseases (and the list now includes Type II diabetes) may begin with chronic inflammation.
- Damage from chronic inflammation contributes to some cancers.
- Depression is now thought to be related to inflammation in parts of the brain.
Now, that doesn't mean that everyone who has an inflammatory-related disorder also had childhood trauma. And childhood trauma doesn't guarantee developing an inflammatory-related disorder. What we're talking about here is risk factors: trauma in childhood increases the risk of chronic inflammation which increases the risk of developing a chronic illness.
Okay, so what counts as trauma? Here's where it's useful to just sit back and listen, because when it comes to childhood trauma, there are no contests. I know, you start telling your childhood story of being raised in a dysfunctional family, and someone will bellow over you, "Hah! That's not trauma! That's just normal growing up! Trauma is what soldiers in combat experience, or kids in a war zone, stuff like that!"
Oh, that is so not helpful. Never, never, never think that one person's experience doesn't count as trauma just because another person had it much worse. Because the truth is, whatever the body and subconscious themselves count as trauma can result in trauma-related inflammation! See, thing is, you can't just reason away what the subconscious perceives. You can't scold it into submission. You can't shame it into thinking, "Gee, other people have it worse than I did, I guess everything is hunky-dory then."
I can't say it enough: If your body and subconscious say it's trauma, then it counts as trauma and can have consequences to your health.
That's why increasingly the standard advice for managing chronic inflammatory-related disorders includes managing stress and emotions through counseling, mindfulness activities like meditation or yoga, and exploring the past to uncover the links and make sense of them. It's emotional labor that can actually help.
But don't just take my word for it. I'm not a physiologist or neuroscientist. My scientific training started out in botany, and later moved on to adult learning and cognition. What I know about this is from my own literature searches for answers about my migraines and chronic fatigue (I don't have official Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I do have something). And if you wandered in here because you're searching for information for that term paper, for pity's sake don't use this blog post in your "resources" list! Your teacher/instructor/professor will probably knock points off for not using valid sources. Try this list of articles and primary sources instead:
- Childhood trauma and adult inflammation: a meta-analysis...
- The hidden wounds of childhood trauma
- Chronic pain and childhood trauma
- We have to talk about childhood trauma and chronic illness
- Adverse childhood experiences and trauma informed care
- Inflammation and neuronal plasticity: a link between childhood trauma and depression pathogenesis
- Childhood trauma gets under the skin
The list goes on and on. When you read these articles, you'll see that what researchers count as trauma isn't all about war zones and natural disasters and such. It can be everything from egregious physical or sexual abuse to emotional neglect. What the child experiences as traumatic, the body counts as traumatic. When the child feels like the world is dangerous, the brain becomes wired to respond to every little possible threat.
Exposure to different traumas leaves its mark in the form of different inflammation-related biomarkers. And that is something that can't be waved off by the scoffers.
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