Today’s passage, “Should questions pertaining to early Adverse Childhood Experiences be appended to our routine physical checkups to better understand the relationship between trauma and sickness both physical and mental?”
 
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and chronic illness are clearly linked in numerous scientific studies. In Bessel van der Kolk's NY Times best-selling book, The Body Keeps the Score, he writes that trauma survivors have nearly 50 times the rate of the general population in developing breathing issues, issues of asthma, and COPD because trauma is stored in the lungs. 

Epigenetics is the study how our environment impacts the way our genes work, regulating whether genes are turned ‘on or off.’ Meaning, someone could carry a gene for an illness but it’s never activated for a variety of reasons and one might be the lack of adverse childhood experiences, or the healthy and secure environment in which they’re raised.  

If you’re interested in reading scholarly research on this topic, I am including a link to an article in The Lancet titled, "The role of epigenetics in psychological resilience” The article discusses whether Epigenetic mechanisms could be one molecular pathway into how adverse and traumatic events can become biologically embedded and contribute to individual differences in resilience. 

We must ask ourselves as a society why we continue to treat the symptoms rather than investigate the origin of its cause. We stick in the familiarity of asking lifestyle questions pertaining to food intake, drugs and alcohol. However, a questionnaire set that would include a rating system for early childhood trauma might help quantify the view on epigenetics in how it may predict whether genes are turned ‘on or off’.

So it stands to reason, genetically speaking, if trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, so can healing.

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