How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime

“Only in Truth can you heal”.

This quote from our Level 1 foundational course says it all. It seems so simple and yet, when we begin to look inside ourselves and seek our healing, it can take us to deep and dark places. Ultimately, this is what we want. In order to free ourselves of negative behavioural patterns, we have to get to the source of the original pain. This inevitably takes many of us to our childhood memories.

These patterns can show up on any level: mental, emotional, spiritual and physical. As an academy of spiritual healing, we acknowledge that the body is an important part of any healing process. The physical form holds our painful experiences and if unrecognized and untreated, this trauma can manifest as illness.

There are new advancements in medical research that now prove this is not only the case, but that childhood trauma impacts the way various systems develop. This includes our brain, immune system and endocrine system, which regulates our hormones.

In the TED Talk below, Nadine Burke Harris discusses the medical research that connects childhood trauma to long-term illness. She shares her own preventative model to intervene with impacted children before any medical issues appear and asks the questions: How might this impact our view of illness and what does this mean for us as a society moving forward?