Just started to read (actually listen to) a fascinating book whose big idea is that there sometimes can be a single cause at the root of a person’s multiple, recurring illnesses and other problems.
This root cause? Childhood trauma. Childhood trauma can cause grownup health problems. When an ingénue like me stumbles into something like this I then quickly discover that what was for me previously unknown territory contains a landscape’s-worth of books, research, controversy, refinements, criticism, and its own three-letter-acronym (ACE or adverse childhood experiences).
ACE is fascinating. What fascinates me just at the moment is how childhood traumas link with those passages in the gospels when people gathered around Jesus and he healed them all. If he healed the sicknesses the people were presenting with, many of them would have been back next week. But if Christ somehow dug out the root, which was something lodged in the psyche, buried there through one or more childhood traumas, and bearing fruit in adulthood as stroke or heart desease or ‘fibromyalgia’, or anxiety and depression, then those patients of his might truly have been healed.