An Epidemic of Chronic Illness: How Stress, Trauma & Adversity Early in Life Impacts Our Capacity to Heal

Being triggered and experiencing overwhelming emotional, mental, and physical sensations can force us down the path of automatic habits designed to make us feel better. However, escape behaviors seldom give us the opportunity to develop resilience and grow as people, and frequently the escape behaviors themselves are harmful to us. It’s because we

I looked around me—really looked, as if for the first time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every single one of my clients who came to me for psychological treatment also had underlying physical symptoms. Long out of school, I started to ask new questions: Why did so many of my clients suffer from digestive issues, ranging from irritable bowel

Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine.

Somatic Experiencing developed by Peter Levine, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy developed by Pat Ogden, and the work of Bessel van der Kolk.