3 Tips To Resolve Your Trauma & Prevent Disease, From An MD

The negative, often subtle effects of trauma can build up over time—and unless you do the necessary work to release that stored trauma, those unprocessed emotions may start to mess with your mental and physical health.

It's a concept physician and renowned speaker Gabor Maté, M.D., bestselling author of The Myth of Normal, sees all the time (and has personally dealt with). "As a family physician and a palliative care doctor, I began to notice that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental. People's emotional traumas in childhood had a significant resonance in their adult illnesses," he shares on this episode of the mindbodygreen podcast. "Whether we're talking about chronic fatigue or other autoimmune conditions, like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, or malignancy, depression, anxiety, or psychosis, I began to notice that those illnesses were not random strokes of bad luck, but they were outcomes of a process that had begun with childhood adversity." 

"Ninety-five percent of trauma is multigenerational," says Maté. "You unwittingly pass it on." Meaning, your trauma might actually be a byproduct of your parents' (or grandparents') experience that wasn't quite resolved by the time they had you—and that can affect how you interact with the world. Remember, trauma is not about a specific event. "It's the wound that you're carrying," Maté reminds us. That wound usually runs deep.

So the question becomes: How do you identify trauma that's not exactly yours? The thing is, it actually starts with looking inward. "The more people understand their own traumas, the more [they] see with clear eyes the traumas of others," says Maté. "The nervous system has a memory in it that is not necessarily conscious, but the wound will still show up in the present moment." 

At the same time, quality relationships are crucial for healing from trauma. "Our biology is dependent on our psychological states, and that depends on our social relationship with others," Maté says. "That's just a scientific fact about human beings." 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record: Human beings are social creatures; we are averse to loneliness. That's why extreme loneliness is considered a risk factor for mortality1, says Maté. "When you're lonely, you are likely to get sicker faster and to die quicker of your disease." 

Most people have trouble saying no, says Maté—which is intriguing, considering "no" is often a baby's very first word. "Nature's agenda is that we should all develop into independent human beings with our own sense of what we want and what we don't want, our own sense of values, our own sense of perspective on the world, our own desires," he shares. "In other words: Nature wants to set a boundary between ourselves and other people's will." 

So what happens? Well, according to Maté, people receive messages in early childhood that in order to be acceptable, they have to be compliant. "They have to suppress their own will, their own needs, their own perspective, and they have to serve others," he says. As a result, they feel uncomfortable saying no as they grow older.