When Your Past Overwhelms You
A friend of mine called me last night. She had been struggling with a chronic cough and shortness of breath for over a year. She had visited doctor after doctor, been put on inhalers and other medications, and had had test after test, without any answers or improvement in her symptoms. She was a very health conscious, active woman and was feeling despondent about not being able to get better.
Her most recent lab test results showed that she had a severely depressed white blood cell count. She was now interested in getting food sensitivity testing done as she realized that her immune system was not working properly.
I gave her the information she asked for. As we continued talking, she asked me, as she had many times before, what I thought the problem was and what more she could do. I prayed to have wisdom to know how to help her. Knowing a little of her background, I told her that something that can really impact health that doesn’t get addressed is neurology.
I’ve experienced just in the last year how dysfunctional neurology can powerfully impact one’s health. For over the last year I had severely decompensated problem with my jaw that caused my brain not to be able to send the right signals to my muscles (causing difficulty walking), gut, immune system, and even endocrine systems. It is amazing how slight differences in how one’s teeth come together can have such a powerful effect on the rest of the body.
Something else that can powerfully impact neurology is early attachment problems. According to researchers, early life experiences affect receptors, neurotransmitters, brain structure, the microbiome, the immune system, and homeostasis maintenance. When one doesn’t feel close to one’s parents it is associated with significant increased risk of chronic illness in later life.
From out conversations in the past I had an inkling that my friend did not feel close to her parents or siblings. Having had experienced a recent divorce, living far away from her grown children, and not believing in a God who loved her, I felt that her feelings of loss—whether conscious or subconscious—were impacting her physical health.
I told my friend about the impact that childhood relationships to parents had on one’s neurology, how it impacted future health, and how I felt that her compounded loss was causing a sadness that might be significantly contributing to her health. And then the tears came. She told me that she had been struggling with poor health for many years—most of her life. And since moving closer to her mother last year and having had to interact with her more, she was feeling intense sadness and angst. It brought back the awareness of how unloved she had felt as a child by both parents and how sad she felt about how all of their lives were ending up. There was a deep emptiness now as she was entering her golden years, because she was by all appearances, alone.
So I broached the subject...I told her that it was the devil’s plan to put us through experiences that would cause us to question God’s love for us and to question our identities. The bad news is that we all are messed up and it is impossible to change anything our past. But I told her that the good news was that God promises us a way out. In the Bible it says that if anyone believes in God, they can be a new creature—former things are passed away and all things become new.
In the short period of time that we have been friends, my friend has not been interested in learning about God. She has had negative experiences with Christians in the past that have caused her not to be interested in God or Christianity. But last night she said, “I guess I should read the Bible. It would be foolish of me to write off something as wrong that I haven’t even looked into or studied”.
Last night as we prayed together, I claimed a promise for my friend that she would find what or Who she was looking for, “You will seek me and find me, when you search for me with all your heart”. As my friend has the courage to believe the words that she reads, I know that her life will never be the same. Because she will have found the One who created her, who can recreate her, and can give her the love and meaning that her heart has always been searching for.
“When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.”
“God will wipe away tears from all faces”
“Perfect love casteth our fear”.
Includes reference by Dr. Aimie Apigian: https://medium.com/@draimie/how-your-attachment-trauma-affects-the-3-states-of-your-nervous-system-76a3d57e87b7