Holistic Therapy

She had been four years old, and she told him it was her father. Once Felitti started asking everyone, the same thing kept coming back. Childhood abuse was common among these patients, and it had come before the weight, not after. One woman told him she had gained a hundred pounds after being raped in her twenties, and that she needed to be that size, because overweight is overlooked.

The weight was the problem they had come in with. For some of them, the weight was doing a job, and losing it took away the thing that had been working.

Felitti presented this at a conference in Atlanta in 1990 and was mostly disbelieved. An epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control named David Williamson sat next to him at the speakers’ dinner that night and told him it was worth checking properly. Williamson introduced him to a colleague, Robert Anda, and Felitti and Anda spent years working together.

What they built became the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. More than 26,000 adults coming through a San Diego clinic were asked to take part and 17,421 agreed, which is a startlingly ordinary sample, middle class and insured. Each answered questions about hardship before the age of eighteen, and each got a score.

Over half of them had at least one adverse childhood experience. A quarter had two or more. As the scores climbed, so did the rates of heart disease, lung disease, depression and addiction. It was the largest demonstration anyone had ever made that what happens to a child shows up in an adult body decades later, and that a doctor treating the body alone is only treating half of it.

The idea of holism was much older. The word itself was coined in 1926 by Jan Smuts, a South African soldier and politician, in a book called Holism and Evolution. He argued that nature builds wholes, that the parts only make sense inside them, and that mind and matter run on the same principle.

Smuts also spent his career building a state that sorted people by race, and helped design an international system under which white governments would rule and separate everyone else. The man who gave us the word for wholeness spent his political life on the machinery of dividing people.

More evidence arrived slowly and mostly by accident. In 1975 a psychologist named Robert Ader was studying taste aversion in rats, pairing sweetened water with a drug that made them sick. The drug also happened to suppress their immune systems. When he later gave the rats the sweet water alone, they started dying, and the more they drank the more of them died.

Their bodies had learned to shut down their own immune response on the taste alone. Ader and the immunologist Nicholas Cohen worked out what had happened, and the field that came out of it is called psychoneuroimmunology. The nervous system and the immune system, which medicine had treated as unrelated, were talking to each other.

In 1977 a physician named George Engel put the argument to medicine directly, in a paper in Science calling for a new model. Biology alone could not explain who got sick, who recovered and who did not, because it left out the person and their life. He called what he wanted instead the biopsychosocial model, meaning the biological, the psychological and the social together.

Engel was arguing about how medicine should think, and the argument produced fields rather than a therapy. Behavioral medicine and health psychology were founded over the next two years, which put psychologists in hospitals working on illness rather than just mental health. In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn opened a stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and began teaching meditation in eight-week groups to patients with pain that medicine could not fix.

Holistic therapy is the stance all of this points at, and the word arrived later, unattached to anyone.

But the word now carries more than it can hold.

The traditions that actually held this view for thousands of years were not consulted. Indigenous, Ayurvedic and Chinese medical systems had treated the person, the family and the land as one thing long before a European soldier named it in 1926, and long before a wellness market sold the pieces back at a markup.

Through the 1970s a holistic health movement grew up outside medicine, in retreat centers and bookshops, and by the 1990s holistic was a thing you could buy. The wellness industry took the true part and made it a rule. Your life affects your health became your health is a report card on your life, and from there it was a short step to being told that your illness is a lesson or your fault.

Trauma-sensitive holistic therapy works inside those gaps. It keeps the cause of what happened to you outside you. It holds your body as interconnected, not a report card. It considers your personal and cultural perspectives on health and wellness. It stays within the scope of therapy and refers you to appropriate medical care where necessary. And it considers social and societal impacts on your health.

Trauma-sensitive holistic therapy doesn’t rush your body.