Connections Between Illness and Discipline in Childhood

"A research team in San Diego in the 1990s asked a total of 17,000 people, with an average age of fifty-seven, what their childhood was like and what illness they had suffered in the course of their lives.

The study revealed that the incidence of severe illnesses was many times higher in people who had been abused in their child than in people who had grown up free of such abuse and had never been exposed to beatings meted out to them "for their own good."  the latter had had no illnesses to speak of in their later lives.

The title of this brief article was "Turning Gold into Lead."  The author [Dr. Vincent J Felitti] who sent me [Alice Miller] this article, commented that these findings are unambiguous and highly eloquent, but at the same time covert and hidden.

Why hidden?  The reason is that they cannot be published without leveling accusations at the parents."

Excerpt from (pp 29 -30)
Alice Miller
The Body Never Lies:  The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting
WW Norton, New York, NY (2004)

From the article 
"The Relation Between 

Adverse Childhood Experiences
and Adult Health: 
Turning Gold into Lead" 
by Vincent J Felitti, MD: 

"The ACE Study reveals a powerful relation between our emotional experiences as children and our adult emotional health, physical health, and major causes of mortality in the United States. 

Moreover, the time factors in the study make it clear that time does not heal some of the adverse experiences we found so common in the childhoods of a large population of middle-aged, middle-class Americans. 

One doesn’t “just get over” some things.