Trauma isn't simply any negative experience. It is specifically an event or situation that overwhelms a person's coping abilities, leading to lasting changes in brain function that manifest in mood, behavior, and physical health.

Unhealed trauma keeps the body's sympathetic nervous system in a constant state of "fight or flight." This chronic stress continuously weakens the gut microbiome and immune system, undermining any benefits from healthy eating, exercise, or sleep. Healing trauma is therefore a prerequisite for physical healing.

The body stores trauma even from before conscious memories form. Such events can restructure the brain's fear center (the amygdala), locking a person into a perpetual "fight or flight" state. This chronic stress response directly damages the gut barrier, leading to lifelong inflammation and digestive disorders.

Studies of children adopted before age two, who have no conscious memory of the event, reveal they have less diverse and more inflammatory gut bacteria years later. This proves the body "keeps the score" of traumatic events, embedding the stress response into our physiology and impacting long-term health.

When examining chronic health conditions, older childhood cancer survivors show a striking pattern of accelerated aging. They present with the same rates of multiple co-existing chronic conditions as their siblings who are two decades older. This quantifies the profound and lasting physiological impact of their early-life cancer treatments, leading to premature frailty.

Dr. Bolsiewicz reframes major depression not as a purely psychological issue, but as a physiological condition rooted in inflammation. He states with "total clarity" that depression, along with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, is a manifestation of chronic inflammation affecting the brain.

Resilience after trauma is less about age and more about the nature of the event. Both children and adults show high resilience to acute, one-off events. However, both groups struggle immensely with chronic, ongoing trauma like abuse or war, which overwhelms natural coping mechanisms.

Early stress over-activates the amygdala (the brain's stress 'on' switch) while stunting the hippocampus (the 'off' switch). This creates a neurological imbalance of 'all gas, no brakes,' resulting in a state of hypervigilance and dysregulation that is often diagnosed as ADHD.

Dr. Will Bolsiewicz distinguishes between life-saving acute inflammation (fighting infection, healing injury) and detrimental chronic low-grade inflammation. The latter is a constant, damaging immune response likened to a “forever war” inside the body, which is at the root of many modern diseases.