It is not our fault

It is not our fault
Before planning how to get well, it may help to consider the various reasons we get sick, only a few of which are under our control.

Sometimes our genes are programmed for susceptibility to one or another awful disease.

We may lack sufficiently healthy food or water. We may grow up without opportunities for exercise, fresh air, education, relaxation or love.

Studies of stressful life events – job loss, divorce, relocation, death of a family member, etc – consistently show higher rates of all types of disease following such stressors.

To these, we can add all of our maladaptive response to life’s insults: bad posture, attitudes, or diets, unacknowledged emotions, lack of exercise, overwork, hurry, various forms of self abuse and addition.

All of these injuries behaviors were learned somewhere or adopted before we knew better for reasons that were necessary - or at least seemed like good ideas – at the the time.

Most disease, then except for overwhelming infections or pure genetic defects, arise from numbers of factors stretching back through our lives and heredity and outward though all our social and environmental influences, a web of causation that we cam never completely sort out.

For various reasons, our bodies and minds (do not get their needs met, and they react by getting sick.)

Our bodies weren’t made to last forever and years of wear and tear eventually cause breakdown.

Therefore, it makes no sense to blame ourselves for illness, to feel guilty about things we could not control.

Guilt doesn’t do anyone any good. Far worse than guilt, though, is helplessness, the feeling that turns us into victims without hope of salvation.
It is not our fault