I received an email from a reader in the US who’s been having cluster headaches since he was a child. Cluster headaches are rare in children. But as this reader shows, some children do get them.

For many years, my focus has been the stress that underlies health problems.

When I first started working with adults who had health problems starting in childhood, it was strange to think that a child could generate enough internal stress to create a health problem.

But stress lives through emotions and children are emotional beings.

Children don’t have the huge vocabulary that adults do to explain what they are feeling or to understand what is being said.

Even if a child is going to grow up to favour logic over emotions, as a child his emotions or his feelings are going to be a major part of his everyday experience, driving his interpretation of the things that happen.

I know a little 4 year old girl who travelled with her family from Asia to the UK when her grandfather passed away. A few months in the UK and all her hair fell out. The hair on her head, her eyebrows and her eyelashes. Great Ormond Street hospital were not able to find any medical reason for this to have happened. She’s a teenager now. She’s well-adjusted, intelligent and has lots of friends. She still has no eyebrows or eyelashes and she takes steroids that encourage some hair to grow on her head.

Can it be that the little boy in the US and the little girl in the UK both experienced some kind of stress that caused their bodies to react in a cluster headache and loss of hair?

Can it be that this reaction has become the way that their body “thinks” that this stress should be handled?

Both children underwent extensive medical care that failed to find any viral, physical or genetic reason for their illnesses. They were both well nourished and from loving family environments. In every other way, they were completely healthy.

Science has a long way to go before it can explain why and how people develop an illness that shows no physical reason to exist.

Until it can do this, it’s important to examine and address the psychological interpretations. Because the illness may just have an emotional reason to exist.

See also:

Thoughts Create Reality

The Emotional Root of a Cluster Headache