Causality

What is the ‘Why’?

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” — Sir Isaac Newton

Causality asks a simple but confronting question: why did this happen?
Not as a search for blame — but as a pathway to agency.

Trauma and illness are part of our history, not our destiny. They only continue to define us when they remain unexamined, unfelt, or unresolved.

In cancer, cause is rarely — if ever — discussed. In my own story, there was little to no medical investigation of causality. At best, causes were conflated with responses.
“Genetic mutations cause cancer,” I was told.
For someone who rarely consumed alcohol, didn’t smoke, ate well, and swam five kilometres a week, the explanation offered by doctors was simply: “You’re just unlucky…Sometimes, life’s not fair”.

That oddly final, deeply unscientific statement shocked me into curiosity.

We’re quick to blame disease on things outside ourselves — corrupted diets, toxic environments, sun exposure, bad luck. And while these factors absolutely contribute to illness when allowed to accumulate excessively, anchoring our story solely there is deeply disempowering. Within a victim mindset, we’re more likely to feel impotent — and less likely to investigate what can actually be changed. When the story becomes “this happened to me,” the body often follows with helplessness rather than repair.

Was I genetically predisposed?
Had I been exposed to something?
Was a deep trauma activated?
Or was my body simply exhausted?

What we now know is this: people who meaningfully attend to causality — physical, emotional, psychological, and relational — tend to heal more effectively and reduce recurrence. Not because they “think positively,” but because they restore coherence across the whole system.

During my inquiry, one of my mentors asked me a question that stopped me cold:

“What is such a pain in the arse that you’d rather die than get over it?”

Ouch.

Or, as Courage Cures now frames it:

“What is so painful in your life that you’d rather die than feel it fully?”

That question reframed everything. It shifted me from blame to responsibility and illuminated how my internal world was reshaping my intrinsic health.

Oncologists aren’t trained to prescribe a change in perspective — yet modern neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, and epigenetics increasingly suggest they should. We inherit not only genes, but lifestyles, belief systems, coping strategies, and unresolved family trauma. Biography becomes biology.

When my aviation company collapsed, the greatest injury wasn’t the loss of the business. It was the human betrayal, the public embarrassment, and the sudden loss of control over the world I thought I had built. I had no framework to metabolise that kind of rupture.

Without a way to process it, I did what many of us do: I endured it silently.

But the body does not forget what the mind avoids. As trauma research now confirms: the body keeps the score.

In the years before everything fell apart, I was already running on a resilience tank deep in reserve — working relentlessly, seven days a week, for years. I bought into the mythology of business grit: never give up, push through, override the body. Busy-ness cooled my fear of failure. Exhaustion became normal.

What I didn’t understand then — and what no one teaches us — is that resilience has a physiology. When we ignore the body’s limits long enough, it doesn’t fail quietly. It speaks in symptoms.

What I’ve come to understand — and what I now share — is this: resilience without self-regulation is slow self-abandonment. Ignoring physical, emotional, and nervous system limits doesn’t make you stronger. It simply delays the reckoning.

From studying outliers and living my own recovery, I’ve learned this: healing becomes possible irrespective of the original cause once a person is ready, willing, and resourced to meet themselves with honesty, courage, and self-compassion.

Causality is not about blame.
It is about agency.

When we stop feeding inflammation — whether physical, psychological, or spiritual — and instead practice regulation, coherence, and self-repair, the body is finally given permission to respond differently. When I began to reconnect with wholeness, wholeness began to reflect itself back through my body.

That’s where healing stops being something we wait for…
and becomes something we participate in.

That’s where healing stops being outsourced…
and becomes a lived practice.