The body learned that from somewhere
Autoimmunity is one of the most confusing diagnoses to receive.
The biology is clear about it that your immune system, whose entire purpose is to protect you, has turned on your own tissue. Joints attacked in Rheumatoid Arthritis, in Lupus, almost anything, including skin, kidneys, heart and brain and in Psoriasis, it accelerates the skin cycle until it cannot keep up with itself. And there are so many of these issues being discovered or maybe I read about them.
But the point and the question that every person with any autoimmune conditions asks is:
Why would my own body attack me?
It is one question that most rheumatologists and immunologists either don’t have time to answer or are asking the wrong question – what instead of why. The standard explanation (genetic predisposition, environmental triggers, bad luck and so on) sound more like excuses than reasons. Even if true, they leave out something that I believe is crucial.
The body learned to attack itself from somewhere. I mean it’s not something that just started one fine day. That one day your immune system just woke up and decided that I don’t have anything to do, so let’s attack this organ?
The pattern underneath the diagnosis
In my shadow workers group, many people are having one or other autoimmune issue. And when I interacted with them, one pattern seemed to emerge from their lives.
An early life where belonging was sought by self-erasure. A living environment in which their needs and feelings were overridden with regularity. And it was not usually an act of cruelty, but some grotesque form of love. Parents who meant well but wanted them to toe the line, or a home where love was transactional against performance. A household where they had to adjust to someone’s mood, for lack of a better word, and where they could never be themselves (too much).
And slowly, the child’s nervous system learnt (or was made to learn) that I am not safe to be fully myself, and I or parts of me are the problem.
The main thing about this is that it is not conscious or cognitive. Things learnt by the nervous system become like a background operating system, the BIOS of a computer. It is a way of looking at themselves that runs constantly, below awareness, shaping every choice.
The reflex of the person becomes (and stays) apologetic and self-doubting. Any criticism from anywhere hits differently because it conforms to the internal belief. Self-sacrifice and suffering bring a strange comfort because it feels familiar.
The constant self-criticism and self-correction are, over a period of time, picked up by the body. The line between what is mine and what is not, keeps getting blurred and the war with its own existence is then picked up by the immune system, whose job is to distinguish and protect from what belongs and what doesn't, gets confused if you will.
And so it starts to mirror that war, in the tissues, joints, skin, and whatever organ becomes the site where the body's oldest confusion finds physical form.
The nervous system and the immune system are not separate
Our immunity is not autonomous, but is tied into the nervous system and the endocrine system. That is why a shock - be it emotional or physical tends to weaken it and we become vulnerable to infections.
And similarly, a person for whom low-grade threat is the norm lives different from one for whom it is not. The body is intelligent and is doing something logical, given the internal environment it has been living in.
Change that internal environment, through the emotional patterning that has been running for years, and not just the diet or the medication, and something becomes possible that was not possible before.
Whether it will be a cure depends on a lot of factors. The nervous system takes time to be over-written but this starts to soften the platform on which the illness had made its home.
Each condition does something different to the self
This piece is the umbrella, just like we place every difficult emotion under the umbrella of stress, each autoimmune condition can be placed under this basic mechanism but the actual reason is what matters more.
In Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, the immune system gradually destroys thyroid tissue. In Graves', antibodies flog the thyroid to work, and in lupus, material that is no longer of use and was to be disposed off stays and is treated as a threat. Each of these is a different relationship with the self, and each has its own piece.
The hardest thing about this work
The people with autoimmune conditions whom I have interacted with are, almost without exception, among the most compassionate human beings I have met. They feel deeply, care enormously and give generously, often to the point of depletion.
And why won’t they be? When your internal beliefs are about self-hatred, one does project compassion to keep the balance. What they need to learn is to turn some of that compassion toward themselves.
The Somashdow’s Three Pronged Work
Shadow work, in this perspective, is about slowly learning to be in your own corner. Finding what within has been at war with itself and gently asking, without force, what needs were left unmet, what it had to do to survive and what it has been carrying alone for so long that it no longer feels like weight but simply who you are. That is the work - quiet, deliberate and without performance. Just a willingness to stop abandoning yourself like you learned so long ago.
Bach Flower Remedies, gently work on the nervous system, helping the body learn that it is safe to stop fighting. The emotional states of self-criticism, over-giving, exhaustion of chronic self-neglect and anything else that presents, because every person, every case is different, and these remedies don’t work like a generic medicine.
And psychosomatics gives the whole picture a coherence, a map that makes sense of what has felt, for so long, like random biological betrayal.
Your body has not betrayed you
This is the thing I most want you to hear.
Your immune system attacking your tissue is not your body turning against you. It is your body doing exactly what it was shaped to do: in an environment of chronic self-erasure, it learned that the self was the threat.
You are not broken. You are the product of an environment that asked too much of you for too long. And somewhere in your body, there is a part that remembers what it felt like before you learned to disappear.
That part is still there. It has never stopped trying to reach you.