What You Carry in Your Relationships Has a Physiology

Key 4 of the 6 Keys of Action Toward Remission is Love & Healthy Relationships, and for many of the women I work with, this is the Key that finally moves what gut healing and education alone could not.

It is also the Key most likely to be dismissed initially as the 'softest' one. So let me explain.

What you carry in your relationships has a physiology. For example: old grief that never completed its process, resentment that never resolved, the habit of overriding your own needs until your body finally insists on being heard, the voice of inner criticism, a partnership where you consistently do not feel valued. All of these register in your nervous system the same way a physical threat would.

Chronic emotional stress keeps the same alarm circuitry switched on that drives inflammation, which is how something with no obvious physical cause can still show up in your bloodwork as a real, measurable load.

This Key is your relationship with your family members, your parents, your intimate love relationships, your friendships, your work colleagues, your children, and the relationship you have with yourself.

We are fundamentally hardwired for Connection, and the people closest to us shape our physiology more than we tend to realize. Healthy Connection and healthy relationship dynamics are measurably 'immune medicine,' and chronic relational stress is measurably inflammatory.

I want to say this next part straight, gently, and honestly, because it is one of the hardest 'truths' in the Autoimmune Recovery Method. You can do everything else: eat anti-inflammatory, sleep well, take your supplements, and a relationship in your life that is genuinely unhealthy can quietly undo much of your hard work in these other areas.

We do not get well inside relationship dynamics that have us feeling unseen, dismissed, responsible for managing someone else's comfort, or like we have to shrink ourselves to keep the peace. I do not just mean physical danger, though that matters too. I mean the everyday, ordinary unsafety of not being able to be fully yourself.

Moving your Autoimmune 'toward remission' looks like getting more skillful at telling yourself the honest truth, about both yourself and your relationships, and telling others the honest truth instead of managing their comfort. A marriage or a friendship where you stop performing okayness, the reflex of saying 'I'm fine' when you are not, just to keep things smooth, where you attend to and address a resentment instead of swallowing it 1 more time.

Moving your Autoimmune 'away from remission' looks like maintaining the same unhealthy patterns and dynamics, the same withheld conversations, the same relationships that keep asking you to shrink to keep the peace.

The 1 question

Here is the InSight Question, the gauge I come back to, and it is the 1 thing I would ask you to start doing right now, and to share with others.

The question is not 'how are my relationships.' That question is too big, and it invites you to produce a reasonable answer, something like 'okay, we're fine.'

A more impactful question to ask yourself is: 'How does my nervous system feel when I walk into a room this person is in?'

Sit with that one. Not to draw a conclusion about anybody, and not to build a case. Just to notice.

Your body already knows the answer, and it knew it long before your mind was willing to say it out loud.

I am not going to tell you what to do with what you notice. That is something we can unpack together in the live course.

A word to the givers

I know who I am writing to. Every one of you is a generous and compassionate 'giver,' and the word 'no' IS a full sentence!

Sometimes we have to learn to say it more often, because saying yes to too many things is rarely what strengthens and nourishes us.

If that is you, the hardest work in this Key may not be a conversation with anyone else. It will be the first time you decline something you normally would have absorbed.

An honest no is, in its own way, an honest yes to everyone, including the body that has to live in tomorrow.

So here, in this Key, you learn to look honestly at who surrounds you and how safe you feel with them. I do not mean only physical safety. You also learn to come into a kinder relationship with yourself, which is where so much of this begins.

It is tender work, and it is real work, and it is necessary work, not optional, not something to get to once everything else is handled.

It is the Key that most needs other women in the room, which is what ARM Foundations is. Every client I have worked with who has Autoimmune has something in the quality and health of her relationships that needs attending to.

Part of my own moving my Autoimmune toward Remission meant doing all the components of this Key in my own personal life: taking a real, honest look at my relationships with myself, with friends, with colleagues. I made the necessary, initially uncomfortable shifts, all of which served the greater good of my health and well-being.

There is truth in this: truthfulness sets everyone free, and mistruths hold everyone hostage.

I get to live now with a very clear mind. I do not experience fatigue, and my joint pain and aches are all gone. My shocking hair loss stopped, and I get to participate in life fully and vibrantly.

I would be honored to walk this path with you as well.