Journey of Healing with Autoimmune Disease
I am a survivor of Rheumatoid Arthritis, an autoimmune disease that starts with degenerating joints, especially the smaller joints, fingers toes, wrist, and elbows, and further continues to damage other body parts and organs. The prolonged condition leaves one in a vegetative state as told to me by doctors and known as an incurable disease.
I haven’t reversed my deformed fingers or frozen wrists, but I have managed to stop the degeneration. I have definitely stopped further deterioration of my joints. In my experience, Autoimmune disease is as much a mental condition as it is physical. A history of unaddressed emotional trauma amplifies the condition in combination with a leaky gut and nutritional deficiency. This is purely my experience of it.
The onset of the Disease
I had drastically changed my diet and didn’t know that I carry a huge baggage of unhealed emotional trauma. My disdain towards food had made me malnourished. I was very aware of myself in a wrong way, I was critical of myself, I judged myself harshly, and I blamed myself for anything that went wrong. It was a certain conditioning of my mind as a child that I developed a certain dislike to my own self. My dislike towards eating or any kind of activity around food was also a trauma response. This led to poor eating habits in addition to self-infused trauma. It took me years of ill health, to stop me from blaming external factors and truly forgive myself, parenting myself back to good health. To this day, I really can’t say if I look forward to eating but I definitely create a situation that makes me value the act of eating.
Relation between Emotional Trauma and Physical Health
Some of us are still children within, circumstances, and family situations might have left us to fend for ourselves at a young age, and as adults, we truly don’t grow into adulthood. We have coping mechanisms to deal with certain critical phases. But in the long run, healing is the only way to get out of a vicious cycle of self-criticism that leads to coping mechanisms and then leads to traumatized body and mind that develops a certain pattern of behavior, that can be called trauma response.
In my case, I had anxiety building in for every small thing, if someone asks me to turn up at a certain time, there is a whole lot of anxiety till I make it at the said time. If someone says they like me or are fond of me, I get very uncomfortable and anxious. It is the result of prolonged childhood trauma. I didn’t know what all of this was doing to me, till I started losing my mobility and I saw my fingers go painfully crooked.
The Healing Journey so far
I experimented with food, smoothies, an elimination diet, oil massages, and visiting different doctors till someone mentioned emotional trauma. The good thing about social media is if you look for certain kind of information, more of it shows up. I started looking at finding a solution for my emotional baggage in addition to the experiments I was doing with food and alternative treatments.
Believe it or not, Things started revealing themselves…I started looking at how much self-damage I was doing unconsciously! That was the start of my healing process. Positive affirmation, treating myself as a child, being conscious of my emotional health, being patient with myself, and becoming aware of the unnecessary guilt I carry, etc were some things that I started noticing n course-correcting. As the famous quote by Paulo Coelho goes ‘If you want something truly all of the universe conspires to make it happen for you’. Thus started my journey of self-healing.
Below is the latest picture of my forearms, there was a time it was a lot worse than what you see here.
Thank you for reading so far…. I would like to elaborate more on the things I did, to come to a pain-free state that I am currently in…. if you like to read more about it. Do leave a comment to let me know.
