What to not expect here

What you will not get from me are tips such as that adopting a plant-based or any other diet will reverse your autoimmune condition. I had been between a vegan and pescatarian diet for decades, abstaining from food with artificial ingredients since my early childhood, and still came down with rheumatoid arthritis (though I don’t discount the possibility that my healthy diet supported my natural remission).

What you will also not receive here is shallow advice that you would just need to finally express suppressed emotions or just know your stress triggers. I know that things are most likely far more complex than that; that complexity is why, in my experience, what are commonly called Complex-PTSD and autoimmunity are but one condition, as also increasingly indicated by research in recent years.

When I was first diagnosed—and in the shock of the realization that I might have to take immunosuppressive medications for the rest of my life—I started to read up on everything regarding the role of trauma in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis. I looked to such shallow psychological advice, also at the recommendation of a psychotherapist, only to end up with severe flares all over my body, mental breakdowns, and emotional dysregulation. The experience of expressing my suppressed emotions to those whom it concerns, only to be met with aggression, accusations, and coldness, was re-traumatizing at the time and triggered a severe Cell Danger Response (more in My Journey) in my nervous and immune systems. I am now here to share the lessons I have since learnt about what was decisive in my healing.

My training and expertise in anthropology was fundamental to these discoveries, since it is our cultures and their deficiencies that create and inform the situations where we get torn between love and fear, making our immune systems confused. Therefore, the first step to recovery is to acknowledge what has happened and identify which incoherent cultural prerogatives connected to the original trauma still operate in our relations and in ourselves. Then we look at what the cultures we find ourselves in can provide to balance us. If we don’t find anything—because our culture might be problematic in that sense—we look at what alternative perspectives and strategies we can develop to protect ourselves, rather than continuing to let our immune systems run on high alert against an unknown enemy. Anthropological insights and knowledges, as well as perspectives from other cultures, are highly helpful in that.