With
autoimmune diseases it’s kind of a life-long story. It begins in early
childhood (sometimes even before that), and then the conditions leading down to
the breakdown of the immune system just snow-ball, and will keep snow-balling
unless we intervene.
To explain the origins of your autoimmunity, I’m going to need to back track
way back to your early infancy. I’m also going to have to bore you with some
biology.
First of
all, the current widely adopted biological model based on the mechanistic
Newtonian physics is sorely inadequate when it comes to treating and
understanding complex medical conditions. It views the body as a random mix of
separate parts that can be fixed or replaced, just like a car, for instance.
This model is relatively new, and despite its popularity has never proven
itself to be particularly effective. Luckily, science keeps moving ahead and re-discovering
truths and principles that have long been known, ever since the ancient times –
which is that the body and mind are in no way separate, and that their workings
cannot be understood from the perspective of separation.
This led to the creation of a whole new discipline – psycho-neuro-(endocrino)-immunology (PNI) which views and attempts to understand human beings in a psycho-bio-sociological context.
It is now
known that the immune, nervous and endocrine systems are not separate but do in
fact create one large supra system. Meaning whatever slightest change happens
to one is reflected in all the other parts of this supra system.
This is crucial knowledge if we want to understand autoimmunity. Since the
endocrine mediated nervous system is what regulates all the biological
processes within the body, what affects the PNI can affect any part of the
body. This means that regardless whether we experience symptoms on the genitals
or the thyroid, the center of the disturbance always leads us back to the PNI
system.
Here’s where the trouble begins
Humans are, just as all mammals, born without a fully developed nervous system. The process of nervous system development continues throughout the first three years of life, and beyond, and is designed to occur through co-regulation with a primary care-taker.
Since newborns cannot regulate their nervous system themselves, they depend entirely on the support and presence of their caretaker. The main factors that provide this co-regulation are sufficient touch, body contact, and eye contact.
The problem
in our current civilization is that most adults haven’t been taught how to
regulate their nervous system themselves. Therefore, they cannot be
sufficiently present for the co-regulation needs of their children. They lack
the ability to be attuned to those basic and crucial needs.
When our biological needs as babies aren’t sufficiently met it leads to less
than optimal potential for our central wiring development. This already leads
to our instinctual disconnection from our needs and shutting parts of ourselves
down.
As we grow, not having sufficiently developed in the first place, throughout childhood we create various beliefs which reflect this disconnection from ourselves and which become sources of internally created stresses.
Most of us, when we grow up, don’t even know that those stresses are there because they’ve become such a familiar part of who we think we are. Most people aren’t in the least aware of the effects this subtle early childhood development has on their lives.