The nervous system
The nervous system has two basic settings – ‘fight or flight’ and ‘rest and digest’.
Fight or flight is when our power is mobilized to defend our boundaries. Rest and digest are when the body relaxes and our energy gets directed at repair work and healing.
The nervous system regulation governs just that. It ensures that after each mobilization and activation we return to rest and a peaceful state of mind. That’s how our body is designed to constantly restore daily wear and tear.
When our nervous system hasn’t developed to regulate itself in this way via early coregulation experiences, we won’t always be able to return to the rest and digest phase, which is our default, and instead spend more of our life in the highly activated ‘fight/flight’, or when that isn’t possible a ‘freeze’ response. None of these allow for the body to heal and repair itself. In fact, they’re antithetic to healing and bodies aren’t designed to spend too long in those states. Yet that is exactly what happens when we haven’t developed our regulatory capabilities.
The high states of activation go hand in hand with the production of certain hormones like adrenalin, testosterone, dopamine or cortisol, and the cessation of other hormone production like serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin – those are the feel-good hormones which facilitate our bodies ability to heal.
In turn, the dysregulated hormonal production causes a disturbance in the immune system. When our body is in a state of defense, our immune systems go into a defense mode too. The prolonged sustaining of this state leads to, guess what? Autoimmunity!
When we remain in a state of fight or flight even after an immediate external danger has passed, the body is programmed, via the function of the nervous, endocrine and immune systems to keep looking for the threat. It becomes confused where the danger signals are coming from (our own mind as we keep self-creating the internal stresses) and eventually begins attacking its own cells.
Which tissues will come under attack will depend on which parts of our system we became disconnected from due to the inability to self-regulate. Meaning, which parts we’ve left behind in a state of freeze, or constant fight or flight thus not allowing them to switch to enough healing time.
If it’s our voice and our truth we’ve neglected it might be the thyroid or throat issues – the 5th chakra. If it was our creativity and sexual integrity it might be the 2nd chakra. If our basic security, boundaries, and sense of safety are missing, it might be issues in the root chakra area, and so on.
Once you understand this, you can see how our self-restorative ability becomes weakened over time. The speed at which this occurs depends on many factors but the main ones are a) how strong a constitution we were born with, and b) how stressful or conducive to neural development our early childhood environment was.
Throughout life with each stressful or traumatic situation, we weren’t able to fully overcome, our level of health takes another dip. Our bodies become susceptible to viruses and bacteria, which they might attempt to fight at first, leading to recurrent acute infections. But over time the vital force becomes defeated and infections become chronic leading to systemic inflammation and lesions occurring in ever deeper and more vital systems/tissues.
From a holistic perspective, we don’t see different conditions taking place in different parts of the body, but just one original disturbance of the psycho-neuro-immunological system or vital force presenting itself via different symptoms.
A homeopathy practitioner won’t be treating your Hashimoto’s, IC, LS and IBS with different remedies. They will use just one medicine that will address all of them at once at the root cause.
It takes time before symptoms develop on the physical level. Most symptoms exist first on the mental-emotional plane. When we don’t deal with what our thoughts and emotions are telling us, the system will just have to produce ever louder and more obvious symptoms.
If we are experiencing unhealthy stress whether from external or internal circumstances and are unable to process it and return to a healthy equilibrium, we are effectively storing the stress in the body.
SUMMARY
The roots of autoimmunity often reach way back to early childhood and with each strain on the organism throughout life the level of health might take a dip and apparently a new group of symptoms or a condition may develop. From a holistic perspective, this is just the original disturbance getting ever deeper into the body and thus the conditions become ever more serious.
Each of the above-named causes and triggers can be the source of a dip in our strength which leads to developing new symptoms.
What you can do
As I’ve explained, the root causes of chronic and autoimmune disease do not only reach far back into childhood but are also usually covered up by layers of experiences and harmful exposures gathered over life.
As you can see, effectively addressing chronic disease equals healing your entire life. It’s not just about removing symptoms in the present.
Homeopathy is uniquely equipped to do just that. It not only removes all the layers working backward towards the original root cause, but also addresses layers of toxic exposures and not only that! It’s perhaps the only form of medicine that has integrated healing the emotional components behind the development of physical symptoms.
In that sense, it’s truly holistic and the most comprehensive form of medicine I know of.