04/01/2026
Great article. Our “illness” may be related to ways we have to compensate, sacrifice, protect ourselves in order to be in relationship with someone. Not being true to ourselves or our process.
RELATIONSICK: Does Your Body Need You To Start Your "Selfish Bitch Project?"
When I first met my partner and co-author Jeffrey Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, we were at a trauma conference, on unceded Native American land near Santa Fe, sitting on a deck by the Rio Grande. The conference host had introduced us, since we had both spent, between us, 33 years researching people who were cured from “incurable” illnesses, without conventional medical treatment or with treatment only deemed to be palliative.
Jeff’s research was admittedly more rigorous than mine had been for my books Mind Over Medicine and Sacred Medicine. While I’d poured through the medical literature, studying published reports of so-called “spontaneous” remissions, he’d spent 17 years doing qualitative research on people like out. Most of the self-reported “miracle cures” turned out to be fake. He screened out the countless people who claimed to have been cured but who lacked any documented medical evidence to prove it, requiring before and after documented medical records, showing accurate diagnosis and then verified proof of no evidence of disease afterwards. And then he followed those people for up to 17 years to find out what happened after the initial cure.
So we had a lot to talk about on that sunny day in May 2019. One of my first questions was:
“So…did you find the holy grail? Like, of all the things people did to try to get that miracle cure, what did you think was the most significant intervention that made all the difference?”
It’s an important but impossible to answer question. When you’re doing qualitative research like this, people are trying all kinds of things- conventional medical interventions, all kinds of alternative medical interventions, seeing energy healers and faith healers, taking all kinds of supplements, trying special diets, visiting places reputed to be sites of healing like Lourdes, doing yoga, meditating- the whole gambit. So it’s almost impossible to say “This intervention is what did it.”
But we were both surprised to realize that our unprovable hunch was the same:
People who got sick because they were giving too much and receiving too little in their relationships, people whose nervous systems were chronically dysregulated because of narcissistic relationships, oppressive family dynamics, involvement in cultic systems or oppressive systems, people whose bodies were taking the hit for being oppressed- they often credited their healing with breaking out of the often self-imposed cages of over-giving and/or oppression. And their bodies responded with improvement or even resolution of longstanding symptoms.
They’d become “relationsick,” but healing how they showed up in their relationships- setting boundaries, getting ferocious about protecting their own bodies, minds, souls, getting out of relationships with people who wouldn’t go to therapy- sometimes allowed the nervous system to settle enough that the body’s natural self healing mechanisms could kick in and heal.
Of course, this isn’t always possible. Some oppression is systemic- and it can’t be healed at the personal level. If you’re BIPOC in America or poverty-stricken or an oppressed female in systems of patriarchy, it’s not always possible to open the cage door and fly out.
But there are some kinds of over-giving and some kinds of relational oppression that are ultimately optional, which means that when the oppression gets bad enough to result in physical illness, some people finally get motivated to say “ENOUGH ALREADY” (which is also the name of a writing course I’m co-teaching with Nancy Aronie, so join us here if you want to write your ENOUGH ALREADY story.)
The Selfish Bitch Project
One of Jeff’s research subjects called it her “Selfish Bitch Project.” Because to people with a tendency to fawn (in the “fight, flight, freeze, fawn” meaning of the word), self-protection can feel selfish. Self-abandonment is what feels normal. Self-delusion. Self-erasure. Anything resembling self-care registers as self-ish.
So when someone begins to choose themselves, to prioritize their own needs for safety, protection, nourishment, caregiving, comfort- sometimes for the very first time- it can feel transgressive, even dangerous. The body may tremble, and the nervous system may interpret self-protection and healthy boundaries as a mortal threat. But over time, something else begins to happen. The body starts to settle. Not always dramatically, and not always miraculously, but often perceptibly. Sleep improves, pain softens, immune flares quiet down, the rash improves, and the relentless hum of anxiety lowers a few notches. The body, no longer forced to carry the unbearable weight of chronic relational stress, begins, sometimes tentatively and sometimes robustly, to self-repair.
The Body Bears The Burden Of Relational Trauma
When I speak about this issue with students and clients, when I would bring this up with my integrative medicine patients back when I still had an active practice, this is where the question “What does your body need in order to heal” would get uncomfortable. People would squirm and look away- because a part of them knew, but the price of that knowing was often too painful to bear.
If your body is carrying the toll of your relationships, then your symptoms might not just be medical, they might also be relational. Not always, not exclusively, and not in some simplistic, blame-the-patient kind of way. Bodies are complex, illness is multi-factorial, and biology, genetics, environmental exposures, health equity, and access to care all matter. But relationships matter too, profoundly. And that’s one aspect of health almost nobody in the wellness world talks about- the relational determinants of health, and most especially, how narcissistic abuse- in the home, in the family, in the workplace, in cults- impacts the body.
Yet, in my medical training, I was never taught to take a relational history with the same rigor that we take a medical history. We ask about family history of disease, but not family patterns of narcissism, oppression, enmeshment, control, neglect, or coercion. We ask about smoking and alcohol, but not about chronic people-pleasing (fawning) or the inability to say no. We screen for depression, but not for the quiet despair of living in a relationship where you cannot be fully yourself. We do not ask, “Who do you have to become in order to stay in your relationships?” We do not ask, “What does your body endure so that you can belong?” or “What would it take for you to live a life your body will love?”
What Jeff and I began to wonder, sitting there by the river, is whether ongoing relational patterns, especially those shaped by power imbalances, attachment wounds, and relational or systemic oppression, function as a kind of chronic, low-grade trauma that the body never gets to metabolize or recover from. If that is true, then no amount of surgeries, special diets, supplements, yoga, meditation, or even therapy modalities will fully resolve symptoms if the relational field itself remains unsafe. It is like trying to heal a wound while continuing to reopen it every day.
What Is “Relationsick?”
This is part of what we mean by being “relationsick.” It is not just that you are stressed, it is that your body is adapting, brilliantly and heartbreakingly, to a relational environment that requires you to override your own needs, instincts, and boundaries in order to maintain connection or survive. Your fatigue might not just be adrenal, it might be the exhaustion of carrying everyone else’s emotional load. Your autoimmune condition might not just be inflammatory, it might be your body turning against itself the way you have been taught to turn against yourself, to abandon yourself, to betray yourself and your own precious parts. Your chronic pain might not just be structural; it might be the somatic imprint of holding tension you do not feel safe to release.
The Physiological Underpinnings of Relationsickness
This is not just a hunch Jeff and I had. Once we started digging into the research, we found solid science backing up our hunch. We also found a physiological explanation for how relational trauma turns into physical illness. If you like to nerd out on all that science, we get into the muddy weeds in our book RELATIONSICK.
The short answer is that relational stress dysregulates the nervous system, leaving it in a chronic state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn stress responses. The body is naturally equipped with all kinds of natural self-repair mechanisms, but those self-repair functions only do their job when your nervous system is in the zone of safety, when the “tend and befriend” parts of the parasympathetic nervous system are in charge.
When the nervous system is chronically in sympathetic overdrive, or even worse, in a dorsal vagal dissociated, frozen collapse, the limbic system gets hijacked, activating the hypothalamic- pituitary- adrenal system. The body gets flooded with cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and other stress hormones, while cells and organs get starved of the hormones of healing- oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins. Chronic inflammation sets in, and then the four horseman of the medical apocalypse can take hold, as described in this Harvard article Inflammation: A Unifying Theory Of Disease.
Claiming that relational trauma can cause or exacerbate disease- and that relational healing can improve symptoms or even lead to disease remission- is not a reductionist claim; it is an expansion of the lens.
There’s No Magic Pill For Healing Your Relationships
If your illness has relational roots, then your healing might require relational change, and that is where things get messy and people get resistant to hearing this. Changing relationships is often far harder than changing diet, taking medications, or getting a surgery. It can mean disappointing people and facing conflict you have spent a lifetime avoiding. It can mean setting boundaries and taking away someone’s option of exploiting you. It can mean grieving relationships that cannot meet you where you now stand. It can mean stepping out of roles that once kept you safe, or at least kept the peace. It can mean becoming someone others might call selfish, difficult, too much, or not enough. And that can feel more devastating to some people than getting or staying sick- which is fair enough. We don’t want to minimize that legitimate reason to resist treating relationsickness.
Breaking The “Good Girl” Contracts
One woman in Jeff’s study described the early days of her healing as feeling like she was breaking every unspoken contract she had ever made, the contract to be the good daughter, the accommodating partner, the one who never rocked the boat, the one who could be counted on to absorb everyone else’s needs. Breaking those contracts came at a cost, but so had keeping them. The difference was that one cost her relationships as she had known them, and the other was costing her health- and possibly her life. When you frame it that way, the question becomes less abstract. What is your body paying for your belonging, and is that price sustainable?
For some people, the answer is a clear no. The body makes that decision unmistakable as symptoms escalate, function declines, and the old ways of coping simply stop working. In that breaking point, something else can emerge, like a simple boundary. Not a polite one, and not a performative one, but a real one, the kind that reorganizes your life. “I can’t keep doing this.” “I won’t be spoken to this way anymore.” “If you won’t go to therapy, I will, and I may not be able to stay with you.” “This is not okay for me.” These are not just psychological shifts, they are biological interventions, because every time you honor a boundary, you send a signal to your nervous system that you are safer now than you were before.
Healing The Body Requires Safety In The Nervous System
Safety is the precondition for healing. Without it, the body stays in defense, in vigilance, in survival mode. With it, even if that safety is imperfect, partial, and hard-won, the body can begin to shift toward repair. This is why some of the most powerful “treatments” Jeff and I documented were not treatments at all in the conventional sense; they were decisions. Leaving a marriage, confronting a parent, saying no, leaving a job or a marriage where the boss or spouse wouldn’t take no for an answer, telling the truth, choosing rest over obligation, and refusing to participate in dynamics that required self-betrayal. From the outside, these can look like life choices, but from the inside, they can feel like necessary, life-saving interventions.
Of course, we have to be careful here. Not everyone can leave, not everyone can confront, and not everyone can safely or effectively disrupt oppressive dynamics, especially when those dynamics are embedded in systems of racism, poverty, patriarchy, or other forms of structural harm. We cannot individualize what is fundamentally systemic. But even within constraint, there can sometimes be micro-movements toward integrity, small acts of self-loyalty, tiny boundary lines, and moments of telling yourself the truth, even if you cannot yet act on it.
Sometimes those small shifts begin to accumulate. They create cracks in the cage and widen the gap between who you have been required to be and who you actually are. In that gap, something vital begins to return, aliveness, agency, and choice. These are not luxuries; they are biological necessities. Because the body is not just a machine to be fixed. It is a living, sensing organism in constant relationship with its environment, including its relational environment.
Doing The YOU-Turn
If you are struggling with a chronic illness, it is worth asking, not as a replacement for medical care but as a complement to it, whether there is anywhere in your life where you are chronically overriding yourself to maintain connection, where you are throwing yourself under the bus to please someone else, where you’re betraying your own needs to meet the needs of others.
It is worth wondering whether there is a relationship your body experiences as unsafe, even if your mind has justified it, and what it might look like, not to blow up your life overnight, but to take one step toward greater integrity in how you show up.
These are not easy questions, but they are often the beginning of a different kind of healing, not just symptom management, but relational repair, starting with your relationship to yourself. Ultimately, the opposite of being relationsick is not just being in better relationships with others, it is being in right relationship with your own body, your emotions, your traumatized parts, your boundaries, and the spark of life force that makes you YOU. It is listening when your body whispers, honoring it before it has to scream, and trusting that your health may depend, at least in part, on your willingness to stop betraying yourself in order to stay connected with others.
That is not selfish. It is survival, and sometimes, it is the doorway to healing you might not have tried yet.
Reckoning With The Wellness Industry
Why am I putting out a book about wellness at the same time as I’m calling out the rot at the core of the wellness and spirituality industry all over Substack and Facebook? Good question. Maybe I’m idealistic, maybe it’s grandiose or naive of me to think I can still contribute without being part of the corruption. But this particular topic- the relational determinants of health- has been a core part of every phase of my career journey, from conventional medical doctor to spiritually bypassing wellness influencer doing TEDx talks about loneliness as a public health issue to an IFS educator in the trauma-informed medicine space. And as far as I know, there’s almost nobody else out there in this space discussing the elephant in the room. Someone needs to say “I don’t care how many supplements you take or how many yoga classes you take or how many diets you try, if you’re relationsick, all that money, expense, time and hope is only going to get you so far.
So it’s my intention to try to both be aware of the pitfalls of this industry, to make efforts to reform it, and to still try to help vulnerable trauma survivors who give too much and receive too little and wind up sick some helpful medicine. If you’re someone who just doesn’t want anything to do with the wellness space anymore, I totally get that and validate your right to trust your intuition and follow what works or avoid what doesn’t. But if what I’m saying feels like it could support you, your clients, or someone else you know, Jeff and I hope our words can be medicine for people ready for this particular message at this moment in our collective and personal history.
*If you’re a writer, you know how important preorders are to the publishing process. If you’re curious to know more, please preorder RELATIONSICK anywhere books are sold. Learn more about preorder bonuses and the book in the link I'll post in the comments below.
