Today I’d like to talk about one of the major road blocks that we face when healing autoimmune disease – shame. There is a toxic undercurrent in the natural health world of implicit or explicit blaming of yourself for your ill health. You are probably bombarded with advice from the internet, well meaning friends, doctors, and alternative medicine practitioners. They tell you all the things that you could be, or should already be doing.
Even if this advice is well intentioned, it can lead to self blame. If only you had eaten less gluten, exercised more, meditated for 20 minutes every day, etc… you would not be ill, or not as ill. It is all you fault. This type of mentality is autoimmune in nature – it is you beating up on yourself. The presence of this type of shaming is strong in our culture, especially for women. It takes a lot of bravery to swim against it. It is challenging but crucial work in the healing journey.
Bravery is really looking that shame in the eye and refusing to listen to it. Yes, you can take charge of your health. Yes, you can learn ways to bring your body back towards health and balance. But it has to be within a container of loving kindness. Creating this container is easier said than done. When treating autoimmune disease, it is vital to work on emotional/spiritual health as well as your physical body. They are part of the same garden.
As with everything having to do with autoimmune disease, I don’t have a quick fix for this, especially in a brief blog post. It takes consistent work, and the form that work takes is different for everyone. What I can share, however, is a starting place that has helped me and many others. If you have gotten this far into this post, I suspect you and I are somewhat similar. You are intelligent, driven, and used to identifying problems and solutions. These are useful traits! However, they can lead to a bit of wheel spinning when there are no obvious answers, as is often the case with autoimmunity. It is important to have time built into your schedule to refresh and reset. Often it is when you give yourself this time that the path forward (or at least the next step) becomes clear.
Find some time for yourself every week where you don’t have to do anything. If you can find a whole day per week, that’s great, but even an hour or two will do. Put it in your calendar. Don’t go grocery shopping, don’t meal prep, just be with yourself and do whatever you want. Maybe this will be sitting with a cup of tea and reading a fiction book. Maybe it is playing with your dog, taking a walk, or painting. It should be something that is not screen based, is just for you, and that you don’t feel driven to do perfectly. Treat yourself like a beloved child. Try this out for a few weeks and see how you feel.
If you would like to read more about healing shame, I recommend book The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown.
