Can Emotional Stress Cause Autoimmune Disease? Here's What You Need to Know

What if your body isn't just unwell, it's communicating? Today we're joined by Rachel Reimer, a systems support coach who helps people uncover the emotional and belief patterns behind physical illness. Welcome, Rachel.

Thanks for bringing me on, Rita.

Oh, you're welcome. You know, I love this, you know, the mind-body connection. So many more people are waking up to it. It's so important, and I think we're going to dive into why maybe some people heal and some people don't. Some people's symptoms may get worse even though they seem to be doing everything right. Yet, Rachel, you believe that the body keeps score of everything we haven't emotionally resolved, and by addressing those emotions and thoughts, the body can begin to— what I love to hear— self-heal.

I believe that the body's a record keeper. It lets us know when we're not okay with something. Anytime that we have a physical symptom, it is the body raising a hand, the body yelling, the body screaming, have a mega— a megaphone, whatever you want to view that as, saying, hey, I am really emotionally not okay with something. Intellectually, you might go, oh, it's not a big deal. My life is fine. There's no big issues going on. If you're having a physical symptom, something says otherwise.

That's right.

that it's like time to check in, time to deal with something.

That's what I find fascinating, is someone can hurt themselves and disregard it, even if it's just a physical, um, like you've sprained your ankle or you've had a really bad bang to the head, or they do have an illness or a chronic illness and they just do not relate any of it to something that may have happened to them in childhood or in the birthing process or as an adult. There's just, you know, I think more people are waking up to this, but we need more education and realize that it doesn't have to be the immediate thing that happened. It can be from time past. And that's what I love about your work. What is a symptom support coach?

So as a symptom support coach, my job is to go in and try to figure out what the emotional stressor is that's related to someone's health issue, assuming there is one. 99% of the people that come to see me have some kind of emotional stressor attached to their physical ailment. Once I go in and I help them pinpoint what exactly that specific stressor is, we'll go in and we'll hash it out of why is this bothering you? What do you think about this perspective or this perspective? And we essentially just try to process it out. And the best visualization that I've been able to come up with for that is that people tend to dip their toe in their anger, resentment, or whatever, they don't actually dive all the way down to the bottom of the pool. And my perspective is that if you do not dive all the way down to the bottom of the feeling and feel it in full to resolve it, it will still stay stuck in the body. So touching it and acknowledging it is great, but if you don't actually have a method to go and work through it all the way, it still gets stuck in the body. If anything, that's more of, I think, where people's worst fear comes to mind. Well, if I sit and think on it, then I'll just ruminate it and think about it all the time. Well, that's just you dipping your toe in the water. Go all the way down to the bottom of the deep end and feel it in full. Won't bother you anymore.

And you mentioned fear. Fear— like, if people do feel that they're going too close to what it is, that feeling can be really unsettling for people. Do you find that's when they push away? It's like, no, no, I can't go there.

Yes. So the biggest barrier when I start working with someone is to convince them that they are capable of getting in the pool to start with, and then to slowly work over to the deep end and then dive all the way down to the bottom. Most people that I work with, or just that I encounter on an everyday basis, have some kind of fundamental fear that I can't do it, I'm going to drown, it's literally going to kill me. And once you get past that barrier or that belief and you've dove in all the way down to the bottom and have come back up successfully, and then you start to feel better, it's almost kind of like this addictive rush of like, I can conquer the world. Like, that was a really hard thing. I can work through any of these other smaller ones.

I've heard so many stories around that. It's the fear of the beginning and then the kind of collapse in that middle, you know, like, I can't do this. This is too hard. I don't want to feel this. And then, like you say, if they go even deeper, by the time they come up and surface, it's like, wow, that wasn't that scary, but I do feel amazing. How do our thoughts and emotions shape what happens in our body?

Unresolved emotional stress can get stuck in the body in several different ways. I tend to view it more in terms of belief systems. So Louise Hay's book, You Can Heal Your Life, is a really good introductory guide on If you have this physical condition, it typically means this. As long as you have some kind of awareness or some kind of Rolodex or system to go off of, I find that to be really helpful. So I really recommend that book to any one of my clients or anyone that's interested in any kind of this work. You can go into more of the Chinese perspective that every organ holds a specific emotion. So the Chinese believe that the stomach is the home of self-esteem. The lungs are related to grief. Gallbladder is normally resentment. So there's several different viewpoints. I don't get too hung up on that. It's nice to have, but if you don't have it, that makes you human. That's okay. When in doubt, I really just encourage people to put their hand over the area that's bothering them and just write for 5 minutes. Like, turn your logical brain off, give that part of your body that's hurting the microphone and just let it talk. Like, you zip your lips, let it talk for once rather than trying to get it to shut up. I have found that very similar to when toddlers have temper tantrums and they go, this is what I want to do. I almost view that as a physical symptom. And then an adult comes in and goes, it's fine that you're feeling that feeling. We're just going to direct you over to the step where you can sit and feel that in full. And then the toddler naturally wants to get back up and run away from timeout zone, and you just keep picking it back up and redirecting it. This is what we're working on. This is what we're trying to process in full. This is the main hurt and the main wound. And the more that you can just direct your attention back to that wound and just let it be there and feel the feeling in full, I have found that that's when physical symptoms really start to change.

What happens, Rachel, when someone has all these repressed emotions and they haven't been dealing with them? What happens? What's happening inside their body? Like when we say the body and the mind-body connection, is there a physical thing that's actually happening or felt within the body?

The best way I can describe this, especially with a chronic illness and autoimmune lens, is very similar to a light switch. When someone is in a flare with their autoimmune or chronic health condition, envision that the light switch is on, which means that there's some kind of unresolved emotional stress that's happened. Normally, if you have repeated flares, it's the same stressor that continues to happen. Some people view that as good news of like, well, once I track it down, okay, I can make some real headway. Other people get really frustrated by that of like, I don't know what keeps coming up. I don't understand what this is yet. And it's just helping them realize that once you figure it out, like, that's really when you, you start to make some serious progress. But yeah, chronic illness and autoimmune illness is just the light switch coming on. And it's trying to figure out what's the stressor that turns the light switch on. Because once you figure out what that stressor is and you're able to figure out how to resolve it, you're able to turn that light switch off and that repeated flare-up pattern doesn't continue to happen over and over and over again.

So essentially, it helps to neutralize the trigger?

Yeah, that would be the best way of putting it. When something is bothering you, it will surface whether or not you're aware of it. And it normally surfaces through a physical health condition. That what, by the time you have a physical ailment in your body or physical symptom in your body, your subconscious has already tried to process it and came up with nothing. And that's kind of its last resort of going, hey, we tried to figure out some way or method to work with this and it's, it's not working. I need help.

When we're talking about chronic illness, before we press record today, we mentioned SIBO and also another one, because that seems to be coming up more and more and more. For people, as are things like parasites. Is there a connection between the type of personality that we have or the way that we conduct ourselves and our behavior in life that can manifest these conditions? Like, do we have toxic behavior? Do we act like a parasite by, you know, virtually taking, taking from other people all the time?

I think it's a combination of those things. I think that it can be belief systems, and I also think that we're more prone to things based off of our personality. My personality is that my emotional container isn't a deep end in a pool, it feels like an ocean. Not everyone feels that way, so I have found out after working with people for years and years and years. Some people have a kiddie pool where I'm like, I'm super jealous, I would love to just dive all the way down the kiddie pool, come right back up. That's, that's not me. Uh, and normally people within that chronic illness and invisible illness range, they're, they're normally my ocean people. And once I sit and explain that to them, it's not a bad thing. It means you feel really deeply. It means you're empathetic and compassionate. But if you're not aware that other people don't function that way, it's going to cause a lot of stress and chaos. And Sometimes it's just a difference in frame of mind. I think there's also different genetic components. When you see someone like me that's fairly slender, I have lighter-colored hair, I have blue eyes, I have very light skin. You're more likely to be in the anemia, low vitamin D, low B vitamins, that kind of thing. Like, it's kind of like this chronic health structure. And even though all of my labs are perfect, there's some predisposition for me to go into that chronic health range. So I think there's so many different factors involved with that. I think it can definitely be belief systems when you're around your family, but sometimes I think it's just your internal temperament too, that not everyone has those characteristics. But with SIBO, for example, I think that SIBO tends to be more of a— Yeah. Cultural issue rather than a temperamental personality issue. And the reason I feel that way is normally the belief system that I see underneath SIBO is I just don't trust my intuition, period. Like, intellectually, I trust my brain. My brain has never let me down. There's some large wound with when I trusted my intuition, she didn't come through for me. And that's a very common belief. with SIBO, and especially with Western culture where we're taught to be logical human beings, use, use the part of your brain that's all intellectual and skip over the feeling part. I think that those cultural impressions really do affect the gut and SIBO in that capacity too.

So SIBO being small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, so do you know intuitively through your work or through the people that you have, clients that you've helped, What is it then about the small intestine that connects to, uh, not trusting? So it's about no trust, is that it?

That's right. And it's not necessarily with a human being in general. It's not betrayal. It's just more of, I had this initial strong feeling and it didn't come to fruition, and I don't— I don't know what the reality is. I don't know how to follow that voice anymore that I'm That's supposedly this voice from my higher power that's supposed to help me. And there's a big rupture with that. Of other times, people with SIBO will go, well, I do trust my intuition with X, Y, and Z. And I go, that's great and fantastic. There's a large rupture that's happened that hasn't been resolved yet. Now with SIBO too, there's a variety of physical treatments and herbs and diets and things like that that can be very helpful. And I encourage people to do that. I'd never encourage someone to just work on the emotional level and that's it. Even though someone can do everything under the sun for SIBO on the physical level, they still may have symptoms and flare-ups. Why is that? I think it goes back to that emotional component, that rupture of I don't trust my intuition for whatever reason.

It could, could have come from birth, or do you believe, like some people believe, pre-birth, like whatever the— sometimes maybe the mother was feeling and you know, those emotions were given over to the, to the baby. But do you find that's mainly whatever we've interpreted in this lifetime, in our life?

Correct. I, I think it's possible for, um, children to get the stress from, from mom, or potentially if you're looking at it more from like a metaphysical perspective of a past life issue. I think that's very far few and in between. I've seen cases like that where I, I do think that is the case, but I think it's 1% or less. I think a majority of what's happening in our physical bodies now is a reflection of what we're experiencing right now or within the relative past.

How do you help people who just find it impossible to tap into their emotions? Like, they're so removed, like they can't even— they go to tap in, then it's Just a blank. They just can't do it.

One of my exercises, I call it the 1-2-3 exercise, and I normally start off with resentment because people love to go into their resentments. So I go, okay, what's something that bothers you at a 2 out of 10 or a 3 out of 10? I'll give examples: dirty dishes in the sink, my husband leaves his underwear on the floor. Like, people are really good at identifying that kind of stuff. I don't, I don't have to poke and prod too much. They'll go, great. Okay. I want you to think of a very specific time that your husband left the, his underwear on the floor. Like, was it this morning? Was it a week ago? I want you to have that in your mind. Not all the times that he's done it, just this one specific time, because that's also a barrier, is that most people want to focus on the accumulation of all of their resentments. You have like 10 different toes in the water. Let's just focus on the most specific thing. This morning he left his underwear on the floor. Okay, great. So that's your number 1, identify the actual event. Not all the events, not all the times he did it, just this morning. 2, how much does it bother you? Bothers me at a 2 out of 10. Fair. 3, what's the first unfiltered thought that comes to mind? If you could say anything in the world when you picture walking into your bedroom and seeing your husband's dirty underwear on the floor and it bothers you at a 2 out of 10, what would you want to say? Maybe a response would be, he's lazy. So then I go, okay, think about that event this morning, and I want you to say out loud or write in your journal, he's lazy, as long as you want to. Over and over and over. He's lazy. He's lazy. He's lazy. That specific event, not all the other times, just this one. And then I'll go, okay, after maybe 2, 3 minutes, I'm done. I, okay, I felt the I'm lazy, whatever that is. Then I have him go back through it again. This morning, he left his underwear on the floor. Does it still bother you at a 2 out of 10? Here's the interesting part. It's normally shifted. It'll go to a 1 or a 0. I go, oh, okay, the event didn't change, your feeling did. That's the only factor that we've worked on right now. So we go to the 1 out of 10, and I go, what's the last unfiltered thought that you have as you're looking at this? Because it's a 1, something's there. And then it might be, uh, he never helps me. They do that on repeat until they don't feel like saying or writing it, writing any of it anymore. And then they just keep going through that until they get to zero. And I'm like, great, you can do that. You can work on the big ones. That's what this entire process is. It does not have to be scary or terrifying. So do you—

are you actually just lessening the emotional charge Of what they're feeling.

It's, it's a form of emotional regulation. So if you're looking at it more from a therapeutic standpoint, it would be called bilateral stimulation of— I am getting them to write something over and over and over again, and it's engaging both parts of their brain to allow them to actually just feel what's stuck in the body. Because it is very hard to feel what's stuck in the body so long as your logical brain wants to be in charge. I like to give your logical brain something to do. So you can actually feel the feeling. And normally that's writing or walking or something like that. As long as you're engaging both parts of your brain while you're feeling something, you have the greatest chance of success of actually getting it out of your body.

I like— recently I went to a seminar and it was all about belief change and mindset change, you know, for growth and etc. And he emphasized so much that to make this change embed in the body, it had to be done when you were super happy or super heightened. Would you agree with that?

My initial reaction is no, I wouldn't agree with that. I think as long as there's a willingness— I think people tend to have a willingness when they're more happy and excited, but not always. I have seen some people at their absolute bottom that have told me, I can't continue to live this way, especially in chronic illness world. Most people with chronic illness are not happy or ecstatic. Uh, I think If I presented that to them, they might feel hopeless. I think as long as you have the willingness to feel gross feelings, I think that there's a pathway forward.

Have you come across someone who has such a resistance to change you just can't access them, or they can't access themselves? And what is happening for those people that they have this very, very strong resistance?

I perceive— yes, I have encountered people that are resistant to change or exploring any kind of emotions. There can be a variety of reasons. I think one of those reasons would be an underlying belief of feeling defective, of maybe one of their deeper beliefs is I'm not enough, or if someone really knew me, they wouldn't love me. And if that were true, I don't know if they would want to try to respond or have relationships with anybody. So I don't blame them for that. Normally, when I work with someone, there's some willingness or understanding that, hey, I've tried everything physically. There's probably something emotionally going on. And it's— I would say it's similar to a dietitian. You can have someone that's 600 pounds. They've made the connection of what I'm doing isn't working. Until they're ready to have that internal willingness of, I'm willing to do something different, you can only do so much. I mean, I can lay out the facts, I can give examples, I could give testimonials, whatever it is. But if they don't have the willingness to do it, I'm not really able to touch it. And I've, I've worked on cases like that before. I've had a woman— this was years ago, like 2017— I had a woman with stage 4 breast cancer. I let her know from my perspective what the emotional stressor was. And she told me, Rachel, I have stage 4 breast cancer. What you mentioned is extremely painful for me. I don't think I'm going to live much longer. That isn't worth it to me. And she just told me that plain out. And, and that was honest. I don't blame her one bit because if she didn't have any hope about her prognosis, why would she want to do that work? It's extremely painful for what, for what gain?

Yes, especially if it's stage 4 cancer. There's most probably, like you said, she's one of the people in the ocean So that's a lot of work. It's not in the kiddie pool. So I mean, that's everybody's, you know, right to do that. Other people may jump on it. So I guess that goes back to what I said before about personality type as well. Those who do anything for themselves and fight, others, they feel they're at the end, so let it go. Do you help them get into a feeling state, or do they need to revisit The, like, visualize the exact thing that happened to them?

It can be done either way. It really just depends on the case and the person's willingness. There are sometimes when I get someone that has 20 different symptoms and trying to pinpoint even one of those might be too overwhelming for them as far as the origin of when that started. So I might just have them identify the part of themselves that comes forward when they have that flare-up or when they have that symptom. So, for example, let's say if someone had chronic calf pain, which might be more consistent with something like fibromyalgia. So I would have them focus on that calf pain, touch that calf, and literally just write for 5 minutes about what that calf is saying. And it doesn't have to make any intellectual sense whatsoever, but you're giving the body the opportunity to actually talk rather than telling it to shut up. And most, at least people that I am raised around it in the culture that I am in. It's take a medication. I want to shut this up. I don't want to talk to this at all. And my perspective is to reverse that, assuming that the pain is low enough that you can tolerate it.

I assume that this would be a very much an individual approach, and it's hard to tell how long it would be for each person, but I'm thinking of the chronic illness, people who have enough on their plate, they're tired most of the time, and to think to do this work would feel like, oh my goodness, no, not more, I can't cope. What is a general sort of time frame that you see?

So I'll give an example of kind of a patient that I would have in mind that might be from your audience. Uh, it would be Let's say someone that's been chronically ill for 7 to 10 years already. They can barely shower. They can barely move. Maybe they can't stay employed. Um, can barely think straight. They have fibromyalgia, brain fog, lupus, POTS, something along the lines of that. Let's say that comes through my doors. If someone has the willingness to do the work, and I mean, if I ask you to do something and you're willing to feel a feeling all the way down to the bottom, even if it would be really painful. I think progress can be made, significant progress can be made within 2 to 3 months if they have the willingness to do that and if we work together about once to twice a week. Not with the whole spectrum of all symptoms, but one or two. I think pretty significant progress can be made. The problem that comes in is an outside stressor could come up or someone decides to binge eat. I don't know, 12 cases of Cheetos or whatever it is. There's so many different environmental factors that can go into that as well. I don't think that it's going to be years and years and years before you see results. I wouldn't take anyone on if I felt that way. I have not had that experience with anyone that I've ever worked with, that it has taken years and years and years. Now, to work with the whole scope of your 20+ symptoms, I like to be upfront that that's normally a 5 to 7 year process of likely once a week and then once every other week and then once every 3 weeks and then once every 4 to 6 weeks. And normally I have yet to see someone that has taken longer than 7 years to recover from a chronic illness. If they have the willingness and if they're really willing to give it their all as far as attention, time, and just diving into the bottom of the pool. To me, when I was chronically ill, hearing 5 to 7 years was actually relief of, oh, there's an endpoint.

Yes.

And what I, what I mean by endpoint isn't that it just magically goes away and it never comes back. What I mean by that is that it It goes inactive. It's almost, instead of this fire-breathing dragon that's just around destroying a town all the time, the fire-breathing dragon almost kind of comes under like this sleepy spell and it turns the lights, the, the lights off. The fire isn't constantly breathing anymore. It's gone back into that cave and it's asleep. Kind of like the fairy tales that you hear about. And it's like someone awoken the dragon and then it's this whole dramatic chaos thing afterwards. That's another way that I view autoimmune. or chronic illness. I don't think it's ever possible to get rid of the dragon, although that would be preferred. I am open to that being a reality if I ever figure it out. I think a really tangible goal that I'm comfortable with anyway is getting that dragon to sleep and to turn off where you're not having symptoms or progression anymore. I think that's possible. I can't promise that. Every single person is so individual and has so many different factors, but I really, really, really do believe That huge significant progress can be made on the chronic illness side of things, assuming you're also doing all the things necessary on the physical end.

So for, I guess, anybody listening who has a chronic illness or autoimmune, 7 years may sound really long, but how long have you had it for, you know? And then 7 years may seem shorter, but if it still sounds— go for like 3, 4 months. 3, 4 months, whether you do it or whether you don't, it's still going to pass. And it just seems to pass quite quickly. So what's a simple way listeners can start tuning into what their body is trying to tell them?

I think the easiest way is to just really sit in silence for 5 minutes because you'll, you'll hear the yelling and go, I didn't realize that was there. I don't think it's something that you even have to consciously search for. I think it's more of a listening process, and most people don't want to listen. A lot of overstimulation with phones, computers, work. It's, it's that go, go, go, go, go. If you do not rest, the body will eventually stack up with emotional stressor that hasn't been resolved yet to the point where it will force you to stop. Very similar to dirty laundry. You can have some pretty gnarly piles of laundry for a while. And eventually your house is going to get filled with dirty laundry and you won't be able to function or leave your house anymore because you have so much dirty laundry. Eventually there's going to come a time where you're like, I have to deal with this. And that's another belief system that I think people can get stuck in is I'll deal with it later. I will never have to deal with it. I'm like, that's not true. Like, think about it as dirty laundry or chores. Eventually you're going to want to use your sink again.

Yeah.

Uh, if you have dirty dishes, like, yes, it's just the thing. You're not going to be able to function well anymore.

Like, eventually it takes a bit of courage really to look at your emotions. Rachel, this has been so informative, and thank you for coming on. You know, for anyone who does have a health condition, I really urge you to go to the show notes because Rachel's website's there and you can book in and talk to Rachel about this. And take it step by step if you have— if you feel that you're overwhelmed and tired, you know, or you have a bit of fear about change, you know. Rachel will walk you through it all. Book with her. Uh, it's something we— I think we all really need to do for our health. Thank you so much. Thank you.