The Connection Between Trauma and Autoimmune Conditions

If you’re living with an autoimmune condition and you’ve also experienced significant stress or trauma, you may be carrying two burdens that are more connected than most people realize. The research on this connection has been growing steadily, and what it suggests is that these two experiences aren’t just happening alongside each other. One may be contributing directly to the other.

Autoimmune conditions happen when your immune system begins targeting your own tissue as if it were a foreign invader. The list of conditions in this category includes rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, inflammatory bowel conditions, and others. Each has its own specific presentation, but they share a common feature: an immune system that has lost its ability to properly distinguish self from threat.

Trauma and chronic stress affect your immune system through several pathways. Your stress response system, when activated repeatedly or over sustained periods, releases hormones that fundamentally alter how your immune cells behave. Over time, this can lead to a kind of immune dysregulation in which the inflammatory response that should be temporary becomes chronic, and your system’s ability to calibrate its responses becomes impaired.

This doesn’t mean trauma causes autoimmune conditions in every person, or that addressing trauma will resolve an existing condition entirely. But it does mean that healing your nervous system is genuinely relevant to your body’s broader functioning, and clients who address both dimensions often report improvements in physical symptoms that their medical care alone hasn’t produced.

I welcome clients navigating this intersection. I coordinate with other members of your care team and approach you as a whole person, because that’s what you are.

I have worked with clients managing conditions like Hashimoto’s or rheumatoid arthritis who assumed their flares were purely physical events completely outside their control. As we addressed their nervous system regulation alongside their medical treatment, several noticed their flares became less frequent and less intense during stressful periods. Their doctors were still an essential part of the picture. The nervous system work simply became another piece of it.

If this sounds like where you are right now, reach out. I would love to help you find steady ground again. You can learn more about working with me at resiliencyco.net.