The 'neuro' in your autoimmune condition
Getting to the root of it all is key.
I’ve suffered from pain and various allergic-and-sensitivity symptoms all of my life, stretching back to at least when I was a little girl of only seven years old. The MD who diagnosed me with mast-cell activation syndrome (MCAS) theorizes I might actually have been born with it, as I had colic as an infant, and in his symptom matrix, that’s a marker.
When traditional medicine—including elimination diets—failed to provide a cure, however, the treatment success I did find came through a slew of outside-the-mainstream interventions like yoga, acupuncture, therapeutic massage, and somatic dance. I also engaged in traditional psychotherapy, as the mind-body connection seemed to play a key role.
But those never brought me lasting relief from ailments, however much they helped emotionally and spiritually and in improving my overall physical condition itself.
Diet alone won’t work
Diet is usually thought to be the culprit for food and chemical sensitivities, so my practitioners and I hit that one hardest. After getting fully caught up in a quest for the perfect diet that would finally end my pain and symptoms, I hit a wall in late 2023. As I explain in this piece introducing the concept of brain retraining, that’s when I discovered the Gupta Program.
One of the components of the Gupta Program is right in there with the other interventions, and that’s meditation, altered with some important tweaks, as I explained in this piece.
But even with the tweaks, meditation alone wouldn’t move the needle on my autoimmune condition. That’s because the condition is a physical one. Whether we call it MCAS or NIC, for neuroimmune condition, the pain and symptoms in the body are real.
I haven’t actually struggled much with the “it’s all in your head” assumption, though I know it’s a common source of frustration for many others with MCAS and similar conditions. My symptoms have always been measurable and observable, in the form of hives, rashes, bronchial wheezing, and other signs, including, for example, inflamed blood vessels and scar tissue in my bladder, visible during a cytoscopy—all of these signs acknowledged by my MDs.
It may be in your head, but it’s not mental
When I introduced the idea of a neuroimmune condition in that recent post, at least one commenter joked that these must be “all in your head” after all. But that’s definitely not what I meant by neuroimmune. The word ties two systems together, 1) the neurological, relating to the nervous system and 2) the immune system, which attacks perceived foreign invaders in an effort to keep the body safe.
These two systems trade signals via neurons in your brain, as a series of messages between the amygdala and insula. Here’s a video to illustrate.
A couple of notes on the video above:
The precipitating event (the initial catalyst for the condition) might be a bonafide reaction to a substance in the environment—a household chemical or food additive. It might also be a virus or other illness.
High levels of emotional distress and trauma can also be a factor, activating and then over-activating the stress response.
This setup conditions the brain and body for overreactions to this and similar substances in the future.
The key takeaway
While a chemical substance might have initiated the first response, it is the immune system responding to substances in the environment that actually creates the symptoms. The condition thus becomes chronic, the reaction-response extending to a multitude of other triggers.
The symptoms themselves can then reinforce the immune-system response, sending a message that you’re in distress because you’re sneezing or wheezy or your stomach hurts. This can become a self-perpetuating cycle.
My self-love is chemical
Furthermore, our modern environments full of unprecedented levels of synthetic substances exacerbate the situation by causing inflammation in the body. Inflammation makes it more likely for triggers to kick off this signal loop in the brain.
That’s one of the reasons why the Gupta Program diet recommendation is to avoid processed foods. Since I’d cut them out already, I was ahead on diet and could focus on the other aspects of brain retraining in the program.
The main thing for the brain is to train
Which brings me to the exciting advantage of recognizing these types of autoimmune conditions as neuroimmune: We can retrain our brains away from this response.
As Ashok Gupta points out in the video above, our systems are a lot like a WWII soldier who’s been stranded on an isolated island and still thinks the war is raging thirty years after it ended. We just need to retrain the soldier to accept the fact that the war is over now, and he can stop fighting.
But just like that traumatized soldier needed care and a period in which to adjust, you can’t just tell your brain that certain foods, scents, or molds are not really dangerous.
First of all, our modern environments are loaded with them, causing inflammation and likely contributing to chronic illnesses and hormonal issues. They’re just not actually causing specific sensitivity reactions, which you can see because a) you don’t always react to them (many of us have good days and bad) and b) not every human being reacts to them.
Your brain cannot turn off the triggering response through logic or prayer or positivity or the power of suggestion. It takes repeated retraining exercises and techniques to accomplish this, sometimes unfolding over a long time. It can also require traditional psychotherapy, as I’ll get to in a moment.
I’ve been at this for 16 months, with a 75 percent recovery from all symptoms, which is 23 percent better than Gupta’s own clinical-trial results for MCAS.
My recovery is continuing, and I anticipate many more symptom-free days, with the techniques now part of my regular management of this condition.
Trauma at the root
There is often a tremendous connection between these neuroimmune conditions and trauma. The folks at the Gupta Program know this.
However, this program is neither meant nor equipped to treat trauma. The distinction I’ve encountered is that the program designers recognize the role trauma plays, and the coaches connected to the program are trauma-informed. But they are not trauma experts.
If you have experienced trauma in your life, especially during childhood—important because the brain is more malleable, like soft clay, during our formative years—I strongly recommend working with a trusted psychotherapist or other trained, experienced practitioner for additional support if you enroll in the Gupta Program or others like it.
For me these two things had to go hand in hand. I’d done years of therapy soon after I first left my family home at 17. Therapy was a lifesaver for me, but it took brain retraining to finally get to the conditioned neurological response at the root of my illness.
Likewise, while brain retraining provided a missing link for me, I still had to return to therapy again—luckily for me, with the same therapist, who had yet to retire—in order to fully integrate the work from brain retraining. I’m still working on this last, crucial piece.
Think about it this way: What if that WWII soldier was right to remain vigilant? What if he’d been the victim of war crimes? In his case, the war crimes committed against him had never been acknowledged, the criminal never punished. He learned to mistrust the world for good reason, as his community, the military, his own squadron—everyone, in fact—had failed him.
Crime victims are too often asked to carry the burdens that should have been borne by society to redress wrongdoing and punish criminals. Victims are often left to be their own support for reparations and healing.
When society shirks its responsibility, the toll on the victim is profound.
My best to you
I hope by sharing my journey I can help others avoid the decades of pain, illness, and frustration I’ve endured.
Please know that I don’t receive anything from the Gupta Program for talking about it here. That program offers a money-back guarantee, no questions asked, if after a year you don’t see results. I’m skeptical by nature and signed up planning full well that if I didn’t get better, I’d take them up on the offer. I’m glad to say I didn’t have to do that. I renewed after one year and continue to see improvements.
On the therapy front, if you’ve never worked with someone, I have further caveats (life is full of these!). If at all possible, find a therapist who doesn’t put restrictions on what you can say, even if that’s to share how your guided nature meditation turned into an Uzi-fueled revenge fantasy. Nor should your therapist force you to forgive a perpetrator or even encourage you to do this, as forgiveness is absolutely not required in order to heal. These are both big topics and deserve more attention; in fact, I’m reading Amanda Ann Gregory’s book, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms, right now and hope to share more in a future post.
How is this hitting you? I tried to distill a complex interaction down to its basic components; did this post make sense?
In addition to what you said, our gut actually produces 70% of the body's neurotransmitters, so gut health is extremely intertwined with everything. It's the first place anything happens inside the body, and a huge part of our immune system as well.
YES! There is NO evidence that trauma survivors need to forgive. I'm so honored that you are reading my book, and you were so kind to mention it.