Autoimmune Disease

Women: instead of just simply putting out the fire, look at what started it in the first place.

Your body feels like it's under attack. And maybe it actually is. Let's stop trying to put out the fire and look at what's starting it.

Exhaustion belongs to the woman whose body has turned on her. It lives in the joints that ache before the day begins, in the thyroid that slows everything to a crawl, in the skin that flares and the gut that burns. It lives in the waiting rooms, in the blood tests that come back "a little off", in the years it takes to be believed.

Most of what we are offered is a fire extinguisher. Suppress the immune system. Quiet the inflammation. Manage the flare. These tools can be lifesaving, and I will say more about that at the end. Yet a fire tells you something about the house it burns in. It tells you where the fuel has gathered, where the air is getting in, and what has been smouldering for a very long time.

This essay is an invitation to turn toward the fire and let it show you something.

Why it is mostly women

Roughly four out of every five people living with autoimmune disease are women. Lupus, Hashimoto's, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren's, Graves'. The list reads like a census of the female body.

Part of the answer is written in our biology. The female immune system runs hotter and more vigilantly than the male one, a design that likely evolved to protect us through pregnancy and to protect the children we carry. Oestrogen tunes immune responses upward. In 2024, researchers at Stanford found that a molecule called Xist, which the body uses to silence the second X chromosome in female cells, can form complexes the immune system mistakes for a threat. Our very womanhood, at the level of the chromosome, carries a vulnerability.

Biology loads the gun. Something still has to pull the trigger. Identical twins share their genes, yet when one twin develops an autoimmune condition, the other very often does not. The difference lies in what each body has lived through, breathed in, eaten, absorbed and been told about itself. That is where this conversation gets interesting.

The voice that learned to attack

Autoimmunity is the body mistaking itself for an enemy. The immune system, built to defend, turns its weapons inward. Anyone who has lived with a relentless inner critic will recognise the shape of this.

I want to be careful here, because there is a cruel version of this idea that says you made yourself sick with your thoughts. That version is false, and it adds shame to suffering. What I am pointing toward is subtler. The body and the psyche speak the same language of threat, and they often learn it in the same place.

In Internal Family Systems, the inner critic is a protector part. It usually learned its harsh voice from someone else, often a parent, a sibling or a whole family culture where being criticised, mocked or shouted at was ordinary. The child takes that voice inside and runs it on herself, believing that if she attacks herself first, the world will hurt her less. Decades later she is still doing it, at three in the morning, in the mirror, in every small failure.

The research on this is striking. The Adverse Childhood Experiences studies found that people with more childhood adversity, including emotional and verbal abuse, carry a significantly higher risk of being hospitalised with an autoimmune disease as adults. A large Swedish study published in 2018 found that people diagnosed with stress-related disorders, including PTSD, were more likely to go on to develop autoimmune conditions. A nervous system raised in a war zone keeps its immune system on a war footing.

So when I say the self-attacking thought and the self-attacking cell share a root, I mean it in this sense. Both are protectors that learned, in a dangerous place, that vigilance is survival. Both soften when they are finally met with curiosity.

The family is inside a larger family

No family invents its cruelty from nothing. The mother who criticised her daughter's body was criticised for her own. The father who dismissed his daughter's feelings lived inside a culture that dismissed women's feelings as hysteria. Zoom out from the kitchen table and you find the same voice speaking at the scale of a civilisation.

Systemic misogyny is an atmosphere women breathe from birth. It tells us our bodies are too much and never enough. It teaches us to monitor ourselves constantly, to shrink, to apologise, to stay pleasing. A woman raised inside that field learns to watch herself from the outside, as an object to be corrected. Self-surveillance becomes second nature, and the immune system lives inside that nature too.

The same field shapes our medicine. Women wait years longer than men for many diagnoses. Our pain is more often attributed to anxiety. Autoimmune disease in particular has a long history of being dismissed as psychosomatic, a cruel irony given what I am writing about here. A woman who is not believed by her doctors learns, once again, to doubt the signals of her own body. The attack arrives from within and is then confirmed from without.

The attacks that are real

There is a danger in making everything about the inner world. It can leave a woman believing that if she just heals her trauma enough, her body will calm down, while she keeps living inside an environment that is genuinely assaulting it. Your body may feel under attack because it is.

Autoimmune diagnoses have been rising steadily across the industrialised world for decades, far faster than genes can change. Something in the way we live is feeding the fire.

Consider glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide on earth. It works by blocking a biochemical pathway that plants use, and that same pathway runs inside many of the bacteria in our gut. Animal studies show it can disrupt the microbiome, and the gut is where around seventy per cent of the immune system lives. The World Health Organization's cancer agency classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic in 2015. Research tying it directly to autoimmune disease in humans is still young, and I hold it with that honesty. Still, a substance that alters the ecology where immunity is trained deserves our attention.

Glyphosate sits within a much wider chemical load. Endocrine-disrupting compounds such as PFAS, the "forever chemicals" in non-stick pans and waterproof fabrics, and BPA and phthalates in plastics, interfere with the hormones that already steer women's immunity. Many of them concentrate in exactly the products marketed to women: cosmetics, fragrances, period products. Microplastics are now found in human blood, placentas and breast milk.

Then there is the electromagnetic environment. The science on everyday EMF exposure is genuinely unsettled. The WHO lists radiofrequency fields as possibly carcinogenic, while large reviews have not found clear harm at typical exposure levels. What I see in my clinical work is simpler and harder to measure: bodies that never get to rest. Phones under pillows, screens until midnight, a nervous system that is never offline. Whatever the mechanism, a body denied deep sleep and darkness loses one of its primary ways of regulating inflammation.

Add ultra-processed food, chronic sleep debt, mould in our homes and the relentless low hum of overwork, and you have a body that is defending itself on many fronts at once. An immune system that is constantly provoked will eventually start to misfire.

Illuminating the fire

Fire is one of the oldest symbols of the feminine sacred. The hearth, the vestal flame, the kundalini coiled at the base of the spine, the inner heat of the Tibetan tummo practitioner. In these traditions fire is life force, transformation and clarity. It burns away what is false.

Autoimmune inflammation is that same force with nowhere true to go. It is a woman's vitality and vigilance turned inward because the outer world never felt safe enough to receive it. So the question I want to ask is how we give that fire a hearth.

Illumination begins with listening. When the flare comes, ask what it arrived alongside. A conflict swallowed. A week of saying yes when the body said no. A family visit. A season of eating on the run and sleeping with the phone beside your head. The flare is information, and it is often precise.

It continues with meeting the inner attacker. In IFS we turn toward the critical part and ask what it is afraid would happen if it stopped. Almost always it is trying to protect a younger part of us that once got hurt. When that younger part is finally comforted, the critic can stand down. Many women notice their bodies soften in the same moment.

It asks us to redirect the fire outward, where it belongs. Anger at a culture that taught us to hate our bodies. Anger at an industry that sprays our food. That anger, felt cleanly and expressed in boundaries, activism, creativity and truth-telling, is the immune system's energy finding its rightful target.

And it asks us to reduce what we can of the real attacks. Organic food where possible, filtered water, glass instead of plastic, fragrance-free products, phones out of the bedroom, darkness at night. These are acts of devotion toward a body that has been fighting for you all along.

Your body has been on your side the whole time. It has been trying, in the only language it has, to tell you the truth about what you have lived through and what you are living in.

A note on care

None of this asks you to abandon medicine. Immunosuppressants, thyroid replacement, biologics and steroids have kept countless women alive and functioning, and stopping them suddenly can be dangerous. Please keep working with your doctors and make any changes to treatment together with them. Illuminating the fire happens alongside good medical care, in the same body, at the same time.

What I am offering is a wider lens. Your autoimmune condition is biology, biography and environment woven together. When we tend all three, the fire can return to the hearth and warm the house again.

Want to learn to work with the root cause of illness? Study with Sigourney in her medical medium school. We start January 2027 and this month is the last month to join on a payment plan.

If this essay stirred something in you, I would love to hear what your own fire has been trying to say. Leave a comment, or share this with a woman who needs to hear she is not attacking herself alone.