Trauma + Autoimmunity — The Deeper Call

In this deeply personal episode, Rohini shares her transformative journey of resolving childhood trauma and related autoimmune conditions through following inner guidance rather than conventional medical approaches. 

Rohini explores the crucial distinction between disassociation and dis-identification, emphasizing that we are not our wounds but rather the compassionate witnessing presence that tends to them. She shares how physical symptoms became messengers calling her back to her body, ultimately leading to profound healing through trauma-informed somatic work, Ayurveda, and reconnecting with ancestral wisdom.

This episode illuminates the powerful connection between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and autoimmune conditions, particularly in women. It's a passionate reminder to anyone going through similar things that you're not broken — your bodies are honestly communicating what requires attention and healing.

Key themes include trusting your inner authority over external medical opinions, the body as messenger rather than enemy, post-traumatic growth through integration rather than bypassing, and the liberation that comes from feeling safe to inhabit your own body. This is a vulnerable and empowering exploration of healing that challenges conventional approaches to trauma and autoimmunity.

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Intro & Outro Music: Coniferous Forest by orangery on Pixabay.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:05

Welcome to another episode of root and rise their space where we slow down and attune to the subtler, deeper and faster rhythms that move through life and that govern life, the space where we dive into self remembering and self reclamation. I'm Rohini Walker, and I'm so happy you're here. So I wasn't planning on talking about this for today's episode, but I received clear guidance to do so during meditation, and I know better than to question that.

Unknown: 0:44

So today I'm going to share a personal story, a personal journey. And I don't really have much of a structure, I suppose, other than honest sharing, but I did have to check in on my intention and my why. What's my intention behind talking about this, my first intention is to share some of my own experience of following inner guidance of tuning out what didn't feel correct and aligned for me, and tuning in what did, tuning into what did, and how that has inevitably brought me so much resolution and healing in my life, both physically, emotionally and spiritually. I know I talk about alignment with our inner authority a lot. It's a core value. But specifically with this episode, I really want to emphasize it. And also, as always, I want to remind you, as you listen to tune into your own inner guidance, to your own inner yes and no, nothing I am sharing today or ever is intended or offered in the spirit of Do it this way. Do it my way, because the coerced supremacy of anything is a colonial imprint, and because my way is appropriate for me, for my body, my energy, my history, for my constitution and my lineage, and we're all too beautifully biodiverse to conform to a one size fits all approach, especially when it comes to our health and the choices that we make around that.

Unknown: 2:50

If there are things that I share that resonate great, pay attention to that, and if there are things that I share that don't resonate also great. Pay attention and work with the magic of contrast to steer you towards what does

Unknown: 3:09

my second intention is to anchor us in the frequency of remembering that we are not our wounds, that we are not our traumas, no matter what we go through and what we have to endure in our lives, we don't have to become defined by and identified with them. They can steer the course of our lives for a time sure when we're deep in it. Some people go through cycles of being deep in it, and that's totally fine and natural, because very intensely experienced traumas require cycles of completion and resolution in sensitive nervous systems. I can attest to that no one is broken, but we are not our wounds, and they don't get to be in the driver's seat forever. We tend to our wounds. We don't become them, and they give our lives depth and meaning when worked with and related to with compassion, which requires us to dis identify from them.

Unknown: 4:28

And by dis identifying, I don't mean disassociating. The two are very different. When we disassociate, we're not in the body, we're hovering somewhere above it, and physically there's a sort of numbness, disassociation. Is a trauma response. It's it's a sort of extended freeze response, a functional freeze where we're able to operate and function and do things and complete tasks and seemingly live life. But we're not really here. We're not embodied. Often the very high achieving type a type people who end up in burnout have been in functional freeze the whole time. Functional freeze can happen in various ways. Often it can be after we've gone into freeze because of a real or a perceived threat, and then that freeze response hasn't fully expressed or completed in our system, so we're still in it, because parts of us haven't realized that we're not under threat anymore.

Unknown: 5:46

I spent a long, long time disassociated and in functional freeze. So many of us do, and we don't always have to have had big, traumatic experiences to be disassociated and in functional freeze. Sadly, these have become normalized conditions in our culture, and I'll probably devote a future episode or episodes to this topic. Let me know if you'd be interested in that.

Unknown: 6:16

So dis identifying from the constricted expressions of our unresolved traumas and wounds is completely different from disassociating. Dis identifying is when we have slowly cultivated the capacity to be in the body, to be present in the body and to feel and witness these wounded, traumatized parts via sensation. We know and feel that they're not us, that they're unresolved traumas expressing as contractions or numbness or pain or very heavy emotions. By dis identifying from them, we actually come into relationship with them, we’re the compassionate witnessing presence, the space in which they get to be seen and felt and supported where they get to be tended to, we're the space in which they get to organically resolve and release without any forcing or fixing or suppressing or bypassing from us, dis identifying from our traumas and the layers of identity that have formed around them. Isn't always easy for those of us who've experienced severe trauma, including physical expressions of the impact of childhood trauma, for instance, which I'll be talking about today, there's a very wounded inner child in there and that one needs to be tended to slowly, as we heal and cultivate the capacity, the space within ourselves to do this, the wounded inner child part cannot be the one running our lives. It's not safe for us or for them, but whatever wounded parts we have within whether from childhood or other times in our lives, they're contractions and constrictions in our psyches and in our Soma in our bodies, as we cultivate the capacity to connect with them through whatever symptoms they're expressing. Symptoms are messengers in the holistic, animist perspective. So as we connect to them and tend to them, we start to know and feel that we are not them, that we're the space in which they're unfolding. We're not the contractions of our wounds, but something much more vast and mysterious altogether, inhabiting these incredible bodies.

Unknown: 9:14

Sometimes this can be difficult for people whose identities and personas have become inseparable from their traumas and related physical symptoms. Who am I if I'm not this? It's an ego death rebirth situation. I've worked with clients who were deeply unwilling to let go of all the identity and behavioral layers that had constellated around their traumas. But we got there. I went through it myself when I was deep in the underworld experience of a physical and emotional breakdown, which I prefer to call a breakthrough, because that somatically experienced realization that I am not my wounds, I am not my traumas, is the beginning of liberation and of coming into true embodied relationship with ourselves.

Unknown: 10:15

So with all that said, with my intentions stated, let's dive in. Like so many of us, I had a very traumatic childhood. Mine was rife with physical and verbal abuse and bullying and emotional neglect, most familial trauma has an intergenerational lineage, and that was certainly the case with me, as I've discovered and mapped the storied lineage of trauma that's been passed down from generation to generation and from nervous system to nervous system from both my parents ancestral lines, the stark energy of trauma is always innocently seeking resolution and release. So by the time I was seven, I had what I know now was OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. Back in the early 80s in India where I was born, no one knew anything about OCD, and in any case, all my strange and punishing OCD rituals happened in secret because I was so horribly ashamed and convinced that I was just singularly broken and bad and wrong. My OCD was a sort of anticipatory self punishment, punishing myself before my mother, or rather her own unresolved traumas, which she had become fully identified with, punished me, which happened relentlessly.

Unknown: 12:05

So when I was 10, my family and I immigrated to London, and the OCD intensified, I had no idea who I was supposed to be. And now there was this new flavor of unspoken shame from being brown and different, from not fitting into the accepted physical and cultural standards and norms of this new place. This was the early 90s, and there was this palpable unspoken shame around my Indianness, which I proceeded to completely reject as a way of fitting in and surviving through all this. The shame fuelled OCD continued and amplified in secret by the time I was in my early 20s, I was drinking heavily and doing a lot of recreational drugs as a way of numbing and suppressing and also as a way of fitting in, because this was England, after all, if you didn't want to be different or singled out as weird, it was best to drink very heavily from your teens onwards. But somehow, in the middle of all this, I decided that enough was enough with the OCD, and organically, found my way into self inquiry, journaling and active imagination work, which was my earliest spontaneous experience of having a conversation with the so called pathology, which miraculously created the space for awareness, for a pattern interrupt and the OCD behavior eventually stopped, but the larger underlying trauma response that was driving it wasn't resolved, as I would soon discover.

Unknown: 14:02

Not long after this, I developed alopecia, which is an autoimmune condition where your hair falls out in patches. I remember a guy I was friends with pointing out a small circular patch at the top of my head that was bald, no hair at all. I touched it and felt the sickening surge of that familiar sensation shame. My mum and I went to the doctor who informed me that this was an incurable auto immune disorder and that I would need to be on steroids my whole life to control it. I remember even back then, a part of me was like, No, this is BS. A part of me that was much more ancient that clearly said, this is not the way to heal this. I could feel it deeply in my belly and in my heart, just like knowing thankfully, my mum was also tuned in, and I know now that this was our lineage speaking through us, our connection to an ancient holistic healing science, namely Ayurveda, that saw the alopecia as a symptom of a larger cause. Thankfully, I didn't have to battle my mum for once, and we left the doctor's office knowing that there was no way I was going to take steroids and that we'd find a way to resolve this without poisoning myself and causing even more issues. And we did. We turned to Ayurveda and to homeopathy, and in six months, hair had started growing back on that patch, and no more patches had appeared.

Unknown: 16:00

I had had glimpses of this larger part of me when I was a child, this larger capital S self, this inner authority, but I had suppressed it by OCD in it into silence. This is that larger self within all of us that doesn't have to shout and posture and prove itself and make a whole scene. It's just there patiently waiting for us to listen. Often. It's guidance will go against accepted norms and external authorities. And this was my first conscious and visceral experience of it. It was a knowing so deep and true in the very fiber of my being that no external authorities could divert me from it. This attunement and devotion to my inner authority has guided me since then, over and over again, sometimes taking me towards lessons that I had to learn and experience, but always steering me and guiding me on the path that I'm meant to take, even if that path looks totally bananas and nonsensical to the outside observer, it's the voice that has saved my life over and over again, so fast forward many years from that first experience with resolving an autoimmune condition without any pharmaceutical drugs. And I'm summarizing and compressing a lot here, because otherwise this will be a very long episode, and it's also kind of dull to listen to an exact blow by blow chronology of the events of someone's life.

Unknown: 17:56

So fast forward many years, and I'm living in the rural wilderness of the Mojave High Desert in Southern California. My husband Ollie and I moved here from London in 2013 and we're still here at the recording of this episode in 2025 we moved here after some pretty shocking life events rocked my world and shook it to its core, which is a story for another time. Suffice to say, my life in England felt meaningless, and this desert is where we were guided to over the years, this land, this desert, wilderness, has helped me to excavate and integrate the shadows of myself back into my larger self. It reunited me with my creativity, with my Soul, with my body, but it took me on quite the underworld journey the process. In 2018 My body's autoimmune expressions returned, this time in the form of psoriasis on one of my legs and on the soles of my feet, and in the form of psoriatic arthritis and joint information causing chronic pain that hampered my ability. I could barely walk. All of this contained the familiar flavors of the shame that was stuck in my system and screaming for resolution.

Unknown: 19:33

The Medical prognosis was predictably the same, of course, incurable, take steroids and painkillers forever. My inner authority's answer was the same as before, a clear No, thank you. My diet was already pretty clean, but I doubled down alcohol and drugs had not been a part of my life for a while, so thankfully, I didn't have that to contend with by now, I had done enough inner work and trained in energy medicine and spiritual modalities to know that this was a deeper call from within, but first, I sought out support from herbal allies, from Ayurvedic medicine, again, from my amazing acupuncturist and chiropractor, to start bringing some suppression, free, ease and relief to the symptoms, and to let them know that I was Listening and that I was ready to follow them, because there was a clear sense that I had to work with these symptoms, these symptoms, who were messengers, that I had to be guided by them. I knew it wouldn't be easy to face what I was being called to face, and I intuitively knew that I had to create some life supporting capacity in my system in order to undertake this journey.

Unknown: 21:07

It was at this time that I found trauma informed Somatic Experiencing work to guide me, talk therapy had barely skimmed the surface for me, and I didn't want to spend years talking about the things I knew they needed to be met, to be viscerally felt and experienced and to be related to and brought to resolution and completion and release within my psyche and my body and my nervous system, I was barely holding it together. To be honest, both physically and psychologically, the inner wounded ones were ready to come out of the shadows, to be integrated.

Unknown: 21:51

So with a trusted teacher and guide and with the modality of somatic experiencing, I began the journey of following the sensations of pain, of shame, of grief and of anger, and I followed them all the way down to the places in my psyche and in my body and into My unconscious terrains. I love working with mythology, and I was able to locate and map my experience within the transpersonal language of myth, as well as work somatically with the unfolding of my own personal mythos, I recognized the self punishing, self destructive archetypal energies that were playing out within me and manifesting through my immune response and its autoimmune expressions, and I discovered the intergenerational trauma that was seeking resolution in my nervous system. Memories flooded in, memories that I hadn't experienced in this lifetime, including memories of colonial oppression from When the British ruled India. These were somatic memories, memories that were accessed through my body. I unearthed some deeply repressed childhood trauma and began the lifelong journey of re parenting my inner little one, the body and the nervous system, are incredibly non linear time capsules. It was all here, all being shown to me, the more I became willing to tune in, to listen, to be guided. None of this was easy, especially having difficult conversations with my parents, conversations around acknowledgement and forgiveness and understanding. They were messy and angry conversations, but they were necessary and they were honest, and they began the process of repair. I'm grateful my parents were willing to have these conversations, however reluctantly and clumsily, because I have clients and loved ones whose families are not willing to have these conversations and who continue to gaslight them, which just continues the cycle of abuse until it's no longer sustainable, and relationships with families of origin have to be cut off.

Unknown: 24:39

It was during this journey of being guided by my physical symptoms to meet my inner Wounded Child parts that I started to sense the direct link between autoimmunity and childhood trauma, which at the time I had heard no one talk about in mainstream health conversations around autoimmune issues, I started looking into it and found a large body of research connecting adverse childhood experiences, which goes by the acronym of ACE and autoimmune issues, especially in girls and women. I wasn't mad or broken. My body was just communicating with me honestly and directly, because the stuck and contracted, constricted energy of trauma had become systemically unsustainable. Thankfully, in the last couple of years, this conversation around the link between autoimmunity and adverse childhood experiences has become much more commonplace in trauma healing spaces, as well as conversations around other factors that contribute to autoimmune conditions such as diet and lifestyle and environmental toxins, which will hopefully encourage the mainstream medical community to take a more holistic approach to this, instead of reflexively suppressing the symptoms with drugs which just causes further imbalance and inflammation and make the symptoms louder and manifest in different ways.

Unknown: 26:27

If you're someone who has had adverse childhood experiences and are now experiencing autoimmune issues, chances are there's a wounded inner child who needs loving, compassionate care and attention, not more silencing and rejection. The most valuable gift from this whole experience has been finally feeling safe to be in my body when I realized that my earliest experience was of not feeling safe to be in my body, it released so much pent up grief and fear and confusion. It's an experience that far too many of us, especially women, have had and have had to normalize in order to operate in this world of not feeling safe in our bodies, and the realization that I had spent most of my life trying to escape and abandon and punish my body, of course, she was going to have autoimmune expressions, I realized that with every sensation of pain, every so called pathological symptom, she was trying to get my attention and call me back to her, And I love her for it.

Unknown: 28:00

Nowadays, my body's autoimmune expressions are rarely present, and I'm pain free, and when they do surface, I know it's a call for me to tune into something to listen to come back to her, in the words of psychologist Dr Benjamin Hardy, we can go from post traumatic stress disorder to post traumatic growth, but this can't happen in a sustainable and authentic way. If we bypass our experience. We can come into Post Traumatic Growth gradually without forcing and rushing, by coming into deeper relationship with the multi dimensionality of ourselves. It really is essential not to bypass or suppress the pain, the grief and the heaviness, or will end up in dissociation. Our traumas don't have to define us. We don't have to feel victimized by them forever. They can be composted to nourish and bring depth to our soul's soil, so we can rise up, integrated and free from suppressing and pathologizing ourselves.

Unknown: 29:27

So as we come to a close, if anything that I've shared from my story has moved something in you, if you've experienced or are experiencing anything similar, I really want to passionately remind you that you're not broken. Your body is not failing you, and it doesn't need to be fixed. You don't need to be fixed if you've had adverse childhood experiences, and they're unresolved and still looping in your system. Your body is trying to alert you. The body is always innocently and honestly communicating with us. It's just that we don't always like what we hear, and we try to silence it. And if your earliest experiences left you feeling unsafe to inhabit your body, it will sooner or later start calling you back to it. So to close, let's drop into a breath, drop back into the body.

Unknown: 30:53

Thank you for tuning into this episode. Thank you for being here. I'm feeling all the rich, expansive vulnerability of sharing my story through my actual physical voice. I'd love to hear from you, if you have any reflections and insights or any questions, I'd love to hear your story. Ways to connect are in the show notes, and until next time, keep tuning out the noise and distraction and attuning to your inner guidance. It's always there waiting patiently for you to listen. I. listen.