The Cost of Adaptation: Trauma, Stress, Chronic Illness, and the Body’s Response

What if your symptoms are not random? Not inconvenient? Not something your body is doing to you? What if your body is actually speaking to you? Asking to be witnessed? f What if this is all part of a conversation your body has been trying to have with you for a very long time?

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes, “Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.” That imprint does not stay neatly contained in memory. It shows up in physiology, in patterns, in the way the body organizes itself around what it has had to carry.

For many women, the body carries a lot. Nearly 80 percent of people living with autoimmune diseases are women. Conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and multiple sclerosis are complex and multifactorial, but more and more research is pointing toward the role of chronic stress, unresolved trauma, and prolonged emotional burden in shaping immune system function. Studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences continue to show a strong correlation between early life stress and increased risk for autoimmune disease, chronic pain, and inflammatory conditions later in life.

If women are more likely to develop autoimmune conditions, men are more likely to externalize or somaticize distress in ways that are less often named as “emotional” at all.There is a different kind of silence at play. Men are often socialized early out of emotional awareness during their developmental years as a child. Not just discouraged from expressing feelings, but from even recognizing them in the bod, or being ridiculed for expressing feelings. Over time, this can create a kind of internal disconnection where activation is felt, but not understood. Grief shows up as irritalbity and fear presents as numbness.

Gabor Maté speaks to this when he writes, “The attempt to escape from pain creates more pain.” When emotional experience has nowhere to go, it does not disappear. It gets rerouted. For many men, that rerouting shows up in patterns like chronic tension, high blood pressure, digestive issues, substance use, or overworking. Not as random habits, but as adaptations. As ways the nervous system tries to regulate without the language or permission to do so directly.

Men have higher rates of cardiovascular disease at earlier ages. They are significantly less likely to seek preventative healthcare. And they die by suicide at rates several times higher than women. These are not just behavioral statistics. They point to something deeper about regulation, isolation, and the cost of emotional suppression over time.

This is not about reducing illness to psychology. It is about widening the lens. In When the Body Says No, Gabor Matéwrites, “When we have been prevented from learning how to say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us.” The body begins to express what has been suppressed, often in ways that are misunderstood or pathologized without context.

Van der Kolk writes, “When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.” This is where so many people find themselves. You can understand your story. You can make meaning of your past. And still feel your body reacting as if the past is happening now. Because for the nervous system, safety is not a thought. It is an experience.

When the nervous system is chronically activated, the body shifts into survival physiology. Stress hormones remain elevated. Inflammation increases. The immune system becomes dysregulated, sometimes overactive, sometimes suppressed. Sleep, digestion, and hormonal balance are all impacted. Over time, this creates an internal environment where symptoms can take hold.

“The body, which has been stressed to the breaking point, continues to defend against a threat that belongs to the past,” van der Kolk writes. That ongoing defense has consequences. Chronic fatigue, autoimmune flares, digestive issues, migraines, persistent pain. These are often treated as separate problems, but they are frequently interconnected expressions of a system that has been under strain for a very long time.

Gabor Maté adds another layer to this understanding. “The body says no in illness when we are no longer able to say no ourselves.” There is something here about boundaries, about adaptation, about the cost of staying in patterns that require us to override our own needs again and again. Not as a personal failure, but as something that was often necessary at one point in time.

None of this means that trauma directly causes disease in a simple or linear way. But it does shape the terrain. It influences how the nervous system functions, how the immune system responds, how the body regulates and repairs. It creates the conditions in which health either becomes more supported or more compromised over time.

This is why tending to your nervous system is foundational. Not as a rigid practice or something to get right, but as a way of shifting your relationship with your body. Learning to notice when your system is bracing. Learning to create moments of settling. Learning to experience safety not just as an idea, but as something that lives in your body.

Van der Kolk reminds us, “We can access the trauma through our bodies.” And this is also where we access healing. Not by overriding symptoms, but by listening to them differently. Not by pushing through, but by building the capacity to stay present with what is there without becoming overwhelmed or shut down. This is the work. The slow reorientation back into connection with yourself. The recognition that your body has been adapting, protecting, responding in the only ways it knew how.

In the course I offer, this is what we begin to explore. A different way of understanding the relationship between emotional wellbeing and physical health. A way of working with your nervous system that feels grounded and sustainable. Not as a quick fix, but as an ongoing practice of listening and responding.

Because your body is not working against you. It has been speaking. When you begin to listen in a new way, it often responds in kind. Here's a link to check out more about shaping your nervous system in the direction of health: https://allison-s-site-27a7.thinkific.com/courses/ai-placeholder-1

With light & love,

Allison

References:

• Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

• Maté, G. (2003). When the body says no: The cost of hidden stress. Knopf.