Are Your Relationships Making You Sick?

Your Doctor Probably Isn't Screening For One Of The Greatest Risks To Your Health

After a challenging two year journey of trying to write a book with someone other than the voices inside my own head, I just finished co-writing a book with my partner Jeffrey Rediger, a Harvard psychiatrist, radical remission researcher, and author of CURED. When we first met almost six years ago as fellow keynoters at a trauma conference, we compared notes on what we’d discovered in our mutual study of people who were cured from “incurable” diseases. When we both asked each other what we believed most impacted people’s disease recovery journey, we agreed on one thing: when your relationships are making you sick, you must heal relational trauma and change the way you show up in relationships in order to restore nervous system regulation enough to turn on the body’s natural self healing mechanisms.

The problem is that a lot of people don’t even realize when their relationships are making them sick. But just like Terry Real says that, in thirty years, nobody has ever once asked him to define what he means when he says “normal marital hatred,” nobody has ever asked us to define what we call “relationsick.” People smile and nod, even though they’d never put two and two together to entertain the link between relational trauma and medical illness.

For the past two years, Jeff and I have been on a deep dive, not just because of the book we just wrote but personally, into all the things I’ve been focusing on in this Substack- relational trauma, childhood development, the link between trauma and physical disease, healthy boundaries, spirituality without spiritual bypassing, a trauma-informed lens on narcissism, an anti-oppressive, deconstructing way to deal with personal and systemic oppression- and how all of this impacts not just our mental health, but our physical bodies.

I originally named this Substack The Body Is A Trailhead, because I originally thought that’s what we’d title the book. But our publishing team just put our noodles together and came up with a new title.

Relationsick: Why Putting Yourself Last Is Destroying Your Health- And How To Heal

The hilarious thing about trying to write a book about relationships with your romantic partner, especially if you’re an ultra-liberal Bay Area civil rights activist who’s been actively involved in protests since you were in college and your partner is a much more conservative Harvard Bostonian who grew up as an Indiana farm boy in a fundamentalist cult, is that every paragraph turns into a three hour discussion. Writing the book and ironing out the clashes where we disagree, along with intensive Relational Life Therapy couples therapy, has been practically a full time job these past two years.

As I said in my essay about dual relationships, any time you try to cross over from a personal relationship into a professional one, there are all kinds of new challenges to deal with. In other words, when it comes to boundaries, do as I say, not as I do! Although it’s natural to want to write a book with a partner or teach an online class with a friend or choose your doctor because it’s also your next door neighbor, if you’re going to cross those lines, you have to get masterful at boundaries. If not, people tend to get hurt. The upside is that if you do decide to cross that line, it’s like a master class in expressing feelings, negotiating needs, and constantly coming back to the table to make sure things are equal and fair. It’s easy to write a book on your own, but writing with someone else forces you to learn to share power, which is really what our book is about. So it was good to be our own guinea pigs!

Are You The Giving Tree In Your Relationships?

Relationsick is divided into two parts. The first part makes the following case. Some people are the boundaryless givers in their relationships. They overfunction, tolerate too much, throw their own parts and needs under the bus, deplete themselves, keep their mouths shut when they start to feel resentful, fail to protest when their boundaries are crossed, expect very little and survive on breadcrumbs, learn to function as needless and wantless, focusing on everybody else, to the neglect of themselves, and then they wind up surprised to get sick way before they should.

Other people who take advantage of these folks may not be nefarious characters, but in the face of someone serving them like they’re the most special person in the world, they may become opportunists who are happy to benefit from people with this tendency towards boundaryless generosity. When one person is busy giving and the other feels little to no guilt about taking more than their fair share, conflicts are bound to arise.

But what if the giver is also conflict avoidant, terrified to speak up, say no, push back, or insist on more equality? What if the giver was never taught their God-given birthright-granted human rights and doesn’t know how to stand up for themselves? What if they don’t know what it’s okay to expect in relationships? And what if that conflict avoidance is anchored in by indoctrinated cultural or religious belief systems that normalize or even glorify selfless martyrdom?

Of course, nobody is born this way. These patterns are understandable constellations of parts that develop because of the way we were treated in childhood, which means, these patterns can also be broken, by treating those traumas that developed our personalities, which are by no means fixed. The book will be going into how, from an attachment wounding and developmental trauma lens, these patterns develop, for both the one who gives too much and the one who, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel obligated to reciprocate. We also go into the physiology of what happens in the nervous system and the rest of the body when we’re violating our own needs, prioritizing caregiving everyone else, and running on empty until the body bears the burden.

The first part of the book also focuses on the importance of deconstructing oppressive belief systems that shut down people’s natural self-preservation instincts. When we are indoctrinated at a young age to shut down emotions like anger, we lose the ability to protect our boundaries. And when we grow up shameless, we don’t feel bad when we crash right through someone else’s boundaries. Healthy anger and healthy shame are pro-social boundary-protecting emotions. Without them, we’re vulnerable to either perpetrating anti-social behaviors or being the victim of them.

The good news is that there is a radical road map to recovery, and that’s what the second part of Relationsick is about. We learned part of it from the radical remission survivors we studied, including Sophie, who told us she believed she was cured from her recurrent breast cancer because of what she called “The Selfish Bitch Project” (which was another possible title for the book, along with The Giving She, but we didn’t want to gender it, since men can sometimes be the ones who give too much too.)

The second part of the book is based in Internal Family Systems, as well as a six step process we developed as the self-help part of the recovery journey. The good news is that, while unhealthy, oppressive, non-reciprocal or narcissistic relationships can make you sick, well balanced, healthy, mutually nurturing relationships are the cornerstone of good health. They lie at the root of many “blue zones,” where healthy communities and strong mutually protective, caring relationships protect each other’s health and lead to a greater than usual number of people who live to be over 100 with few disabilities.

Join Us For LOVE SCHOOL

For those of you who resonate with what we’re talking about here and want to receive support before the book comes out in April 2026, we’re going to be previewing some of the content from the book in a new continuity program we’ve developed called LOVE SCHOOL. It meets every two weeks and we just had our first meeting this past Monday, the day we turned in the book this week. If you feel like joining us, we recorded the first meeting and you can catch up before our next meeting next Monday, February 24 Noon PST-2pm PST.

LOVE SCHOOL is an Internal Family Systems-based community of practice for those in recovery from relational trauma, whether you struggle with medical illness, mental health challenges, or just difficulties enjoying relationships without undue heartbreak. It’s for single people and partnered people, straight people and queer people, neurotypical people and neurodivergent people, and people whose closest relationships are with their kids, their best friend, or their pets, rather than a romantic relationship. The goal is to survive rough times in community, to nurture nervous system resilience, and to feel the upswelling of more safe, brave love in our lives.

We’d love to have you join us! We care deeply about health equity and making trauma healing approachable for all who need it. If you can afford to join us at the full price, it really helps us support those who can’t. But if you feel like you need or want to be with us, we do have a sliding scale.

Also, please considering subscribing to the paid subscription here. It will deepen your journey for only $5/ month and also helps us support our health equity work for those who can’t even afford that. I’m drip-releasing two unpublished books about IFS-informed boundaries (The Boundaries Handbook), as well as one about spiritual bypassing, deconstructing indoctrinated oppressive beliefs systems, and how to recover from it using IFS (Love Bigger: An Exploration of Spirituality Without Spiritual Bypassing).

Do You Struggle With Equality In Any Of Your Relationships?

Does any of this sound familiar to you. Do you resonate with giving too much and having health issues because of it? Do you caretake too much and care-receive too little? Do you take too much from your relationships and see that others might have medical conditions that could be reversible if you showed up more for someone? Do you struggle to even know how to be more reciprocal in relationships because of your own trauma history or because of neurodiversity? Do you sometimes feel bad because you feel like others are just naturally good at relationships, when you just can’t seem to figure it all out? Do you feel burdened when your loved one expects more of you? Or do you feel so sad and lonely because you feel like your legitimate needs are a burden to your loved ones?

Are you interested in trying new ways of relating, as part of your comprehensive medical treatment plan or to support a sick loved one? I’d love to hear how all this lands on you. Thank you all so deeply for helping me crowd source many of the things we’ve written about in Relationsick. This book is for all of us, including me and Jeff. We are grateful you’re here and in relationship with those of us in this community.

*Art credit Sheri Howe