Systemic auto-immune reactions

As a 14-year girl she was pure, healthy and full of life-energy. Being a bit rebellious and having her own dreams about life. Six years later she has changed a lot on her body, suffers from many psycho-somatic symptoms and is a bit lost about her course in life. She comes from a traumatized family in a traumatized village with lots of violence.

When she told that she fainted and was hospitalized with tachycardia and low blood pressure when by accident she saw her biological father in the street, it dawned to me that this could be symptoms related to a systemic auto-immune reaction.

When it’s not possible to accept and take one of your parents as your parent, this means that you’re not accepting part(s) of yourself. You áre your mother and you áre your father, no matter what they have done to you or whether they are criminals or saints.

When you can’t take a parent as your parent, the consequence might be you are fighting against yourself. And this might cause auto-immune symptoms. And even auto-mutilation, like not accepting your body as it is.

Projection

Another effect we sometimes see, is when we can’t accept a parent, we do not fight against ourselves, but we project this fighting energy on others. We are angry at others or we don’t accept them. Like my older brother, who, for good reasons, could not accept his father and ended being angry at the world. And yes, father can be seen equivalent as the ruling part of the world, the institutions, the government, the law etc.

Fighting ourselves

In a wider sense we also might wonder what happens when we can’t accept our culture or our country. Or to be more precise, parts of our culture or our country. When something in the soul of a nation can’t be saved, integrated or accepted, often a dark part, we either might start fighting ourselves or we might project this energy on other nations and cultures. Fighting ourselves might be expressed in polarization or the falling apart of democracy or other state forms, like what we can see in the Netherlands at the moment.

Projecting on others is a big part of our Dutch history. What couldn’t be saved in the Dutch soul, we tried to save in the souls of tribes in South Africa, Indonesia and the Caribbeans. Under the name of spreading religion and saving the pour souls of the local tribes and people, we colonized them, enslaved them and destroyed them.

What is it that couldn’t be saved in the Dutch soul and was therefore projected on other people?
Before starting a war, what would happen if a nation would truly look into themselves and explore what can’t be integrated in the nation itself?

As in the case of the young girl, there might be a helpful process to outgrow the auto-immune reactions. To integrate. To integrate her father as part of herself. Regardless she likes or dislikes the behavior of her father.

Integration is the process to complete what could not be completed before. The result of integration is more stability, more resilience, more inner peace.

Integration is about the past. It’s not at all about changing the past, as often is a misleading process in for example family constellations, it’s about taking the past as it is.

Integration is the gateway to your future.

Integration is a highly undervalued process.

Let’s change ‘Think, before you act’, into ‘Integrate, before you act’.

Starting with myself.

~ Jan Jacob Stam