Relationsick: Why Putting Yourself Last Is Destroying Your Health—and How to Heal
Lissa Rankin
Synopsis "Relationsick: Why Putting Yourself Last Is Destroying Your Health—and How to Heal"
The body wants to heal itself. By treating your relational trauma and healing power imbalances in your relationships, you can create the conditions it needs to begin.
Most people know that controlling relationships can lead to mental health issues. But few people understand that our bodies translate relational trauma into physical, chronic, and even terminal illnesses—autoimmune disorders, cancer, chronic pain, and more.
Building on the Internal Family Systems and Relational Life Therapy models, Relationsick is a trauma-informed recovery plan that will help you rebalance relationships where you give too much and receive too little or where someone is abusing their power—at your body's expense.
Relationsick will help you break free from the fawning behaviors that keep you stuck in toxic relational dynamics. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience, Drs. Lissa Rankin and Jeffrey Rediger place recovery firmly in your hands through grounded, ethical, trauma-informed, evidence-based medical advice.
Regulate your nervous system, protect your heart with good boundaries, and heal your body by learning to: Spot the red flags of narcissism—as well as the green flags of healthy, responsible, health-inducing relationships Understand fawning, over-functioning, and enabling behaviors in a trauma-informed way—so you can take charge of your health Deprogram unhealthy conditioning and set patterns that will help your nervous system begin the process of deeper healing Get to know the parts of you that cause you to give too much and keep you stuck in power imbalances that can make you sick Communicate clear and assertive boundaries, navigate existing relationships with narcissists, and decide if a no-contact approach is right for you Show up for yourself and your other relationships, so you can nurture safe, transparent, and loving connections in your life
With practical self-help tools including quizzes for self-assessment, this radical new approach to healing from physical illness and unhealthy relationships makes it clear that your body has the power to improve or even reverse trauma-inflicted illness. All you have to do is help it do so.
