Healing Through Tiny Steps: The Surprising Link Between Allergies and Emotions

Healing the nervous system doesn’t require force - it requires consistency, safety, and small steps over time. This powerful idea is at the heart of embodiment coaching, and a surprising story about peanut allergy treatment recently brought it to life for me.

I recently read an amazing story about a new treatment for peanut allergies and I couldn't stop thinking about how much it reminded me of embodiment work.

The story follows Chris who has suffered from a peanut allergy since he was a baby. As an adult it has dominated his life - he has to be super careful when he’s eating in public, he’s avoided travelling to places where peanuts are used in a lot of cooking (like south east Asia) and his parents constantly worry about him.

A peanut allergy is the immune system reacting to proteins in peanuts, mistaking them for harmful invaders. In an effort to protect us from danger, the body’s release of histamine creates a wide variety of symptoms which can be life threatening.

The new treatment re-trains the immune system to recognise peanuts as safe — preventing the intense reaction altogether. To do this, they start exposing the body to teeny, tiny amounts of peanut - Chris started with just a fraction of a milligram - and building up the dose until whole nuts can be consumed safely.

How incredible is that?

The systems of our body are so flexible that we can create massive results through tiny, everyday actions, and turn something that once controlled our whole life, into something that we no longer need to worry about.

This news story was so fascinating to me because this is exactly what we do in embodiment coaching - except instead of training the immune system, we’re training the nervous system.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race with Allergies and Emotions

No amount of willpower was going to stop Chris’ immune system from freaking out the second a peanut touched his lips. If day one of the trial had involved eating a handful of peanuts and telling himself to ‘get over it’ he wouldn’t be alive to tell his story.

When our bodies have learned to fear something and react strongly to protect us from it, using force to push ourselves through it normally backfires.

If your nervous system has learned that rejection, pain, sorrow or even joy is just too much for you to handle, it will continue to shut down every time it gets a whiff of those feelings.

Chris’ doctors began by giving him the tiniest amount of peanut possible, and building it up over time, so that his immune system could learn that this food is safe.

Through embodiment work, we learn to slowly expose the body to the sensations that it has learned to run from, gradually building our capacity to feel them over time. Until eventually our nervous system now knows that these strong sensations are safe for us to feel.

Avoidance can Dominate our Whole Lives

Ironically, when we have to avoid something, our whole life becomes centred around it. Chris had to be so careful to never put himself in contact with a peanut, that he probably spent more time thinking about peanuts on an average day than I ever will in my life.

When we’re avoiding a particular feeling or sensation, over time our whole lives will be dominated by the very thing we want to avoid. For example, if you just can’t stand the feeling of being rejected, you may stop yourself from reaching out to people, being vulnerable with them or taking a risk. Before you know it, you’ve been rejecting yourself over and over and your life has been shaped by rejection.

You see, in an attempt to banish this feeling from our life, we made our whole life about it.

Chris probably wishes that he could just rid planet Earth of all peanuts, and I’ve definitely wished that I could press a button and turn off the part of me that feels rejection.

But life doesn’t work that way. So the only real way to regain control and stop letting it be in charge, is to accept its presence, and learn how to let it be part of our lives.

That’s why Chris now eats four peanuts every morning, so that he can keep his body adjusted to it, and no longer live in fear of them.

Creating Safety for our Nervous System

Being surrounded by doctors and medical equipment was pivotal to Chris feeling safe enough to let even a microdose of peanut into his body. Without that it would have been downright dangerous for him to even try, and could have led his body to heighten the immune response even more.

This is what happens when sufferers of PTSD become retraumatised over and over again, as they re-experience traumatic feelings or memories, without a solid foundation of safety. That’s why it’s so vital for care providers to be trauma informed, and for people with serious trauma to work with a trauma therapist.

I don’t work with patients with serious trauma, because as an embodiment coach that’s outside my scope of practice. But I do support people to reconnect to feelings that they have feared and avoided, and that their bodies may have learned is not safe to feel. If you’re a human alive on this planet, then this likely includes you.

We always begin by connecting to a felt sense of safety, and return to that regularly throughout the session. I offer prompts which encourage the client to only move at a pace that feels right for them. And if they do become distressed, I know how to guide them back into a place of stability.

This support allows them to face things which were just too hard to face alone.

And most importantly it stops the body from gaining any more evidence that this sensation is a threat.

When Life Feels Unfair

Chris’ mother identified that he had a peanut allergy when he came out in a rash after she gave him a peanut butter sandwich as an infant.

Why did Chris’ body have an extreme reaction to peanuts when mine didn’t? Who knows!

I don’t know why I was born with a very sensitive disposition. Or why my dad had multiple rare heart conditions. Or why my friend has spent her life dealing with eczema flare ups.

I am completely in love with just how wise and powerful our bodies are, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering why they do weird and annoying things all the time.

Sometimes the challenges life gives us just aren’t fair, and I sure spent a long time feeling like my body was against me.

But at the end of the day, we have two choices: we either wallow in resistance, making ourselves feel even more terrible about our lot; or we accept where we are, we grieve the life we didn’t get to have, and start making the best of the one we do have, with teeny tiny steps towards what we want every day.

After a while those teeny tiny steps can turn into a whole lot of freedom and a whole new life.

Ready to Take Your First Tiny Step?

If you're ready to begin gently building your emotional capacity, my “How to Feel Your Feelings” meditation is a great place to start. You can grab it and begin at your own pace.

And if getting started alone feels a little daunting, you're not alone. I also have a few spaces open for 1:1 coaching, where we can work gently together to build your capacity in a safe, supportive way.

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