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.

Lissa Rankin, MD, is an OB/GYN physician and author of 8 books, including the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine. She is the founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute and the health equity nonprofit Heal at Last, and an artist who researches radical remission, trauma-informed medicine, and the relational implications for medical conditions, including the effects of loneliness, narcissism, and coercive control on health. She teaches online and in-person classes in the realm of relationships, IFS, and health, as well as creative writing for therapeutic purposes. She has co-taught many classes with IFS founder Dick Schwartz and is an educator of Internal Family Systems (IFS), with a specialty in IFS and medical conditions. She also mentors doctors, therapists, and entrepreneurs to support their visionary work. Her TEDx talks have been viewed over 6 million times, and she has starred in two National Public Television specials. Lissa lives in West Sonoma County with her partner, now that her daughter has gone off to New York for art school. She thrives on daily hikes in nature, making art, dancing, singing, writing, gardening, upcycling clothing, DJing music whenever she can, and healthy gourmet cooking.

Jeffrey Rediger MD, MDiv, is an author, a licensed physician and psychiatrist, and on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He was the medical director of McLean SouthEast and Community Affairs at McLean Hospital in Boston for 22 years, and concurrently for many years also the chief of behavioral medicine at Good Samaritan Medical Center. In addition to his medical and psychiatric training, he has a master’s of divinity in theology and philosophy of science from Princeton Theological Seminary. His investigations into remarkable recoveries from incurable or fatal illnesses have been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Dr. Oz Show, and Anderson Cooper 360, among others. He has been nominated for the National Bravewell Leadership Award and has received many awards for leadership and patient care. His bestselling book, Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life, has been published in 22 languages so far and is available at both local bookstores and online.