Why “Good Girls” Get Sick: The Hidden Link Between Self-Trust and Autoimmune Disease
Issue: You were the responsible one. The one who coped, who didn’t make waves, who did everything right. And now your body is attacking itself, and no one can fully explain why.
Problem: The pattern of over-responsibility, self-abandonment, and chronic focus to others’ needs — often called the “eldest daughter” or “good girl” pattern. Though it affects far more than eldest daughters, it keeps the nervous system in prolonged activation. Research now confirms a direct link between chronic stress, HPA axis dysfunction, and the onset of autoimmune disease. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, this same pattern depletes the spleen. The organ governing digestion, discernment, and the ability to make decisions from a place of trust.
Solution: Healing autoimmune conditions rooted in this pattern requires more than managing inflammation. It requires restoring the nervous system’s sense of safety, rebuilding the spleen’s capacity for discernment, and most fundamentally — relearning self-trust at a cellular level.
Key insight: Your body did not betray you by becoming ill. It told the truth about a pattern that was never sustainable. And what got you through it can now become the very strength that heals you.
My Story
When I was younger, my life wasn’t measuring up to what I wanted. I wanted a different life. A happier one.
I didn’t realise that the challenges at home were moulding and morphing me to overcome difficulties I didn’t yet have language for.
My parents were new migrants to Australia. They couldn’t find work in their fields of education, and the lack of income created a ripple of stress through every part of our lives. With no boundaries, as an empath, I absorbed their worried thoughts as if they were my own. At times I felt I was going backwards. I magnified the problems and felt powerless. Blamed the world and blamed my father. Raised as a Catholic, I also blamed God, so surely, I had done something wrong to not deserve a happy life.
I didn’t understand yet that life was simply messy. That a crisis reaching a tipping point was part of life, not a sign of my own failure.
Stress hormones flooded my system. I was overwhelmed, with everything pulling for my attention at once. When I woke up, within an hour of getting out of bed, I was already depleted. And yet I did everything right. I was responsible, I did the cleaning and I studied hard.
When I was sixteen, I knew I wanted to study naturopathy. It lit me up in a way nothing else had. My father said no. I didn’t have the energy to fight him. That wasn’t a choice I was given.
My stomach was in knots. I knew that if I didn’t do what he said, he would lash out in anger. My thyroid began under-functioning. The constant stress signals kept my cortisol elevated, and I felt perpetually under threat. Even when, on the surface, nothing was happening.
The Gap between the Present and the Future
I couldn’t see the bigger picture. There was a gap between how I thought life should be and the reality I was living, and I couldn’t see past the very next stepping stone. I thought everyone else had an easy, happy, perfect life. I didn’t know what was happening behind their closed doors either.
We can all become caught in this innocent, immature way of thinking. But challenges are not punishment. They are part of the process of growth, a seed of opportunity disguised as hardship.
The grit — the irritation, the annoyance, the friction, was shaping and smoothing the prickly parts of me that would become my greatest strengths. I learned to stand up for myself. To speak up and to stay grounded in my body. I learnt how to stop projecting my fear into a negative future, expecting the worst from every situation. And I found my positivity and joy, not from the world around me, but from within.
Naming the Pattern
If parts of this story felt familiar to you, you are not alone. And you do not need to have been an eldest daughter, or a migrant, or to have had a difficult father, for this pattern to live in your body.
What I am describing is sometimes called the “eldest daughter syndrome” or the “good girl” pattern. But in my thirty years of practice, I have seen this exact pattern in children, youngest children, women who grew up in seemingly stable homes, and women who grew up in chaos.
What unites them is not birth order. It is a specific nervous system adaptation: learning, early and often non-verbally, that your needs are less important than keeping the peace. That your role is to manage, to anticipate, to absorb, to comply. That self-trust is dangerous, because trusting yourself might mean disappointing someone whose approval or whose anger you can’t afford to risk.
This pattern does not stay in childhood. It becomes the operating system of adulthood. The woman who can’t say NO. Who feels guilty resting. Second-guesses every decision because she was never given the safety to trust her own. Who is exhausted within an hour of waking, because her nervous system has been in a state of low-grade activation for so long that “calm” no longer registers as safe, it registers as a threat she has missed.
And here is what the research is now confirming: this pattern does not just affect how you feel. It affects whether your immune system can tell the difference between yourself and a threat.
The Science: Stress, the HPA axis, and Autoimmunity
A 2025 review published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences confirms that chronic stress drives dysregulation of the HPA, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. The body’s central stress response system and that this dysregulation is a critical link between psychological stress and autoimmune disease. With evidence connecting persistent HPA dysfunction to conditions including systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.
This is not a small or fringe finding. A landmark study published in JAMA found a significant association between stress-related disorders and the subsequent diagnosis of autoimmune disease.
This finding has since been reinforced by further research, a 2025 systematic review from Front Psychiatry confirmed the link between traumatic stress and the development of multiple autoimmune conditions, including lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.
Why this matters for women’s bodies — the autoimmune conversation
As many as 80% of people with chronic autoimmune conditions are women. A sex-biased trend that includes rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, Sjögren’s syndrome, scleroderma, and many others. The NIH Director’s Blog confirmed in February 2024 that autoimmune disease is now the third most prevalent disease category, surpassed only by cancer and heart disease.
Women are four times more likely than men to develop an autoimmune condition. And researchers are now beginning to understand why. A landmark 2024 study published in Cell found that the two X chromosomes women carry, may also play a role in triggering autoimmune reactions. Suggesting that the very biology that makes women female may contribute to this vulnerability.
But biology is not the whole story. What the science also confirms is the cascade effect: research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2024 found that 34% of all people diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder go on to be diagnosed with at least one more. With 24% developing two autoimmune conditions and 8% developing three. Women are significantly more prone to this co-occurrence of multiple autoimmune conditions, with a 2025 real-world study of over 164,000 patients confirming that women show higher rates of different autoimmune diseases.
Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis are often gateways to further conditions. Sjögren’s syndrome, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and inflammatory bowel disease appearing alongside initial diagnoses in a cascade that conventional medicine is only beginning to map.
What this means is that when one autoimmune condition appears, the body is communicating something systemic. Not just a localised immune malfunction, but a whole-system pattern of an immune system that has lost the ability to distinguish self from non-self. This pattern often has its roots in a nervous system trained to override its own signals.
What is Happening at a Cellular Level
Chronic stress leads to a continuous rise in stress hormone levels, which causes cortisol resistance. A state where the body’s anti-inflammatory mechanisms weaken while pro-inflammatory reactions intensify. Your body’s natural braking system for inflammation stops working properly, because it has been pressed too hard for too long.
And crucially, Psychosom med, research on cumulative childhood stress shows that early adversity is associated with elevated inflammatory markers and altered immune response that persist decades later, even when the original stressor is long gone.
This is the scientific validation of what so many women already feel in their bodies: what happened to me a long time ago is still happening in my immune system now.
The Vagus Nerve
The vagus nerve plays a central role here, too. It regulates inflammation through what Tandem Psychology researchers in 2025, call the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway. When vagal tone is strong, calming signals are sent to the immune system, telling it to stand down. When vagal tone is weak, often the case during chronic stress, the immune system is more likely to misfire and overreact, laying the groundwork for autoimmune disease.
The good girl pattern is, at its core, a vagus nerve and HPA axis pattern. The hypervigilance, the inability to rest, the constant scanning for what others need. All of it keeps the nervous system in a state that the immune system reads as ongoing emergency. And an immune system that believes it is in ongoing emergency eventually stops being able to distinguish between an external threat and its own tissue.
The TCM perspective: the spleen, discernment, and self-trust
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the spleen governs transformation and transportation. It takes in what comes from the outside world, food, experience, and information. It transforms it into something usable, while transporting away what is not needed.
This is not only a digestive function. It is the function of discernment itself. The spleen is what allows you to digest an experience and decide: this nourishes me, I will keep it. This does not, I will release it.
The Good Girl Pattern
When the good girl pattern takes hold, this discernment function is overridden. You learn to take in everything. Every demand, expectation, emotional cue from those around you. Without the freedom to decide what is yours to carry and what is not. Everything gets swallowed. Nothing gets released. The spleen, asked to transform an impossible load without ever being permitted to set anything down, becomes exhausted.
The emotion most associated with spleen depletion in TCM is worry. The very thing I described in my own story, the constant anticipation, the inability to stop scanning for what might go wrong. And spleen depletion is directly connected to the lymphatic system, which is, of course, the immune system’s primary transport network.
Here is the thread that ties it all together: a nervous system trained to override its own signals creates a spleen that can’t discern what to keep and what to release, which creates an immune system that cannot discern self from non-self. The good girl pattern, the worry, the spleen, and autoimmunity are not separate problems. They are one pattern, expressed at four different levels of the same body.
And the path back is the same at every level: restoring the capacity to trust your own discernment. To know what is yours, and what is not. Take in what nourishes, and release what does not — physically, emotionally, energetically, and immunologically.
What Healing this Pattern actually looks like
Healing an autoimmune condition rooted in this pattern is not only about reducing inflammation, although that matters. It is about teaching the nervous system, the spleen, and the immune system that discernment is now safe.
Restoring vagal tone
Through breathwork, humming, and slow exhales directly supports the anti-inflammatory pathway. Giving the immune system the calming signal it has been missing.
Supporting the spleen
Through warm, easily digested foods, regular meal timing, and reducing the chronic worry that depletes it. Covered in depth in the Spring Detox post, rebuilds the body’s capacity for genuine discernment.
Practising Micro-decisions from Self-trust
This is the deepest work, and it begins small. Choose what to eat based on what your body wants, not what is expected. Saying “let me think about it” instead of an automatic YES. Noticing the knot in your stomach, as I described in my own story and asking what it is trying to tell you, rather than overriding it.
Releasing what was Never yours to Carry
Much of what the good girl pattern absorbs is a parent’s anxiety, a family’s financial stress, an entire household’s emotional climate. It was never a child’s responsibility to hold. Ancestral and energetic clearing work supports the release of patterns that were absorbed rather than chosen.
Reclaiming the Path that was Denied
I was told NO when I asked to study naturopathy at sixteen. I found my way to it eventually and it became my life’s work. If there is something you were told NO to, something you set aside because it wasn’t safe to choose, that unclaimed gift may still be asking to be reclaimed. This is explored further in Weight of Unclaimed Gifts.
The Strength that was Always Yours
I want to return to something I said earlier:
“The grit was shaping and smoothing the prickly parts of me that would become my greatest strengths.” Mariangela Parodi, Hobart Naturopath & Energy healer.
It is the actual mechanism of cellular healing — the body and the nervous system, given the right conditions, can transform what depleted them into what sustains them.
The vigilance that exhausted you can become discernment. The sensitivity that overwhelmed you can become your gift as a healer, a leader, a mother, a friend. The pattern that made you sick can be the very thing that, once understood, makes you whole.
You did not create this pattern. You adapted to survive something that asked too much of a child, or a young woman, who deserved better. And now, as an adult with the resources, the awareness, and increasingly the science to understand what happened, you can complete what couldn’t be completed then.
Your body told the truth. It is still telling the truth. And it is ready, now, to tell a different story.
If you recognise this pattern in your own body, and you are ready to restore your nervous system, support your spleen, and rebuild self-trust at every level, I would love to support you.
Art by Mariangela Parodi
“You didn’t create this pattern. You adapted to survive something that asked too much of you. Now, as an adult with awareness, support and resources, you have the opportunity to finish what couldn’t be done back then.” Mariangela Parodi, Hobart Naturopath and Energy Healer.
GUIDED HEALING TRANSMISSION
Before you take your next step, I invite you to receive a guided transmission created specifically for this healing.
This 26-minute transmission combines neuroscience with quantum field healing to help your nervous system recognise it is safe to stand down, your immune system learns to trust again, and your body begin the inflammatory cascade reversal.
Listen on YouTube:
Continue reading — Personal Story:
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With radiant love and steady presence,
Restore, Remember, Rise ❤️
Mariangela Parodi BAppSc, ND
Mariangela Parodi BAppSc, ND is a Naturopath & Energy Healer based in Hobart, Tasmania. Specialising in nervous system recovery for women when exhaustion, overwhelm, or depletion no longer responds to rest. With over 30 years of experience in biomedical science, naturopathy, energy medicine, and shamanic healing. She bridges science and spirit to restore the body’s innate intelligence and rewrite the cellular blueprint.
The creator of the Alkymia Method™, a sacred fusion of naturopathy, energy medicine, and shamanic healing. #1 international bestselling author of The Mystic Woman’s Compass. Mariangela guides heart-centred healers and conscious leaders to transmute exhaustion, illness, and spiritual disconnection into sovereignty, vitality, and luminous purpose.
ATMS Fellow | Spiritual Biz Award Recipient | Featured in Aspire Magazine, Canvas Rebel, Hobart Magazine & Spiritual Biz Magazine | The Legends Series Podcast. Hobart & Online | alkymia.com.au
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