The Cost of Believing Your Body Only Works "Sometimes"

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By Jenny Peterson

Not long ago, I was listening to a psychologist’s podcast. A caller phoned in, struggling with anxiety. The host told them:

“Your body is working perfectly. That anxiety response is protection. Your biology is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.”

I agreed with him.

But then another caller came on - this time with an autoimmune condition. And the psychologist’s tone completely changed.

“I’m so sorry this is happening to you. The body you should be able to trust is now failing you.”

My jaw dropped.

One moment, the body is perfect. The next, it’s the enemy. One moment, you’re told to trust it. The next, you’re told to go to war with it.

And here’s what gets me - no one called it out. Not the audience, not the caller, not even the psychologist himself.

That’s how normal this contradiction has become. We trust the body only sometimes - and in every other case, we assume it’s broken.

The Cultural Conditioning Behind It

This contradiction runs deep. Think about our language:

• “We fight cancer.”

• “We battle autoimmune disease.”

• “They lost the fight.”

War metaphors are everywhere. They paint your body as a battlefield - and you as your own enemy.

Now compare that to how we talk about a cut or a broken bone. No one says, “Your body is fighting your leg.” We say, “Your leg is healing.”

No one says your body has betrayed you when you get a cut. We simply expect it to do what it’s designed to do: repair itself.

So why the double standard? Why do we assume intelligence and trust in one situation but betrayal in another?

It’s the same body. The same design. The same biology.

Why the Body Doesn’t Suddenly “Fail”

We’ve been trained to believe the body runs on two different operating systems:

• One that works perfectly for small issues.

• One that malfunctions when the stakes feel higher.

But that belief doesn’t make biological sense.

What if the body never flips from working perfectly to failing? What if every single thing it does - whether it’s a fever, anxiety, autoimmune, or even cancer - is part of the same intelligent design?

Because the truth is: Illness isn’t betrayal. Illness is adaptation.

Your body is always responding, adjusting, and protecting you in the only way it knows how.

• A fever is your body fighting infection.

• Inflammation is protection while tissue repairs.

• Fatigue is your body forcing rest when you’ve pushed too far.

The same intelligence that heals a cut is the intelligence behind every chronic condition. It doesn’t disappear when the symptom gets a scarier label.

We’ve been conditioned to see adaptation as failure. We look at symptoms and think, “My body is turning against me.”

But symptoms are not betrayal.They’re evidence of the body doing its job - responding to unresolved emotional patterns, unprocessed experiences, and old survival programs it still thinks it needs.

When you see illness as adaptation, the whole story changes. Your body becomes the messenger, not the enemy.

It’s showing you what’s happening beneath the surface - what needs attention and where healing is unfinished.

Once you understand that, you can stop fighting your body and start partnering with it.

A Tale of Two Beliefs

Let’s look at this through an example.

Imagine Jane, who has panic attacks. People tell her:

“Jane, your body’s protecting you. Your nervous system is just on overdrive.”

That message comforts her. She may not like the panic attacks, but at least she believes her body has good intentions.

Now imagine Jane is later diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. Suddenly the story changes:

“Your body is attacking itself. You need to fight it.”

In an instant, her belief shifts from my body is for me to my body is against me.

That belief doesn’t just live in her mind - it changes her biology. It creates fear, betrayal, and helplessness. And that loss of trust makes healing nearly impossible.

The Cost of Selective Trust

This is why so many people tell me, “I’ve tried mind-body work, but I don’t think it applies to my condition.”

It’s not that mind-body work doesn’t work for certain conditions. It’s that they’ve been programmed to believe their body can’t be trusted once things get “serious.”

Every time they think, my body is against me, they reinforce the very pattern keeping them stuck.

That selective trust - believing your body works for some things but not others - creates a split inside you. It keeps you living in fear, hesitation, and doubt.

And that split costs you:

• Fear every time a new symptom appears

• Hesitation to take action or trust your body

• Doubt that healing is possible for you

You can’t heal while at war with the very body that’s trying to protect you.

The Reframe: Illness Is Communication

Healing requires full partnership with your body, especially when the symptoms feel scary.

If you can believe your body protects you during anxiety, you can also believe it protects you during autoimmune or cancer.

The design doesn’t change. The biology doesn’t fail. Our narrative does.

Your body doesn’t betray you. It adapts. It protects. It communicates - always.

So the real question is:

• Where in your healing have you accepted the story that your body turned against you?

• How much has that belief already cost you?

Because when you stop paying the price of fear, you start investing in trust - and that’s where healing begins.

The Empowering Truth

We’ve been taught contradictory messages about our bodies. One moment, they’re working perfectly. The next, they’ve failed us.

But once you see illness for what it really is - adaptation, not failure - you begin to heal at the root.

The body doesn’t need your war. It needs your trust. And when you choose trust over fear, everything about your healing shifts.

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Jenny Peterson is a Chronic Illness Expert, the Founder of MBR (Mind Body Rewire), and the host of The Rebellious Healer Podcast. She helps those struggling with multiple chronic symptoms reclaim their health and freedom—without diets, detoxes, or pills.

For 10 years, Jenny worked as a holistic practitioner, relying on supplements, diet, and detox protocols to support healing. But when she faced her own chronic health struggles, those methods failed her.

When Jenny was on her healing journey, she struggled to find a protocol that provided the structure needed to rewire the subconscious. So she created her own process to heal—and that process became the foundation of the Heal & Thrive Framework, a structured, step-by-step method that helps clients identify the subconscious patterns behind their symptoms and rewire them for lasting relief.

Using this exact process, Jenny fully resolved Lyme disease, digestive issues, panic attacks, skin conditions, cystitis, and more. Her own transformation ignited a mission: to help others break free from chronic symptoms and take back control of their health.

At Mind Body Rewire, we have an unwavering belief that healing chronic health issues doesn’t have to be complicated when the focus is on the root cause: the subconscious. We believe every person is fully capable of creating the health and life they desire when they unlock the subconscious programs influencing it.

Ready to say good-bye to symptoms and hello to freedom?  START HERE