Dreambirdie
work in progress
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It is a lot. I don't know anyone off the bat. The other 2 people I called had no openings.
Oh well...
Oh well...
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Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
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It is a lot. I don't know anyone off the bat. The other 2 people I called had no openings.
Oh well...
beaker She has no sliding scale. And I have no insurance.
The reason this woman was appealing is that she does not use toxic products and has an office that is eco-safe for me. I have MCS and that is a big factor. It took me close to a year to find her.
For now, I am done looking. If something comes up, then it will happen on its own without much more of my effort. In the mean time I am going to check out the CD you recommended and the book someone else did.
Hi dreambirdie,
Please forgive me if this sounds like a dumb question. But seeing as how we pwcs are still
going to run into people, doctors too, who don't understand our illness how can this therapy
help ? Unlike ptsd, we're just going to be traumatized again.
Could it actually be helpful to remember our angst around those who don't accept us ? That way
we're not disappointed or surprised when it happens.
Providing you're able to enjoy life when you're not with these people, it seems healthy to me.
Tc ... X
EMDR has been quite well studied, and people speak well of it. I think you need a good practitioner though - the guy that was recommended to me started to cry in our second session (honestly, not making it up) when I was talking through some of my 'material'. I called the session to a halt and didn't go back. I've got nothing against empathy, but you at least need to feel the bloody therapist is strong enough to hold the session.
Sorry to cut your post....
My friend keeps wishing I would do "mindful thinking therapy." Another type of therapy that is the rage. But, again...how can I be mindful when my concentration can be good one day and crap the other? There are too many variables with this illness. Today was a day where I was so tired that my mind is/was blank. Is that being mindful? I wouldn't even know how to be mindful, I am that fatigued.
I also have experience with EMDR, and it can be f*cking amazing. But Spitfire is right - I think for any kind of therapy to be effective, the mind has to have a certain degree of self-reflectivity. When a tired, foggy brain looks at itself, no wonder it doesn't find much to grasp on to. I have experienced one exception, though. It's a little off-topic, but a couple of years back, I scheduled a session with a woman trained in Somatic Experiencing, a somatic trauma therapy. It turned out I was very brain-foggy that day, so really wasn't expecting much to happen. We did some somatic resourcing exercises with the brain fog, though, and it did lessen somewhat and I felt some relief.
I think this is because PWCs, or others with chronic conditions, react to the illness when it flares up as we would to any other trauma - with fear, aversion, hypervigilance, numbing, heightened sympathetic nervous system response, etc. We feel out of control, and don't know when it will end. In my case, I believe the SE resourcing didn't do much for the brain fog, but it did calm down the nervous system that was reacting to, and exacerbating, the brain fog. It was basically just resourcing tricks to deal with trauma symptoms, though, not working through underlying issues.
Somatic Experiencing was developed by Peter Levine. He wrote a book about it called "Waking the Tiger." I have not studied it extensively, but know that it, as with many other somatic trauma therapies, works a lot with resourcing (working with a person to be easily able to access positive states). Once a person is sufficiently resourced, they can explore the traumatic material. Therapy may use a process of pendulation, in which the person explores the traumatic material, then, if it becomes too overwhelming, is directed back to a resourced state, back to the traumatic memory for a bit, and back and forth again. The point is that most of us dissociate from traumatic material if we get too much of it at once, so you have to work with it in little pieces, a process known as titration.I am curious to know more about the Somatic Experiencing.... Is it also focused on trauma release?
A while back, I posted the assumption that chronic illness, as it messes with our nervous systems as a trauma would, can be thought of as a trauma, and, if so, the mental suffering caused by it may be able to be partially ameliorated through somatic trauma therapies. I didn't find much on the topic out there, though. I think having a bad flare-up is akin to being physically tortured, in which one is are subjected to physical pain, is unable to escape or make it stop, and doesn't know when it will end. In this case, a dissociative response would be quite appropriate. In the case of CFS/other chronic illness, I think the resourcing aspects of SE and other such therapies can be quite helpful. I'm not sure if the trauma release work would be all that helpful, though, unless there were specific associated traumatic memories, as the traumatic stressor (the illness) is ongoing. What might be helpful is an increased ability to tolerate the process of looking at painful sensation "as it is," without judgment or dissociating - the mindfulness mentioned by others above.
I received EMDR for around 2-years to help me deal with childhood issues. It was extremely helpful. The best thing about it, I found, was that you can often create a new narrative around the event, or new feelings, which are manifestly healing. I did find it tiring: I would feel waves of anxiety being unlocked connected with trauma. But the payback was that my anxiety levels went down overtime; and I'm not convinced they would have done otherwise.
I can't speak of it highly enough.
There is a free book on Amazon that lays out all the steps for EMDR and several aps for for the eye movement portion. I had several sessions with a therapist, and done a bit on my own, both have been successful.
There is a free book on Amazon that lays out all the steps for EMDR and several aps for for the eye movement portion. I had several sessions with a therapist, and done a bit on my own, both have been successful.