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I wasn't sure where I ought to post this, but I figured here would be just as good as anywhere else. I know that this post will be very long and drawn out, but I really just wanted to share my story somewhere. I'm hoping it will prove valuable to someone else. Please consider it.
It was April 2013 that I got chronic fatigue after going through a long period of high life stress, with my first crash being brought on by some ants that I got bitten by in Australia, followed by really severe triple jet lag. From then on, my functioning level fluctuated between 20-30%, and trying to do anything over that would trigger a crash.
I went to doctors, got tested for everything, did a lot of research, tried to eat healthy, etc. etc. It's been heard all before. Everything about my condition remained the same until almost one year later, the beginning of April 2014 (this spring), when I was in one of my brain-foggy hazes and started watching all the videos on chronic fatigue that I could find on Youtube. One of the videos was a BBC documentary called M.E.: Toxic Tiredness. The second half of the video follows two long-time sufferers of CFS as they go through talking therapy in an attempt to cure themselves. The idea being sold to them was that chronic fatigue has physical symptoms but emotional causes, and if they went through therapy and talked about their feelings they’d get all better. The specific therapy was Mickel Therapy, based in England, which you’re supposed to do with a trained Mickel therapist for the price of several hundred British pounds. The underlying belief of the therapy is that we are all affected by negative emotions, and when those emotions are ignored and suppressed it leads to us being internally depressed, and when that depression is ignored and prolonged then it debilitates our bodies with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or other chronic illnesses.
It came across to me as a whole lot of British bullock; they showed a few people that’d been “cured” from the therapy but I was sure that it was all from coincidence or the ‘power of positive thinking’ or just the placebo effect. I looked into it further to see what myth-debunking articles the internet would have on the so-called therapy, and instead came across a series of books on Amazon by a Dr. John Sarno. He writes on what he calls “mind-body disorders”, physical ailments that are caused by strong emotional reactions, like headaches, back pain, eczema, stomach cramps, etc. He talks of stress and anxiety being able to trigger them, and writes how the ailments can be eradicated by dealing with the emotion behind it. I figured it might be worth it to read about his books, and when I did I decided I should see if I could explore some of my own feelings. I didn’t have much else to occupy my mind with, and I’d get some back pain every now and then, so I figured I’d try it out. I reasoned that if I managed to deal with some negative emotions I’d be happier and it’d be a little easier for me to live with chronic fatigue.
I wasn’t going to make the investment for a therapist, but I suck at acknowledging my feelings, so I got a self-help book called ‘Running on Empty’ by Jonice Webb. (It helped tremendously.) I kept a notebook to write in everyday. While there were things about my life I didn’t like, even with chronic fatigue I considered myself to have a positive attitude with no anxiety, no depression, and not a lot of stress. Very soon after I started exploring my feelings though, I had a huge wave of debilitating anxiousness settle in on me and my back pain got infinitely worse and I started having major stomach cramps and I felt a whole ton of depression coming up. It felt awful; horrible. To get my mind off of it I’d try to work on my feelings more and try to focus on how I felt emotionally to distract myself from how like crap I felt physically and psychologically. I started wondering if I had actually brought the anxiousness and cramps and depression upon myself by trying to recognize my feelings, but at that point I couldn’t tell. It was all extremely frustrating, but I was set on trying it out for one month before giving up.
After a while (as in like 10 days) I was happy to discover that as I acknowledged and let out my feelings one by one (mostly anger; I had a LOT of anger, which no one including myself would ever have guessed since I’m such a nice and sweet Canadian girl), my back pain and stomach cramps and anxiousness started to dissipate. And then I was surprised to find – my fatigue was dissipating along with them; not just the physical fatigue itself, but the brain-fogginess and the complete lack of motivational energy too. I didn’t think it was possible that it was anything more than a coincidence, or hopeful thinking. Even so, I tested it a few times by cautiously letting myself do a little more physically and waiting to see how severe the crash would be – but a crash never came. I hadn’t done any of this stuff to actually try to cure myself; I had figured that it might alleviate my symptoms, but I didn’t have any hope that it would eradicate them – and yet that’s what looked like was happening. I started doing more and more physically as I felt better and better, and I started to see the direct correlation with how I felt emotionally and how I felt energy-wise. Whenever I’d start to feel the fatigue come back over me, I’d ask myself what had happened during the day that may be causing me to feel distressed, and then I’d think of something to do to resolve what had happened. I found that I didn’t need to drastically change anything in my life in order to appease my emotions; I didn’t need to leave my husband and run away to live on a beach in Tahiti. I just needed to do smaller important things, like setting proper boundaries with others, and speaking up when I felt a wrong had been committed.
After two weeks of feeling increasingly better I was confident enough to confide in my husband that after a year of being sick with CFS I was finally recovering (I hadn’t told anyone about the therapy I was putting myself through; I wanted to keep it to myself. It was far too strange to talk about). I kept on with my self-introspection, praying for clarification, writing everything that bothered me, and I kept getting better – until one night when we were over at my in-law’s place for dinner. Halfway through the dinner I started to feel myself going into major relapse. I went upstairs to lie down but it came on stronger and despite my best efforts to calm myself, I felt way fatigued all over again. I tried to think back over the course of the whole evening – to remember if there was something that happened that had bothered me – and then I remembered a comment that my mother-in-law had made to me twenty minutes earlier; it was largely negligible and I didn’t even consider it to be a big deal, but I realized that it had made me feel angry and I’d just ignored it. Once I came to that realization, I decided how I was going to address it and resolve it, and once I had made myself feel better, the fatigue was gone within ten minutes and I went downstairs for dessert.
After a month of all of this I was free of all traces of fatigue, and after another month more of self-introspection and listening to my emotions I actually felt completely happy with myself and my life. It’s now been over six months since, and even though I still have life stress and all the emotional ups and downs of being a woman, I haven’t had a single relapse. I now believe that I will never have another relapse again, so long as I always continue to listen to my feelings.
I do still testify that ME/CFS is a real, physical, debilitating bodily illness, and that it is not merely “really bad depression” or something that is “all in your head”. It is not a mental illness, nor a mood disorder. It is a physical handicap, real and tangible, but I now believe that emotions are real and tangible too, and that they are real enough to wreak havoc on our bodies and immune systems.
Please look into the story. You can read up on the books I mentioned (Dr. Jonice Webb, Dr. John Sarno), do the research, and try it out for yourself for a month, even if you think it’s all futile. It won’t hurt anything. – At the very least, it’ll stop you from getting back pain
These are the steps that the therapist takes you through in order to help you. I did them on my own:
1. Suppose that the physical symptoms are manifestations of real emotions (you don’t need to actually believe it is or have faith in it, just suppose it is hypothetically.)
2. Get to know yourself and your feelings better. Meditate, pray, write in a journal, read an emotional self-help book, do anything you feel might help you recognize your feelings better.
3. Through your introspection, try to identify a negative emotion you feel (sadness, anger, frustration, grief, etc.) that ought to be addressed. Figure out the cause of that negative emotion; what event, person, or situation triggered it.
4. Figure out a way to correct the situation; once it is fully corrected, the negative emotion will go away on its own, and you will have a little bit of your emotional freedom back.
5. Repeat until you have a firm understanding of yourself and have properly expressed your storage of pent up negative feelings. It all gets easier with practice, and eventually starts to feel natural.
6. Every time you have a sudden relapse, ask yourself what happened just before, and see if there was something that might have bothered you. If there’s something that you think maybe did effect you negatively, decide what you’re going to do about it, and fix it. Then you can see if the relapse goes away.
It was April 2013 that I got chronic fatigue after going through a long period of high life stress, with my first crash being brought on by some ants that I got bitten by in Australia, followed by really severe triple jet lag. From then on, my functioning level fluctuated between 20-30%, and trying to do anything over that would trigger a crash.
I went to doctors, got tested for everything, did a lot of research, tried to eat healthy, etc. etc. It's been heard all before. Everything about my condition remained the same until almost one year later, the beginning of April 2014 (this spring), when I was in one of my brain-foggy hazes and started watching all the videos on chronic fatigue that I could find on Youtube. One of the videos was a BBC documentary called M.E.: Toxic Tiredness. The second half of the video follows two long-time sufferers of CFS as they go through talking therapy in an attempt to cure themselves. The idea being sold to them was that chronic fatigue has physical symptoms but emotional causes, and if they went through therapy and talked about their feelings they’d get all better. The specific therapy was Mickel Therapy, based in England, which you’re supposed to do with a trained Mickel therapist for the price of several hundred British pounds. The underlying belief of the therapy is that we are all affected by negative emotions, and when those emotions are ignored and suppressed it leads to us being internally depressed, and when that depression is ignored and prolonged then it debilitates our bodies with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or other chronic illnesses.
It came across to me as a whole lot of British bullock; they showed a few people that’d been “cured” from the therapy but I was sure that it was all from coincidence or the ‘power of positive thinking’ or just the placebo effect. I looked into it further to see what myth-debunking articles the internet would have on the so-called therapy, and instead came across a series of books on Amazon by a Dr. John Sarno. He writes on what he calls “mind-body disorders”, physical ailments that are caused by strong emotional reactions, like headaches, back pain, eczema, stomach cramps, etc. He talks of stress and anxiety being able to trigger them, and writes how the ailments can be eradicated by dealing with the emotion behind it. I figured it might be worth it to read about his books, and when I did I decided I should see if I could explore some of my own feelings. I didn’t have much else to occupy my mind with, and I’d get some back pain every now and then, so I figured I’d try it out. I reasoned that if I managed to deal with some negative emotions I’d be happier and it’d be a little easier for me to live with chronic fatigue.
I wasn’t going to make the investment for a therapist, but I suck at acknowledging my feelings, so I got a self-help book called ‘Running on Empty’ by Jonice Webb. (It helped tremendously.) I kept a notebook to write in everyday. While there were things about my life I didn’t like, even with chronic fatigue I considered myself to have a positive attitude with no anxiety, no depression, and not a lot of stress. Very soon after I started exploring my feelings though, I had a huge wave of debilitating anxiousness settle in on me and my back pain got infinitely worse and I started having major stomach cramps and I felt a whole ton of depression coming up. It felt awful; horrible. To get my mind off of it I’d try to work on my feelings more and try to focus on how I felt emotionally to distract myself from how like crap I felt physically and psychologically. I started wondering if I had actually brought the anxiousness and cramps and depression upon myself by trying to recognize my feelings, but at that point I couldn’t tell. It was all extremely frustrating, but I was set on trying it out for one month before giving up.
After a while (as in like 10 days) I was happy to discover that as I acknowledged and let out my feelings one by one (mostly anger; I had a LOT of anger, which no one including myself would ever have guessed since I’m such a nice and sweet Canadian girl), my back pain and stomach cramps and anxiousness started to dissipate. And then I was surprised to find – my fatigue was dissipating along with them; not just the physical fatigue itself, but the brain-fogginess and the complete lack of motivational energy too. I didn’t think it was possible that it was anything more than a coincidence, or hopeful thinking. Even so, I tested it a few times by cautiously letting myself do a little more physically and waiting to see how severe the crash would be – but a crash never came. I hadn’t done any of this stuff to actually try to cure myself; I had figured that it might alleviate my symptoms, but I didn’t have any hope that it would eradicate them – and yet that’s what looked like was happening. I started doing more and more physically as I felt better and better, and I started to see the direct correlation with how I felt emotionally and how I felt energy-wise. Whenever I’d start to feel the fatigue come back over me, I’d ask myself what had happened during the day that may be causing me to feel distressed, and then I’d think of something to do to resolve what had happened. I found that I didn’t need to drastically change anything in my life in order to appease my emotions; I didn’t need to leave my husband and run away to live on a beach in Tahiti. I just needed to do smaller important things, like setting proper boundaries with others, and speaking up when I felt a wrong had been committed.
After two weeks of feeling increasingly better I was confident enough to confide in my husband that after a year of being sick with CFS I was finally recovering (I hadn’t told anyone about the therapy I was putting myself through; I wanted to keep it to myself. It was far too strange to talk about). I kept on with my self-introspection, praying for clarification, writing everything that bothered me, and I kept getting better – until one night when we were over at my in-law’s place for dinner. Halfway through the dinner I started to feel myself going into major relapse. I went upstairs to lie down but it came on stronger and despite my best efforts to calm myself, I felt way fatigued all over again. I tried to think back over the course of the whole evening – to remember if there was something that happened that had bothered me – and then I remembered a comment that my mother-in-law had made to me twenty minutes earlier; it was largely negligible and I didn’t even consider it to be a big deal, but I realized that it had made me feel angry and I’d just ignored it. Once I came to that realization, I decided how I was going to address it and resolve it, and once I had made myself feel better, the fatigue was gone within ten minutes and I went downstairs for dessert.
After a month of all of this I was free of all traces of fatigue, and after another month more of self-introspection and listening to my emotions I actually felt completely happy with myself and my life. It’s now been over six months since, and even though I still have life stress and all the emotional ups and downs of being a woman, I haven’t had a single relapse. I now believe that I will never have another relapse again, so long as I always continue to listen to my feelings.
I do still testify that ME/CFS is a real, physical, debilitating bodily illness, and that it is not merely “really bad depression” or something that is “all in your head”. It is not a mental illness, nor a mood disorder. It is a physical handicap, real and tangible, but I now believe that emotions are real and tangible too, and that they are real enough to wreak havoc on our bodies and immune systems.
Please look into the story. You can read up on the books I mentioned (Dr. Jonice Webb, Dr. John Sarno), do the research, and try it out for yourself for a month, even if you think it’s all futile. It won’t hurt anything. – At the very least, it’ll stop you from getting back pain
These are the steps that the therapist takes you through in order to help you. I did them on my own:
1. Suppose that the physical symptoms are manifestations of real emotions (you don’t need to actually believe it is or have faith in it, just suppose it is hypothetically.)
2. Get to know yourself and your feelings better. Meditate, pray, write in a journal, read an emotional self-help book, do anything you feel might help you recognize your feelings better.
3. Through your introspection, try to identify a negative emotion you feel (sadness, anger, frustration, grief, etc.) that ought to be addressed. Figure out the cause of that negative emotion; what event, person, or situation triggered it.
4. Figure out a way to correct the situation; once it is fully corrected, the negative emotion will go away on its own, and you will have a little bit of your emotional freedom back.
5. Repeat until you have a firm understanding of yourself and have properly expressed your storage of pent up negative feelings. It all gets easier with practice, and eventually starts to feel natural.
6. Every time you have a sudden relapse, ask yourself what happened just before, and see if there was something that might have bothered you. If there’s something that you think maybe did effect you negatively, decide what you’re going to do about it, and fix it. Then you can see if the relapse goes away.