What kind of improvements in your ME/CFS symptoms to you noticed after doing Reverse Therapy (RT)?
The wired and tired disappeared completely.
Not that I became physically active suddenly, I still took my horizontal rests on the couch. But now because I wanted to and looked forward to an hour of lying down leisurely.
my body became relaxed, warm and "happy" on a daily basis. Happy = at ease, smiling, confident.
I sighed a lot, sighs of relief.
I could eat things that I wouldn't with ME and not feel ill afterwards (coffee, pie)
My stamina went up and I could go out and walk into town for an hour or visit with a friend for two hours.
I experienced normal tiredness for the first time in years.
If you grade the severity of ME/CFS on the scale of
mild, moderate and severe, where were you on this scale before you did RT, and where did you end up after?
Before RT I had fallen back to moderate grade. Housebound. Spend large portions of the day lying on the couch. Could not cook a meal and take a shower on the same day, I had to alternate. Mild consistent brainfog. Liverpain. I rated myself at 45% of a healthy person.
After RT I went to no ME.
I could take walks outside and could shower on the same day. No brainfog. I still paced myself though, rested a lot.
Did you find that your RT sessions addressed any particular area of your mind, or addressed any particular learned stress response that you had?
The last. Basically it focusses on the same thing that James L Wilson in his book "Adrenal Fatigue, the 21st century stress syndrome" calls "the energy robbers" (p103) and dealing with them.
I had learned to respond a certain way to people, situations and thoughts that is not healthy for me/my body.
A lot of RT-clients need to learn to say no to people and their demands. They also need to learn to take action, to do something about that what hurts them. They'll then see that the world will not devour them, that they can take up more space and express themselves more clearly without negative social consequences.
I fall in the 40% of RT-clients who actually need to learn to live life slower, to calm the fuck down. To not try and control everything. Not take action, not right the world all the time. I needed to learn that it's ok for me to waste time and loiter about. Smell the roses.
A second thing I needed to learn is that I am safe. Here and now. That there is no physical threat imminent. (I experienced severe stress as an infant and as a result my nervous system acted like we were never safe, always on full alert.)
I knew I ought to feel safe but I did not know how to actually believe it. Make my body feel it.
the RT councelor did not touch upon my yought or psychology. They are not interested in how I came to be this way one bit. They are only interested in the here and now and in how my chattering mind is bombarding my body with impulses that get translated into hormonal messages.
Whenever I started talking about yought or nervous system she'd wave it away and instead would ask what I felt in my body, right at this moment. This is what they do, focussing on the body instead of the head.
RT taught me the tricks to make my two messages ring true.
The trick is quite simple: enter a relaxed state of mind through mindfullness/meditation and than read your secret message from a piece of paper. And then feel it. Feel it in your whole body, being true. Do this multiple times a day.
Easy as it sounds, the simplest way of achieving this is doing a Skype session with an RT counselor. 1: They teach you the meditation part quickly. 2: They can decipher your "secret" message more easily than you can. 3: And they can show you how to actually feel things in your body. How the body communicates with the head.
With us, our heads are getting in the way of bodily signals all the time. Analyzing things, thinking things, theorizing, worrying, scanning the body for pains. You just don't pay attention to the actual feeling of being (in) your body. We benefit greatly from someone who cuts through all that jibber and shows another way of being in the world/time. Of existing. (I detest how goofy I sound but words lack)
(I tried DIY RT for a four months. After all, I understood the tricks and I pretty much knew my messages and I'm a smart cooky. But it didn't work. It is so much easier to follow an example instead of trying to do it yourself. I regret the time I wasted very much. Just because I wanted to save myself 80 pounds)
4: They show you a few other tools you need so you can implement the new "you" into daily life.
- focus on what makes you happy, with the specific goal of getting your endorphines flowing every day. I had to make a list of activities that would make me happy, were I symptom free. And then I had to do things on that list. They make sure it's a good mix of active and rest, of social and quiet time.
- It also addressed the learned thinking-as-an-ill-person. I had to learn to think as a well person. But this was at the end of my RT counseling (only 2 full sessions, at 80 British pounds a piece)
In the case of
@sueami's
story of major improvements in her ME/CFS after doing Reverse Therapy, she explained her own particular learned stress responses in the following:
She also wrote blog articles
here and
here about how Reverse Therapy addressed her learned stress responses.
she kickstarted me on RT. I used the same councelor she did,
Lyn White in the UK who works via Skype with people all over the world.
