Welcome to Phoenix Rising!
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 can be hard to hold onto your reality when not only others deny it, but when you are forced to do so yourself. You do feel a little crazy.
Quite so. As social creatures we normally rely on the checks and balances of those around us to keep our own sense of reality more or less aligned. But for ME/CFS sufferers it is akin to how people accused of being witches must have felt, back in history; they knew the were not, but everyone else insisted - and believed - they were. The checks and balances are distorted.
When I first saw the movie Gaslight, pre-ME/CFS, I wondered how a person (Ingrid Bergman, fantastic as always) could let her sense of herself and reality be so badly skewed and undermined by someone else's (Charles Boyer, also very good) deceit. And now I know - we are not the stable unmoveable creatures I used to think we were!
When I first saw the movie Gaslight, pre-ME/CFS, I wondered how a person (Ingrid Bergman, fantastic as always) could let her sense of herself and reality be so badly skewed and undermined by someone else's (Charles Boyer, also very good) deceit. And now I know - we are not the stable unmoveable creatures I used to think we were!