alex3619
Senior Member
- Messages
- 13,810
- Location
- Logan, Queensland, Australia
Don't think of a white square. Don't think of a red triangle. Don't think of a pink elephant.
Ask a healthy person these and they will have big trouble not thinking of these things. I don't think that psychologists have figured out yet that an ME patient is so slow to process stuff that we might realize we don't want to think of it before we actually do, and stop.
Yet the advice given in psychology is I think good on this point. You can't not think of things in general. What you do is think of other things. Its about creating a different focus.
Yet in crashes I think many of our concerns are entirely appropriate and genuine. Its normal, not abnormal, its the circumstances that are abnormal, and so we respond in ways that most people don't.
Finding something else to focus on, some small thing you can still think of, or think about, or get involved in, is probably a good thing. It might be something as simple as watching a snail. There was a book about that. It might be something uniquely important to you. It might be keeping a journal of your experiences, writing it all down. What it might be or not be would be based upon who you are and how sick you are. If you can find that something then you have half the battle won.
When I was in hospital and too fubar to even move, I was thinking about things that are important to me ... which in my case is advocacy related usually. You don't even have to be able to write stuff down, if you can think you can shift focus. A variant of this idea would be to learn some style of meditation that works when you are in a crash.
During really bad crashes we entirely lose the capacity to think. This is worse but easier to cope with, because we are zombies, and zombies don't think. Its during improvement, or on the way down, or in slightly less serious crashes that these issues arise. They arise for all of us.
Ask a healthy person these and they will have big trouble not thinking of these things. I don't think that psychologists have figured out yet that an ME patient is so slow to process stuff that we might realize we don't want to think of it before we actually do, and stop.
Yet the advice given in psychology is I think good on this point. You can't not think of things in general. What you do is think of other things. Its about creating a different focus.
Yet in crashes I think many of our concerns are entirely appropriate and genuine. Its normal, not abnormal, its the circumstances that are abnormal, and so we respond in ways that most people don't.
Finding something else to focus on, some small thing you can still think of, or think about, or get involved in, is probably a good thing. It might be something as simple as watching a snail. There was a book about that. It might be something uniquely important to you. It might be keeping a journal of your experiences, writing it all down. What it might be or not be would be based upon who you are and how sick you are. If you can find that something then you have half the battle won.
When I was in hospital and too fubar to even move, I was thinking about things that are important to me ... which in my case is advocacy related usually. You don't even have to be able to write stuff down, if you can think you can shift focus. A variant of this idea would be to learn some style of meditation that works when you are in a crash.
During really bad crashes we entirely lose the capacity to think. This is worse but easier to cope with, because we are zombies, and zombies don't think. Its during improvement, or on the way down, or in slightly less serious crashes that these issues arise. They arise for all of us.
