I want to encourage everyone reading this thread to consider how your reaction might be different if Rachel had simply posted that she appears to have gone into full remission quite suddenly, practically overnight. So far my experience here seems to indicate that most of us who've had this illness for quite a while have experienced at least one full or partial remission at some point, and thus we generally accept remissions as a fact of this illness, albeit an unexplained and perplexing one.
Well said indeed, Dainty. What would we have said? I think we'd have said that this happens, that remission and relapse is not an untypical part of the pattern, and that for some people remission seems to be long-lasting, but for others ME/CFS is something that comes and goes with months and years. For my part, I'd have said that the one constant characteristic of my own remissions is that they never seem to last, the damn thing always comes back. And of course we would all echo the sentiment that we truly have fingers crossed for you, Rachel, that this marks the end of ME/CFS for you - we would all hope for that for you, and people do seem to report that happening to them, so there's plenty of reason to hope that this is what happened.
I normally avoid threads on religion because I don't want to cause offence - and trust me, if you get me on the subject of religion, I
will cause offence pretty quickly! My views on the subject are strong, coming from quite a bit of direct experience. But in this case, I do want to make a couple of cautionary notes - even though I don't want to bring people down - because my personal experience is that this is a dangerous area we are discussing.
First: I've had some mystical experiences myself, some very powerful ones, and I've had a remarkable and apparently deeply spiritual remission too. I've experienced a lot of what people talk about when they talk about mystical/spiritual experience in religious contexts, and when you experience it yourself, you know for sure that it's real, and it's what everybody has been talking about, and that's something you never lose. I never had these experiences in a church though! I never had them in a religious context, and I didn't hold any religious beliefs when I had them, and I still don't. I don't think any of these phenomena have anything to do with the religions that exploit them - and these things happen in every culture and every religion by the way - and I think the dangerous and negative thing begins when people take this experience as evidence in support of their way and their religion and their beliefs and whatever their damn book says about how other people ought to live. That's where it all starts to get rather nasty...religion is quite brilliant at making good people do bad things...
Second: my own 'faith healing' anecdote. It was all the buzz for about a week in my local area, when a young man paralysed from the waist down attended a faith healing at a local church, cast away his wheelchair, got up, and stood in front of the congregation. Everyone was abuzz and talking about it with great excitement...until the poor guy died prematurely a week later of (if I remember right) heart failure.
So my caution would be to say: yes, religious techniques are powerful phenomena, and faith healing phenomena are clearly a universal human reality that has nothing to with any particular religion. But these phenomena are also not what they may seem to be, and the obvious danger is that in overriding your body's demands, you can perhaps push on through just about anything...up to a point...
So I do hope for you, Rachel, that this is just what it seems to you and that your suffering is at an end. I know you've gone into long-term remission before, and relapsed quite recently, and I really do hope that's an end of it all for you now - even though you would be very much missed if you weren't around on these forums any more! I wouldn't suggest you change anything about your beliefs or your reaction to your experience - if it works for you, that's all that matters. I'd just like people to at least consider attributing this sort of experience to God, rather than to their own religion, because voodoo priests etc have been doing faith healing since time immemorial, so it really has little or nothing to do with the particular church in which it happens.
Now I remember why I don't do religion...I'll try harder to stick to that rule in future...
