Online Recovery Programme Session 3

Hi There

Before we get into Session 03, let’s see how far you have come already.

At this stage of the programme you will have completed the exercises we introduced last time. So if you still have some left to do, that’s ok. It’s probably a good time to quickly recap what you have done so far.

We asked you to:

1. Take your temperature and pulse twice a day.
2. Listen to your meditation CD.
3. Wellbeing Exercise 1- ‘Your Promise.’ Write out Your Promise to commit to your recovery no matter how tough it gets.
4. Wellbeing Exercise 2 – ‘Brain dump.’ Write down all your symptoms - get them all down on paper.
5. Wellbeing Exercise 3 - ‘M.E. Communication Review’ - Add up the time you are spending thinking, talking and writing about your symptoms and illness. Try changing the subject and talk about something other than being ill.
6. Wellbeing Exercise 4 - ‘10 Things that make me happy’
7. Wellbeing Exercise 5 – ‘Positive people Exercise’
8. Weekly Plan sheet – Use this to help you jot down when you would like to do your exercises.
9. Write up your realisations and progress in your Wellbeing journal.

The last thing we asked you to do was to record your realisations and progress in your Wellbeing journal.

If you are starting to wonder why we are so keen for you to keep a journal, this session will explain why this is so important and how it affects the speed of your recovery.

You have had an overview of the Six Phases of Recovery and in this session we will look in more depth at Phases One and Two.

Clients on our programme often tell us the methods they used to self- medicate in the early days of their health breakdown and they include:

• Drinking lots of caffeine
• Glucose drinks
• Glucose tablets
• Drinking alcohol to relax and having a bad reaction to it
• Sleeping tablets
• Anti-diarrhoea medication
• Anti-depressant use
• Comfort eating
• Eating sweets or instant carbs to get some energy

Can you relate to any of these?

The other one that is very common, believe it or not, is increasing exercise or joining a gym to build stamina, even though the body is screaming out for rest. I did exactly that in my denial phase and suffered such severe muscle pain that it lasted for 17 days and I had to take time off work.

When this phase is going on, they will probably be suffering in silence and will often not want to admit to themselves, let alone others, that there is a problem. The fears start to build - that you are losing your edge and that you are getting lazy.

Lifestyle at this time is often hectic with maybe lots of hard work and shouldering lots of responsibility. We convince ourselves that it will pass. The stress levels will be high and tasks will start to take longer to do.

Sufferers in this phase still force themselves to go out socially even though they long to be in bed. This stage however, is very easy to identify. The eyes become lacklustre and complexion is often very pale. We can spot it a mile off. When you ask after someone’s health because they really do not look well, they will brush it off very quickly.

For instance; you may have had glandular fever in the past or taken the pill or had an operation or suffered extreme shock. Whatever it is, something has affected the thyroid gland and as Dr Peatfield explains:

‘If thyroid hormone is not being produced as it should, nothing works properly .... it slowly worsens and the adrenals are called upon to further compensate for the stress... low adrenal reserve is characterised firstly by a poor response to stress of any kind. Patients report that they feel ill when stressed.......illnesses like flu, or a cold have a devastating effect, lasting longer than they should and causing much more severe symptoms than would be expected."

For an in depth and concise explanation of the adrenal and thyroid connection to exhaustive illness, read ‘Your Thyroid and How to Keep it Healthy’ by Dr Barry Durrant Peatfield.

Another sign of Phase One is when sufferers screen their phone calls and do not tell friends and family that they are feeling terrible. Throat problems are a common signal and a hoarse voice is often a sign that we are not expressing something and not being truly honest with ourselves. The body is really struggling but will try to cope.

This phase will go on until the load becomes too much and sufferers reach their own tipping point and then they crash. The adrenal glands will become depleted through prolonged stress and if stimulants are being used to help a person cope, this can lead to complete adrenal exhaustion and total health crash.

Elements of denial still exist and it may take a while before sufferers are ready to admit that this is not going to be a quick fix. The exhaustion and pain are all consuming. The symptoms increase and often there is no respite through sleep, because insomnia can become so intense that it feels as though it is impossible to escape it.

Alternatively, you may be sleeping endlessly, only to wake up feeling as though you have run a marathon. If we were to be made aware earlier of the denial phase then we could see this crash phase as completely understandable.

It is crucial at this point that we explore what behaviours preceded this phase. That is why we look in detail on the programme at exploring causes.

Session 5 'The Problem is Rarely the Problem' and Session 6 ‘What If and the Power of Questions’ will be very helpful for you in that area as will understanding the role of the endocrine system in Session 9.

It is essential to reflect on what has brought your health crashing. It is at this point that there is huge anxiety on the part of the sufferer - worrying about what will happen to your job, home, family, business, reputation, University course or whatever has been central to your life.

A big fear is that something more ‘serious’ or terminal is wrong and is undiagnosed.

When this happened to me, I was absolutely convinced that the virus I had contracted had caused my illness. I took no responsibility for the state my body was in before I crashed. I had always pushed myself through health problems and expected to always be able to do that.

I felt that my body had let me down, and like so many other sufferers kept striving to keep getting back to ‘normal’ which means doing all the stuff that had caused the problem in the first place.

I saw some great practitioners and not one of them made me face what might have caused me to become so ill. It is vital that an honest assessment is made and explained to a sufferer who is totally in the dark about why they are so ill.

This is the time to work on accepting that the body and mind need to undergo a healing journey that will not happen overnight. Patience and a positive approach can help you move from this into Phase Four much more quickly, avoiding the most challenging Phase Three.

So what do we mean by Raising Your Spirit?

Today we are working on the emotional health element of your Health Wheel and will introduce you to the ‘The Emotional Ladder’.

Have you heard the expression ‘Low spirits’? Someone may have told you about someone seeming like they are in low spirits. This expression isn’t used as much as it once was. But it is a great description of how we feel when we withdraw and feel the emotions connected to sadness, loss and discouragement.

It really means that our spirit, the thing that inspires us, is lacking and we are in a place far away from joy and happiness. To really feel these emotions and process them effectively creates optimum health. The difficulty is that when our spirits are low and we feel depressed, discouraged and fearful, we can literally set up camp in the middle of those feelings and find it difficult to trudge through them and come out the other side.

In his work ‘Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative', James W. Pennebaker and Janel D. Seagal from The University of Texas at Austin USA discovered that:

Writing about important personal experiences in an emotional way for as little as 15 minutes over the course of three days brings about improvements in mental and physical health.

Several studies have also found that writing or talking about emotional topics influences immune function in beneficial ways, including t-helper cell growth (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser) and an interesting one for us is the positive antibody response to the Epstein-Barr virus which is a condition almost identical to M.E.

This was the instruction given to test groups in experiments to see how writing can positively impact health:

‘For the next four days, I would like for you to write about your very deepest thoughts and feelings; about the most traumatic experience of your entire life. In your writing, I’d like you to really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts.

You might tie your topic in to your relationships with others, including parents, lovers, friends, or relatives, to your past, your present, or your future, or to who you have been, who you would like to be, or who you are now.

You may write about the same general issues or experiences on all days of writing or about different traumas each day. All of your writing will be completely confidential.'

The results were astounding and in all cases health improved dramatically.

Have you ever had a blocked sink? The water cannot flow and it just becomes stagnant as something that you can’t see is blocking the flow. Your morning pages are the plunger that unblocks those hidden thoughts and feelings that keep your energy stuck and blocked.

Writing daily will energise you. Stirring up your emotions is a key part of your recovery. We sometimes fear doing that.

When I was 24, I had my first baby, a beautiful little boy. I called him Aaron. It should have been the most wonderful experience of my life. Sadly my baby boy died at just 2 days old and nothing could have prepared me for the pain of that time.

Looking back I remember how people actively avoided talking to me, how they crossed over the road pretending that they hadn’t seen me. This is a common response to bereavement. I learned that people are frightened of emotion. They don’t want to cause upset.

The huge lesson I learned was that as we go through life we can’t avoid these situations that can throw us a massive curve ball and send our emotions haywire.

As you are acutely aware having M.E. is one of those curveballs. The losses you have experienced, such as your job, your social life, your energy and even the ability to think clearly, mean that we begin to grieve. It is a form of bereavement. Bereavement counsellors understand that healing is a process and you have to move through a scale of emotions.

Have you heard of the work of Esther and Jerry Hicks?

They are teachers who have a very specific take on the link between your emotional state and what you attract into your life.

A brief explanation of their theory is that everything is basically energy and in turn, everything that is energy gives off a vibration. We know that to be true as you can pick up when someone is happy or sad or tense just by walking into a room.

We often say you can cut the atmosphere with a knife, how do we know this?

The answer is that we have a frequency just like a radio, and we pick up this vibration. Would you agree that when we are depressed we obsess about negative, sad and helpless thoughts? As we do that, we attract more and more bleak thoughts and so the depression is perpetuated.

I remember when all I used to think about was what I was missing out on, the friends I was losing and how bad I was feeling. It was all I ever thought about and talked about.

I had to become aware and start making changes before I started to feel better. The other end of the spectrum is that when we feel happy and joyful we attract good experiences into our lives - this is the law of attraction in action.

These two ends of the spectrum and all the states of attraction in between are what they refer to as the emotional scale.

1. Joy / Empowerment / Freedom / Love
2. Appreciation
3. Passion
4. Enthusiasm / Eagerness / Happiness
5. Positive Expectation / Belief
6. Optimism
7. Hopefulness
8. Contentment
9. Boredom
10. Pessimism
11. Frustration / Irritation / Impatience
12. Overwhelm
13. Disappointment
14. Doubt
15. Worry
16. Blame
17. Discouragement
18. Anger
19. Revenge
20. Hatred / Rage
21. Jealousy
22. Insecurity / Guilt / Unworthiness
23. Fear / Grief / Depression / Despair / Powerlessness

So play this out for a moment: what do you attract when you focus on your symptoms?  More and more thoughts of illness and pain  -  how does this make you feel?

It feels really bad, right?

You also know that you feel bad because you want to feel good. But when we moan so much about feeling bad it is difficult to break out and thus we slide further down the scale.

Esther and Jerry show us that the reason we want to feel good means we want to experience a contrast emotion.

Contrast is: The difference between how we want to feel, and how we do feel.

Emotion + Response = Outcome

Can you imagine anyone leaping up a ladder?

It is unrealistic that you will move from grief and depression to joy in one leap. People do not climb ladders like that. What you can do, is:

• Be aware of where you are
• Say 'okay I know I am here at the moment'.
• 'It’s okay I will process this and be glad when I notice I have taken a step up the ladder'.

You might look at this scale and think, well, jealousy or anger aren’t very nice emotions so why do I want to experience them?

Well they are more powerful than grief and depression and they will give you the drive to take some sort of action, even if it’s just to tell someone you are angry or just throw something!!! It’s a first step.

There are things you can do to move up that ladder. The exercises this week will enable you to do just that.

As you practice this, you will begin to feel more in control of your emotions which directly influence your thoughts. You will attract less and less thoughts that worsen your symptoms. You are gaining control of getting your life back on track.

Mind

• Do you get brain-ache when you do too much reading, worrying or talking?
• Resting means resting your brain. Turn off the TV and sit in silence.
• Put your tongue to the top of your mouth and press it behind your teeth.
• Close your eyes and say in your head 'relax, relax, relax' or a word that works for you. It’s a great exercise to silence the internal chatterbox that torments you and helps to rest your brain.
• Access a Chrysalis Effect Practitioner to get help with an excessive anxiety loop problem.
• Click here to complete the contact form to work with a Practitioner

External World

One way to help change anxiety levels and shift your mood is to involve yourself in something you are interested in.

What’s going on in your community? Is anyone fundraising or trying to do something really positive? Are there any groups doing stuff you are intrigued by?

Make sure this is not about M.E. or illness. Local newspapers or websites will be a treasure trove of things you may be able to help with- even if it is only sending a note of support and following progress until you feel you can get more involved.