“It’s The Most Challenging Time of the Year” (With Apologies to Andy Williams)

I have known for a few years now, ever since I began my recovery from chronic fatigue in 2015, that the holiday season was the most challenging time of the year for me. I experienced many of my major “crashes” in December and January. Prior to recovering, I thought and hoped that my symptoms were due to my clinically low winter vitamin D levels (even though months of prescription-strength supplements did nothing noticeable for my symptoms, which were episodic and random-seeming,  because I refused to look for or see the relevant patterns.)

In my recovery I worked on seeing the ways I pushed and coerced and drove myself all year long, but most especially between October and January, when six major family birthdays and all the biggest holidays happen.

I was driven to make birthdays and holidays the biggest, most perfect days I could for everyone in my family, and my recovery was built on seeing and shifting the thinking that drove me. Realizing that it didn’t have to be my job, all of it. Not everything I could think of needed to be done. I could ask other people to take on some of the tasks. It didn’t have to be perfect.

This year, I realized quite clearly that it simply never could be perfect. My thinking would *never* be satisfied with how I did Christmas. I could never get enough presents that were the perfect thing that someone wanted and were also a complete surprise. I could never do all the decorating, baking, cleaning, cooking, hosting, and social butterflying that my frankly insane thinking thought I should be. That was a nice little realization and I thought I was doing Christmas better than I ever had done before.

And yet, I still found myself staring blankly at the checker in Trader Joe’s a few days before Christmas, when he asked me if I was doing anything fun for Christmas. Fun? Christmas? What was he even talking about? Who has fun on Christmas? Christmas is a production to get through, in one piece preferably, but certainly not a time for “fun,” which at this point in my holiday prep I had apparently forgotten the definition of. I think I laughed bitterly and said something like, “Oh lord, I’m too busy making Christmas happen, who has time for fun?” And then I remembered my manners and asked him what he was doing for Christmas. He was going skiing. He was going to have fun.

That conversation stuck with me, and I repeated it to a few different people over the past week or so, mostly to laugh at my Christmas-making persona, but not catching the fact that I needed to hear something in it that I wasn’t yet listening to.

This morning, I woke up feeling blah, and then, a little more than blah, then in fact quite yucky. I went back to bed (which I hate to do), aware at some level that this felt like an old and familiar symptom rise. An ache in my gut and a deep desire to retreat into the oblivion of sleep. Why would I be having a symptom rise now, when I was “doing Christmas” so well?

As I laid in bed, trying to stay mindful and curious in the face of a stomach ache and a strong desire to sleep, I noticed a number of things. I realized that the urge to sleep was an avoidance mechanism and the ache was the invitation to get still and ask myself what wanted to be felt.  I noticed that my mind absolutely did not want to feel anything until it knew exactly what was going to come out of that crazy closet of repressed feelings. I also realized that this was why I had dropped my yoga practice a few months ago. Not because I was too busy. Not because we’d torn up the carpeting in preparation for putting in hardwood flooring ourselves and I didn’t have a good place to practice. Because I was getting to that time of year when I didn’t want to get still and let feelings arise.

My mind still did not want to open the Closet of Feels without knowing what might come out, so I thought about Christmases in my past and what grief or disappointments or other bad feelings I might have left unacknowledged in my psyche.

And then it hit me. It’s crazy to me how we can know a story about our family of origin, and yet not know it. Not look at it head-on. Not get curious about how that might have affected us all. It’s just a giant elephant covered in a paisley tablecloth in the corner of the room. For decades. Five decades in fact.

Fifty years ago, my mother’s father died on Christmas day. I believe he suffered a massive heart attack on Christmas eve, and died the next day.  I know this, and I don’t know this. I don’t know what happened to our Christmas in 1968, and I have never thought to ask. I don’t know whether we all rushed up to Connecticut, or just my Mom. I was four years old.  My sister was one.

What I can imagine, though, is that horrible loss on Christmas day must have been awful for my mother. And the next Christmas must have been so hard. And the Christmas after. And the one after that. I imagine it got better over time, but I also imagine that the shock, the grief, the pain, and the loss never really got fully processed. Talk therapy was an exotic practice back then. We were a military family. We sucked it up and soldiered on.

In all of my inner work around the roles I take on and the obligations I burden myself with, I never once thought to ask myself why I thought Christmas had to be done extravagantly, perfectly. Why was there never an end to my to-do list. Why my picture of Christmas could never in a million years be “going to the mountains to ski.”

It had to be at home, with family, tons of presents, formal Christmas dinner. It had to a big, fancy production that helped distract us from a grief that as a child I doubt I ever noticed was swirling around us, because my mom was working so damned hard not to let it “ruin” Christmas for us. She worked so hard for us year after year, and I automatically assumed I had to work that hard for my family too, when I grew up.

I don’t even remember my grandfather.

I had no idea how much his death shaped my experience of Christmas until this morning.

And now I get to release an effort that was never mine to carry in the first place. And hug my Mom for all that she experienced and all that she carried for us when I was too young to realize or appreciate it. And maybe, one of these years, I’ll go skiing at Christmas. No, snorkeling. Snorkeling sounds much more fun.

I am doing very well. I am still a stay-at-home mom and will be for another year or two, I imagine. I don’t want to miss these last months and years with my wonderful teens. My oldest is in process of launching into the world. She has her driver’s license and two volunteer gigs and is contemplating next steps. My son has just turned 17. I have a couple of volunteer gigs of my own, including serving on the board of trustees of our Unitarian church, which is far more work than it was billed when I accepted the job, but it’s meaningful, intentional work and good practice for me in inhabiting a professional role with more mindfulness and authenticity.

As always, I wish you happiness and vibrant health, and insights that lead to peace, clarity, more joy, and more fun.

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“It’s The Most Challenging Time of the Year” (With Apologies to Andy Williams)

Three-year Check-in

A couple of months ago, someone who had found my blog messaged me asking if I was still doing okay. I was reminded of how easy it was to fear that full recovery from chronic fatigue is not possible and to doubt every recovery story that I ever read, and so I will continue to check in every year to assure otherwise.

I continue to find new and sometimes more subtle ways to listen to my deeper self – and ways that I continue to not listen – and these self-realizations make me feel happier, more adventuresome, and more grounded than I have ever been before.

I feel lately as though my whole chronic fatigue journey, which I have always viewed as something horrible that I got through (and even felt guilty about bringing it onto myself with all my not listening to my inner voice) has actually and truly been something that happened for me, and not just “to” me.

I don’t think I would ever have picked up the threads of self-inquiry and mindfulness that I explored in my 20s and early 30s without it. I think I would have grown older, more settled into my habits and worries and rule-bound roles, and not really noticed how much joy and enthusiasm and creativity had leaked out of my life, without having to find my way out of that horrible, horrible place I was in physically and mentally.

So my recovery has turned into a life path in some deep ways for me and I’m very grateful for it. I don’t know if everyone responds to Reverse Therapy in that way — in some of the recovery stories I read it seemed as though the subjects took the basics that they needed out of the process and got back to living their lives but with fewer inner-needs-ignoring habits — but it truly has been life-transforming and life-renewing for me.

I feel like I have shed so many layers of unhappy and stressful beliefs that my experience of life just gets lighter and better with each new realization. I have had a brief symptom flare or two in the past year, and they have been entirely about letting me understand and release super deep-seated conditioning. I expect that will keep happening now and again and I even look forward to it, for the insights and deep changes it triggers for me.

This year began with some wonky bloodwork and a physician who insisted I had to go on a keto diet as the only way to reverse pre-diabetes blood sugar readings (among other out-of-bounds results.) When she refused to offer me any more mainstream (and sustainable) suggestions for changing my diet, I gamely gave it a try again (I’d gone very-low-carb-high-fat several times in the course of my chronic fatigue recovery efforts, all to no avail.)

Within a day and a half, I was curled up in a ball in bed, brain fogged, exhausted, and in pain, having what my doctor assured me was the keto flu and would pass. It took me a couple of hours to realize how similar it felt to some of my worst chronic fatigue crashes, and I decided to listen up, eat a sane diet, and find a new doctor ASAP.  I was back to my normal, happy, healthy-feeling self within a day.  And I learned yet another lesson – to listen to my own very clear inner voice (asking for sustainable dietary changes) rather than the “authority figure” telling me what to do.

I searched for reasonable, science-based (and not junk-science) voices in the online diet and calorie-tracking community I joined, made a variety of small, not-hard (and thus sustainable) changes to what I ate, learned to notice satiety cues (as opposed to feeling full or over-full), made friends with a feeling of light hunger as a sign that changes were happening, and four months later, I have lost 25 pounds, my bloodwork is almost entirely in the normal range on all the previous out-of-range measures, and I finally have a healthy relationship to food and eating and my body, really for the first time ever. Again, what a gift this whole experience has been.

I’ve also travelled extensively this spring, managing jet lag and many miles of walking each day without any symptoms. Now that I am home for the summer, I walk 10-15 miles a week, have been rehabbing neglected garden beds, cleaning and decluttering house, garage, and yards, and generally catching up on years of deferred maintenance, with more energy than I have had in a good decade.

Perhaps because I have felt so energetic and connected with my inner voice, I’ve felt free to push myself out of my comfort zone in many different ways in recent months — going to figure drawing sessions with my daughter, learning to play the washboard and performing with my husband, and taking a pretty visceral taxidermy workshop in London (again with my creative and adventuresome daughter).

I am not putting off any longer the things I might like to do and I am no longer saying no to things I am not sure of. Fear and anxiety have receded enough that I am not cowed by them when the arise anymore and I recognize that life is lovely, brief, and meant to be lived fully and wholeheartedly.

I share all of this to reassure anyone reading that full recovery from chronic fatigue is not only possible, it can (and is supposed to) lead to a better life than you’ve ever lived before. All that it takes is a willingness to set aside the incessant and insistent frontal cortex voices of Worry, Planning, Roles, and Rules and listen deeply to your authentic self, which is still very much there, no matter how hard it might feel to find or hear, as it did for me in the early months of recovery. It is just waiting for you to ask yourself how and who you really want to be in this precious human life.

 

 

Three-year Check-in

Two years out. Still well. Still finding more of my true voice.

I recently wrote another summary of my illness and recovery for a natural health magazine, that I wanted to link here, as I post my annual check-in and reassurance that all continues well. I find myself understanding what happened to me in deeper ways as the months and years pass.

I also continue to find ways that I am ignoring what I really want. All the more obvious self-coercion has been uncovered and discarded (I think!), but I continue to not allow myself to have, to say to others or sometimes to even acknowledge to myself what it is I really want — desires large and small.

But I do catch the internal voice or tug of the heart so much more quickly and easily now, and that’s a delight. I have dyed my hair purple, then blue. I’ve spent money on things and experiences that make me happy. I let myself get a chihuahua-mix puppy who’s been a delight (and I worked through a bunch of old programming around pets and responsibilities and a sense of burden that wanted to suck the joy out of the experience, until I caught, questioned and released the thinking.)

As I think about returning to paid employment (after a long season of child-rearing, homeschooling, and then the death of my father and helping my mom as best I can in her ongoing adjustment to widowhood), I can hear so much more clearly and quickly what it is I’d like to do for employment, and why.

I remember what it was like to unquestioningly believe that a cognitive approach could never fix what was so clearly a physical problem.

I remember how unwilling I was to consider it, or spend any money exploring it (even though I spent many, many thousands of dollars on inconclusive or useless medical tests, crazy amounts and varieties of supplements, and so many alternative therapies.)

I remember being horrified when people in my online community of sufferers would write that they were going off all their supplements cold-turkey to give their bodies a break.

I found that deeply disturbing –I think because I clung to the idea that I would eventually find the right supplement regimen that would fix me, and to realize that others were getting no benefit whatsoever out of them and were willing to quit them entirely (at least for a while, before they started trying to find the magic combo again) left me terrified that I had no recourse at all.

Then by some grace, I was able to open my mind to the possibility that Reverse Therapy could work. I read the testimonials, I read the e-book, and I plunked down 85 pounds for a two-hour session with Lyn White via Skype (I think that 85 British pound cost me about $135 back in 2015. It’s probably cheaper now.) And I never looked back.

I remember the relief of reading the Reverse Therapy e-book that really did make sense as it laid out the ways that over-thinking and rules and roles burdened our psyches and our autonomic nervous systems.

I remember the great comfort of talking to a woman who had been completely flattened by ME, lost her nursing career, and yet recovered to a full and active life. If she had recovered after a bona fide ME diagnosis, then so could I. And she repeatedly assured me that I could. Her other clients had done the same, and it wasn’t complicated, it was just something I had to keep applying myself to, each time a symptom flared.

It *was* hard to understand how to get out of my head, out of my thinking mind, out of my rules and my roles,  and to feel for my intuition, my heart, my quiet inner voice.

But it was not impossible and it was so rewarding –not only to not be so mystifyingly ill anymore, but to be so happy, joyful, humorous, energetic, creative, loving and smart again (I don’t know which symptom was worse — the unholy fatigue or the brainfog that left me with only a shell of my former mental capacity).

I encourage anyone reading this to give it a try — to ask yourself why you wouldn’t spend two hours and the cost of three or four bottles of supplements that really don’t seem to be doing much good anyway?

What is that voice that’s keeping you from trying this? Does it really make sense to refuse to explore an avenue with so many success stories? Is it an overbearing part of your mind trying to keep you from seeing what it doesn’t want you to see — that all its strategems to protect you are not only failing, but actually causing your distress? How fascinating it would be to explore this possibility.

I will close with my constant and heartfelt wish for everyone reading this to experience peace, courage, wisdom, healing, and the full joy of being alive, wherever you may be on your path at this moment.

Two years out. Still well. Still finding more of my true voice.

My Recovery from Five+ Years of Chronic Fatigue via Reverse Therapy

My Chronic Fatigue Recovery

The Short Version: Reverse Therapy completely and fully worked, when nothing else did anything more than provide a temporary amelioration of symptoms. (In this post I outline specifically how RT worked for me.)

Now, because I know what happens when anyone suggests that Chronic Fatigue can be cured at all, much less cured by something that isn’t exclusively focused on physical systems (the standard dismissal is that the person never had chronic fatigue in the first place, because there is no way that mental processes can be causing it), here is the Longer Version, to assure you that I did indeed have chronic fatigue syndrome and that I tried very hard to get better with various approaches considered valid by the chronic fatigue community that I found at Phoenix Rising’s discussion boards (you can read the evolution of my illness there by searching my posts. I registered under the name Sueami):

My chronic fatigue and assorted health issues began in the fall of 2009 with a virus that I couldn’t fully recover from. After six months of lingering fatigue, cough and viral symptoms, I gradually improved and was taking jujitsu classes by the spring of 2011 with my daughter.

After a class in which I decided to run the full warm-up exercises with the rest of the students rather than sitting them out, I collapsed with an unholy exhaustion unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life and could barely drag myself up a half-flight of stairs into my house. I was dismissed by my family practitioner as just having tried to increase my activity levels too fast but the malaise continued every time I even tried to walk for exercise. A naturopath diagnosed me with adrenal exhaustion and after four months of sleeping 14 hours a day and resting for much of the rest of the day and taking various supplements, I again slowly recovered.

I began having increasingly severe gastrointestinal attacks and cut gluten out on the advice of my naturopath. His treatments seemed to improve things for a time, but I would have bouts of exhaustion, post-viral symptoms or digestive upset again and again. In early 2013 another attack of malaise, post-viral symptoms, brain fog, and fatigue struck.

Feeling that the naturopath’s supplements were a dead end, I went to a functional medicine clinic in April of 2013 and after a battery of tests was diagnosed with clinically low vitamin D, a severe candida intestinal overgrowth, and advised to begin a mostly paleo diet and supplement with prescription D and progesterone tablets.

I developed severe vertigo in May, shortly after starting the progesterone, and was diagnosed as having benign positional paroxysmal vertigo. Inner ear re-balancing postures helped resolve the worst of the vertigo so that I could function without wanting to throw up, but I had to constantly repeat them from first thing in the morning throughout the day, if I tilted my head.

Overdoing recovery efforts, like most everything else I overdid in my life, I pursued an even stricter candida protocol than my physician had prescribed, a zero-carb diet with a variety of anti-fungals and other supplements through the remainder of 2013. I also began sunbathing to restore Vitamin D levels, as they were barely budged by the 50,000 iu pill I had taken once a week in the spring.

I developed a squamous cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer, on my leg in the fall of 2013 and had surgery in early 2014 to remove it. I had been fairly functional throughout 2013 but crashed hard at the end of the holidays and family birthday cycle in January 2014 and suffered unabated chronic fatigue from that point out, sleeping 10+ hours a night, waking exhausted and being hit by waves of unbearable fatigue throughout the day if I tried to do more than very basic self-care, cooking and cleaning. Among myriad other symptoms were significant brain fog, dry eyes and blurred vision.

About the same time my skin cancer was identified, a root-canaled tooth became terribly sensitive to heat and cold. After I healed from the skin cancer surgery, I had the tooth pulled in April 2014, in hopes that removing the decay present there might relieve the fatigue. I also did genetic testing to determine my methylation cycle polymorphisms and began supplementing to support methylation after reading about Fred D. Davis’ dramatic health improvements with folate and methylcobalamin on Phoenix Rising, an online chronic fatigue community.

I found an integrative physician who prescribed methyl b-12 shots for me and advised me to go off dairy and several other foods that might cross-react with gluten sensitivity. He was cautiously supportive of methylation supplementation and said he felt it could help recovery from chronic fatigue but he had never seen it be a cure-all. He was focused on healing the gut and improving absorption of nutrients.

I continued a one-step-forward-two-steps-back decline in the summer of 2014, experiencing chest pain, palpitations and breathlessness upon walking. I began Buteyko breathing exercises, which seemed to help, and I believed that chronic hyperventilation might be causing some symptoms.

Throughout the fall I was semi-functional. I was tested and cleared for lyme disease, lupus and celiac disease by my regular health-insurance funded doctor, who also ordered an echocardiogram to make sure that cardiac problems weren’t at play. I began restricting my diet even further to an auto-immune protocol, out of desperation cutting out all nuts, grains, citrus, gluten, dairy, eggs and any other possible food trigger.

I finally completely crashed to bedbound after overdoing hosting duties at a party for my daughter’s teen friends at winter solstice. I spent Christmas morning flat out in a recliner, with barely enough energy to open presents.

At a loss for any other solution, I followed some advice from a poster on Phoenix Rising who speculated that extreme rest might allow the mitochondrial energy production systems to renew and rebuild. I followed a plan of no more than 4 hours a day of being upright and doing any mental activity, for no more than 20 minutes per “active” session. My husband made most of my meals for me and the kids took care of themselves, and I tried to meditate or just rest for 40 minutes of every hour.

I also began following a well known ME specialist, Dr. Myhill’s supplementation protocol for ME/CFS.

By the beginning of February, I began to feel a bit more energy and could be up and about without debilitating fatigue or weakness. On a day when I felt almost normal, I did two 10 minute bouts of sweeping, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, just to feel like I could be of help, and walked down the street a few houses and back with my family that evening. Within two hours, I was completely flattened by a post-exertional malaise and had to crawl to bed.

From that point on, I had significant autonomic disregulation. I could not sit up in bed without my heart rate shooting up to 120 bpm and skipping beats many times a minute. Walking slowly to the bathroom or kitchen would send it up to 135 or more, with more chest pains and arrhythmias,  and the word from various CFS sufferers on Phoenix Rising was that we needed to keep our heart rates below anaerobic levels or we would further damage the mitochondria (and with CFS we went into anaerobic functioning at a much lower level than healthy people, they said), so I spent my entire day laying flat in bed.

The advice was also to limit mental activity as well, as too much talking or thinking could cause some people to crash as well. I spent day after day laying flat on my back in bed, allowing myself short bouts of time on the internet and chats and snuggles with my kids that I timed to keep under 20 minutes.

I laid flat on my back for the next three weeks, unable to focus on anything for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time, my sleep becoming more and more disregulated. I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep until 12 or 1 or 2 am, but would wake with the sun at 7 am and the fatigue and exhaustion would become even more overwhelming. Panic attacks became increasingly frequent, and I deeply regretted not having gone to see a Chronic Fatigue specialist while I was still well enough to travel (the nearest recognized specialist was in Northern California and I am in Colorado).

I had put off a regularly scheduled follow-up visit with my integrative physician for two months due to my increasing debilitation, and I was too ill to come to his office for the hour-plus visit that he wanted before he would adjust my supplement regimen.

Worried about how much I had declined, my physician agreed to consult with me via the phone, as I was unable to leave the house without my legs giving way and my heart rate sky rocketing and wildly irregular heartbeats. He asked me to get an array of blood work done first, and after three weeks in bed, I felt I could risk the ride into town. I lay reclined in the car seat while my husband drove me to a blood draw site where I had to use a wheelchair to get from the car to the lab and back. (That blood work came back almost completely normal, with the exception of low magnesium.)

During our phone consultation, Dr. Henke told me he did not understand how I could be so ill when I was doing everything right and the blood work looked so solid. He urged me to stop nearly all of my dozens of supplements (and to ratchet back on the potassium and magnesium I was taking in large doses because they were the only things that seemed to help my heart arrhythmia.) I was taking several dozen types of supplements each day, each added in as I tried a new protocol or heard of a new possible avenue for reducing symptoms, and he felt they were disregulating my digestion to the point I was unable to absorb proper nutrition.

He also suggested I read a book, The Last Best Cure, written by a science journalist with multiple diagnosed chronic illnesses who tracked her progress with her Mayo Clinic physician and found a roughly 70 percent improvement in her various conditions and overall quality of life over the course of a year by adding mind-body practices such as meditation, yoga, acupuncture and talk therapy.

The book was in many ways too vague a prescription but it did lead me to start considering nurturing my mental health and not being afraid to add in a few low-impact, fun things to my day (letting myself surf more on the Kindle tablet or watch a cartoon with my daughter), and my energy levels started to improve enough that I could search up chronic fatigue recovery stories episodically on the kindle. I began finding a number of stories in which people had recovered fully and completely, something that was deemed impossible at Phoenix Rising.

Some people had recovered by throwing themselves into yoga, one young woman had left a career she disliked and following a childhood dream and found a full recovery, and a number of people had posted on youtube and on blogs about recovering via Reverse Therapy, which I had read about the previous summer. At the time, I had asked about it on Phoenix Rising’s discussion boards.

Reverse Therapy, Mickel’s Therapy and any other process (such as yoga or a mysterious treatment called Lightning Process) by which some individuals had recovered completely from CFS were thoroughly derided and dismissed by longtime CFS sufferers at Phoenix Rising, who felt they were either scams or trying to portray chronic fatigue as entirely a mental problem. People who testified that they had recovered fully were deemed never to have truly had chronic fatigue by the most vocal posters at Phoenix Rising, who were the only people I knew who had chronic fatigue, so I took their word for it. I had to become completely non-functional before I was willing to consider such an “alternative approach” (though I look back at all the things I did try and find them to be vastly more speculative, costly and alternative that Reverse Therapy).

I was so desperate and so encouraged by these testimonials that I contacted a practitioner in England named Lyn White and she sent me the e-book. I read it through in a day and began trying to implement the basic advice. I saw immediate and dramatic improvements. After a week, I was able to go out of the house for a drive with my family, to enjoy a slow, short walk by a lake and to eat fries at a nearby diner.

I deeply regret losing those months of my life and descending into sheer hell before I was ill enough to be willing to make an appointment with Lyn, a former nurse who was stricken by ME and eventually recovered through Reverse Therapy and retrained as a practitioner.

I hope that my story will help give other sufferers the encouragement to give Reverse Therapy a try. (I suspect Mickel’s Therapy would work as well, and perhaps even what is known as Lightning Process, which certainly has its share of strong testimonials, despite the bizarre secrecy around the details of the process.)

Over the course of the next five months I had five or six coaching sessions with Lyn via Skype and returned to my full activity levels. I can now exercise aerobically, drink moderate amounts of alcohol again (for the last several years, even a few sips of wine would quickly make me feel almost poisoned) and I am active all day, gardening, eating whatever I like (I’ve gained back the 25 pounds I lost over the last several years, but I don’t mind at the moment, it is such a joy to have a normal relationship with food again.)

It was a straightforward process but difficult sometimes to muster the willpower to follow it. It also took me a couple of months to reset my central nervous system and turn off my chronically triggered sympathetic nervous system and during that time I had to switch up my activities frequently between various pleasant and stimulating activities, and to sit in a body-focused meditation when symptoms arose, to see what was triggering them.

Reverse Therapy’s basic tenet is that our illnesses and symptoms are a result of a chronic over-firing of the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response, until it gets stuck in the on position and begins disregulating various other endocrine systems.

It all starts when we override our deeper needs, interests and desires, in the name of filling a particular role (nurturing mother, good wife, good child, standout employee) or making sure people like us, or feeling forced to tolerate ill treatment from others, a job, or other circumstance in our life that is not in our best interest.

The older, deeper part of our brain, tasked with keeping us safe and urging us to realize our full potential, is able to communicate with us only via emotions and hormone systems. It is governed by the hypothalamus, which sends alarm signals that our frontal cortex, the thinking mind and the part of our brains that absorbs cultural and social conditioning on how we should behave, insists are meaningless and should be ignored. For months and years we persist in tolerating various behaviors, beliefs and activities that are not serving us or that at some level feel unsafe to us, and the hypothalamus ratchets up the symptoms higher and higher until they are impossible to ignore and are disregulating various systems of the body.

We might have overextended ourselves and ignored our own needs because we felt we had to fulfill a particular role in a particular way or because we feared rejection from family or friends. The reasons that we have a chronically on fight/flight/freeze response vary from person to person but fall into broad patterns that are outlined in the Reverse Therapy ebook.

Mine had to do with pushing myself constantly in ways large and small, to do things completely, as big as possible, and perfectly, and all by myself. I didn’t ask for help enough, I threw myself into my parenting role with too much energy and not enough self-care, I didn’t ask for help or appreciation or pampering, I took on responsibility for other people’s emotional reactions, and I denied my own desires and wishes (because my kids’ came first or we didn’t have enough money or I wasn’t working so I shouldn’t spend) until I had no idea what made me happy, what sparked joy for me anymore. I was too tired and ill to reach out to others socially and all my attempts to get well, from resting to dietary restrictions, only removed the last remaining sources of joy and pleasure from my life. No wonder I declined as precipitously and completely as I did.

I now feel virtually normal. I do have small flutters of a remaining symptom, a heart palpitation of sorts, and an occasional sense of the deep fatigue that once plagued me. They arise when I get too caught up in mental stories or reactivity, or am pushing myself in some way I haven’t yet become self-aware about.

I am still working on recognizing and changing old behaviors; I will find myself pushing to do more than I want to do, or trying too hard to please my family or guests, or just waiting for my kids to need something from me instead of going out and doing something that feels fun or challenging to me. These are old habits and I am confident that I will be able to rewire them. My remaining symptoms are now just a light reminder that I am falling into a habit pattern and need to wake up.

I plant to return to work soon, though I may wait until after the holidays, as we have all four of the birthdays in our family, both grandmothers birthdays and thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with the extended family to navigate over the next few months.

I used to think I suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder or low vitamin D because my symptoms usually flared in winter. Now I realize I was felled by all the extra stress I put on myself to make everyone’s birthdays and Christmas perfect for them. I’m still working on releasing that sense of obligation to make the holidays happen for extended family and make them exactly what everyone wants here, but I fully expect to have a lovely winter for the first time in six years.

I am so incredibly grateful that many dozens of other sufferers were willing to post their stories of recovering from chronic fatigue, that I knew I wanted to do the same, as soon as I felt well enough to revisit the awful months and years that I spent descending further and further into unreal exhaustion, autonomic dysfunction and myriad other symptoms that chronic fatigue syndrome encompasses. I wanted to encourage others who share my symptoms to dive into the therapy through which I recovered, or any of several similar therapies that I expect function in a similar way.

I have written a second blog post here that is a more detailed account of my Reverse Therapy experiences and I will soon post a compilation of recovery stories that helped me decide to give RT a try.

I will offer a bit more background about myself. I am a 50-year-old homeschooling mother of two teenagers. In my life pre-kids, I was a daily newspaper reporter for nine years and my beats included education, the environment and health. I then became a university spokeswoman for another five years, until I had my first child.

Over those 14 years, I had walked away from a high stress career for more sustainable employment, began a fairly regular yoga practice, became a Vipassana meditation practitioner and delved into the voluntary simplicity movement with my husband, where we consciously considered and shaped our spending and earning decisions to maximize our time with the two children to come and all that felt most meaningful to us.

I looked like a very self-aware, balanced, mindful person, acquiring tools to maintain my physical, psychological and spiritual health and shaping my life to be meaningful and self-sustaining. I was completely oblivious to other mental and physical habit patterns that were slowly but steadily eroding my resilience and energy levels.

For now, I am not enabling comments on this blog. I have no desire to argue with other CFS suffers about whether I had chronic fatigue or whether I really recovered. My first posts at Phoenix Rising about my recovery taught me what response I might expect. I do plan to compile a list of the many examples of chronic fatigue recovery stories out there, to encourage other sufferers to pursue their own cures.

John Eaton, the psychologist who created the Reverse Therapy process, has made available a free e-book detailing the process. Here is one place it can be downloaded in PDF form, for you to understand the theory and methodology.

I wish everyone reading this the courage to explore a recovery therapy that embraces the mind-body connection, and I wish you all a return of abundant health and a fulfilling, joyful life.

PS. A note about the dates on this blog: WordPress has a ridiculous flaw that won’t let you order your posts in anything but reverse chronological. Their only suggestion is to change the publication dates post-publishing to change the sort order. So while it now looks like I wrote this entire blog over a week in September 2016, in fact, I wrote the first five posts of this blog in October, November, and December of 2015, and in January and June of 2016.

My Recovery from Five+ Years of Chronic Fatigue via Reverse Therapy

How Reverse Therapy Worked for Me

In the hopes that it might encourage others to give Reverse Therapy a try, I want to offer some (okay, many) details of my particular experience with the process and how it led to my recovery.

I don’t recall everything about my early sessions and stages of recovery. My brain fog was still pretty awful and I honestly wanted to forget how ill I had become and anything related to that. But this is what I can recall and reconstruct from notes and emails.

I read through the Reverse Therapy e-book as soon as my coach, Lyn White, emailed it to me. I began trying to implement the suggestions in it immediately, mostly trying to reframe what I was experiencing to reduce my fear around it, even as I waited the week before she could fit me into her schedule.

I tried to be less afraid of physical activity. I took off my heart rate monitor and tossed it in a drawer to donate to charity. I began to sit up in a reclining chair and to watch a 20-minute cartoon that was my daughter’s latest animated obsession once or twice a day. I let myself surf on the kindle more, and I continued to search up recovery stories on the Internet.

Over the course of that week, my autonomic symptoms receded somewhat (I still couldn’t help taking a quick pulse to make sure that I wasn’t spiking heart rate too much when I sat up in a chair, and I could see it wasn’t going as high each time I changed position) and I agreed to an outing. My husband drove me and my daughter up to an overlook by a lake and I walked slowly and carefully around a bit, enjoying sitting at a picnic table and being outdoors, then we headed back into town and stopped for French fries at a diner. I had eaten nothing but chicken, veggies, bone broth, and fruit for four months on an auto-immune diet and I will never forget the taste of those fries.

My first session with Lyn was three days after that. She had sent me a questionnaire to fill out beforehand, asking for contact information for my physician, if I had a formal diagnosis, and if I had been given a full range of blood tests, to be certain that cancer and other treatable illnesses had been ruled out.

She asked how long I had been ill, what my major symptoms were, did they wax and wane and if so, what was happening in my life when they did. She also asked if I had a support network, was I caring for others, and what stressors were occurring in my life during the two years before my symptoms first started appearing.

During our first few sessions, she would start each by reiterating the basic understandings of Reverse Therapy — that we have two intelligences in our body, both necessary and important, both communicating in different ways; that the symptoms I was experiencing were very real, physiological dysregulations, a result of one intelligence overriding another too frequently and for too long; and that these symptoms were the product of ignored messages and were fully reversable.

As Lyn explained it, we have an older, deeper part of the brain, governed by the hypothalamus, whose job it is to keep us safe, encourage us to speak up for ourselves, and to help us experience meaning, satisfaction and connection with others.

It’s a pre-verbal part of the brain and communicates via “gut instincts,” physical feelings, and emotions. The hypothalamus communicates with the gut and with various endocrine glands and systems, and Reverse Therapy calls this part of our human intelligence bodymind, a term which I don’t love, but I haven’t come up with anything much better.

The second type of intelligence is located in the frontal cortex, the newer, cognitive portion of our brain that communicates to us with thoughts and worries. Reverse Therapy calls this “headmind” and identifies it as the source of our intellectual powers and also the seat of conditioned thinking and beliefs — all the messages from family, friends and culture about how we are supposed to behave in order to be accepted, approved of, and loved.

Headmind tries to keep us safe, too, but sometimes at the expense of deeper happiness and satisfaction. It tries to protect us from social rejection, from loss of connection, love or support, by absorbing all the rules and expectations of those around us and pushing us to live by them, so that we can be successful, approved of, and feel loved.

Headmind is very powerful and hugely useful to us much of the time, but its power and the fact that our culture values thoughts and thinking over feelings or intuition means that it can easily override bodymind’s messages, which come as feelings, sensations and emotions. Headmind is often all too ready to dismiss or ignore them if it doesn’t understand the message or feels that to heed it would risk disapproval or failure.

If headmind continues to ignore those messages, bodymind begins to feel genuinely unsafe and sends out alarm signals, activating the sympathetic (or fight or flight) nervous system. If these messages are ignored for too long, the endocrine systems involved in the signaling become dysregulated and the SNS gets stuck in a state of hyper-arousal, creating the symptoms of worsening chronic fatigue.

So my early weeks of Reverse Therapy were about turning down the dial on my SNS over-activation, reducing the triggering of the fight/flight/freeze response.

Lyn said the basic things that fired up that response were biting your tongue, doing for others, and living by other people’s rules. What kept it up was boredom, so I needed to change up my activities often and make sure that I was doing a variety of fun and interesting things.

Lyn’s homework for me was to make sure that I did what I wanted to do as much as possible, that I raised endorphins any way I could – physical exercise that I enjoyed, doing anything as long as it felt good, and swapping activities often.

I was shocked at how hard it was to answer the question, “what did I want to do?” in those early days. Brainstorming new things to do was surprisingly difficult and often I had to settle for the faintest flicker of interest as my signal that I might want to do something.

I made lists of what might make my heart sing and I tried to do several things a day from those lists. I sought to balance out restful with physical, solitary with social and inside activities with outside activities. I started small and worked my way up to bigger activities and outings.

Switching activities every 20 minutes or so at first was frustrating and felt quite tiresome sometimes, but it worked. I began to feel better, calmer and to get back in touch with what might make me happy, what I might want to do, and I got a little more comfortable asking for help from family and friends.

It was deeply reassuring to hear Lyn say over and over again that I didn’t have to do Reverse Therapy perfectly to get completely well, that I didn’t have to get all the body mind messages in order to recover. I was often stymied by what a particular symptom rise meant, and when I sat in the brief, body-centered meditation that she taught me as a tool for identifying what message bodymind was sending me, I was chagrinned by how difficult it was for me to get beyond my thinking about what might be going on and get in touch with that deeper message, which often came as a feeling or flash of insight or a brief phrase.

As someone who had meditated and done other growth work for almost two decades, I couldn’t believe how disconnected from my inner voice I had become.

In my sessions with Lyn, we revisited both recent symptom flares and times in the past five years when my CFS had gotten suddenly worse. She had me sit in the body centered awareness, call that time up, and listen for a bodymind message. It was easier to do with her than on my own, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. I definitely think working with a trained Reverse Therapy coach is invaluable for many reasons, including this.

Early on, I relied on Lyn’s help often in seeing the ways that headmind was overriding my deeper needs and wishes. I didn’t have the capacity yet to see my own habit patterns and feel their impact on me. The tool that I wanted to use to understand and implement Reverse Therapy was the very part of my brain that had been creating my health crisis by ignoring my deeper needs and wants, and it just wasn’t going to allow me to have the necessary realizations, without someone else pointing them out to me.

For so long, I had been pushing myself in so many different ways, and many of them I truly couldn’t see. Those that I did see (usually because my husband or children had pointed them out to me), I couldn’t see any alternative to, because I believed my thinking around those behaviors unquestionly.

My days had become increasingly full of self-coercion and self-denial since becoming a parent. The examples are myriad and pedestrian, but they added up to a life that was sucked dry of fun, novelty, joy and self-actualization.

Any small housecleaning effort would invariably snowball into much more work than I originally meant to do — instead of cleaning one surface, or one room, I’d tell myself I needed to vacuum into the next room and down the stairs and into the basement to keep dirt from being tracked into my newly cleaned areas.

I would often walk farther than I intended (because the kids want to and I shouldn’t say no to more exercise for them); garden longer (there are always more weeds to pull and more veggies to harvest, process and store); or chain more errands together on an outing to save gas.

Nearly any activity could end up turning into what I called the Bataan Death March, but I never really saw clearly what I was doing to myself and how it was sucking the joy out of my life.

I had all sorts of good reasons for pushing myself. Headmind is clever that way and those of us who are bright can get saddled with a particularly overwhelming headmind – super cerebral and able to argue for what it wants very persuasively.

I had to save the planet with every carbon decision I made. I truly thought I was being good to myself by being efficient with my time and energy and stacking errands upon errands. Being a good homeschooler and parent meant always saying yes when the kids were excited to do something. Being a respectful parent meant never making the kids do things for me (which somehow morphed into never even asking the kids, thanks to another little quirk I have about not wanting to ask for help and taking a no as a personal rejection.)

I felt obliged to be a good wife, daughter, mother, environmentalist, pet owner, whatever — too many roles and too many unquestioned headmind rules about each role.
 I learned from Lyn to spot these expectations when they started running me.

I also learned from her that I didn’t need to justify myself or my actions, a particular aspect of speaking up for oneself that caused me stress.

So much of what I said or did was about making myself look better to my own highly critical headmind, which assumed that everyone else was judging me the same way it was. I would often overexplain things, especially if I was trying to say no. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be understood. (And of course I still do, but awareness robs the impulse of much of its power over me.) This need weighed down conversations and made them unenjoyable and tiring, even.

Lyn is a big fan of Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication, and she often cited his admonition to not do anything for others unless it felt as free and happy to you as tossing food to the ducks at a pond.

I was pretty shocked by that idea – I was quite in thrall to my headmind’s rule that as a responsible mother/spouse/friend that I am supposed to do a lot more than that for others; in fact, I labored under the belief I should always say yes.

And yet, that sounded so delightful — to only do something if it felt like feeding ducks — that I started saying more noes and much to my surprise, no one complained about it.

Almost magically, once I released myself from the obligation to say yes, I would often find that I really did want to say yes, but for a different, sweeter reason than being afraid to disappoint or anger, and that new, uncoerced yes resulted in a deeper, more lovely experience of whatever I had agreed to.

Another way that my headmind was out of control and kept me in thrall was through its catastrophizing.  Mine is magnificent at imagining the worst possible outcome of any situation, presumably in a dysfunctional attempt to keep me safe. I could so quickly spiral into negative thinking and anxiety when I let it run amok.

I now have learned to yank its leash whenever it wants to start telling me about all the bad things that could happen. I finally have gotten to the point where I can laugh with exasperation when I catch it, and just keep pulling it off the path of doom and back into the current moment, which is always fine and safe and where there is always enough.

For many years, I mistakenly believed I had to listen to all my thoughts or I would be “repressing” them in an unhealthy way. I am finally learning that certain thinking is simply a bad neurological habit and I need to pull the electrical impulses out of that groove in my brain and down a peaceful, calm neural pathway instead.

Making those changes and rewiring my brain has gotten easier and easier over the eight months since I started my recovery.

Today, three months after my last session with Lyn, my symptom rises are much less common and for the most part feel like a small surge of anxiety or panic to me; they don’t rise to the level of physical symptoms anymore. Most of the time I am able to figure out what I am doing to myself to cause bodymind to squawk a warning. I might go days or even a week or so without any, then I’ll hit a situation that I haven’t consciously navigated yet and find that I am pushing myself in some way or other and triggering a message from bodymind.

Right now I have entered a time of the year that is full of headmind rules, a time that in most of the last six years would culminate in a big crash of some sort or other. My headmind was certain I had some sort of seasonal affective disorder or Vitamin D deficiency, but I now understand quite clearly my crashes were about pressures I was only peripherally aware of placing on myself.

Between October and January my husband and I, our two kids, and both grandmothers have birthdays, and of course there is Thanksgiving and Christmas to navigate with all the competing expectations of extended families.

As the oldest child, the smart one, the fixer, the empath, the thoughtful gift-giver, the mother, the daughter, the wife, I — or more properly headmind – had put so many expectations and chores on myself, to make birthdays and Christmas special and perfect, to do it all myself and do it as beautifully and meaningfully as possible, it’s no wonder I had grown to hate the holiday season, without being entirely conscious of it.

I am looking forward to the holidays this year – partly because it feels so damned good to catch and free myself from the expectations I have habitually carried, and partly because I know that I’m really going to enjoy myself this year, doing only what I want to do and mindfully taking care of myself while we celebrate together.

I really feel that I am well now, even though I am still uncovering places and situations where I don’t realize I am coercing myself or where I am ignoring my own needs. I expect to find these situations for years to come, and I’m totally fine with that, because I have the tools and the understanding I need to deal with them. I look forward to it even, because it is immensely satisfying to grow in this particular way.

So, if you’ve read this far and you’re struggling with some sort of chronic, idiopathic condition, I encourage you to consider Reverse Therapy.

I spent about $130 US for my first RT session. And that’s all I had to commit to, one session. I often spent more than that in one visit to the health food and supplement store, or one visit to my integrative physician.

I saw significant results as soon as I read the Reverse Therapy e-book, began to re-frame what I was experiencing, and gave myself permission to begin doing more of what made me happy.

I will compile links to the many testimonials that convinced me to give this process a try in a final post and hope that my experiences as detailed in this blog will add to that body of evidence and encourage others dealing with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia or other chronic, idiopathic illnesses to suspend the mind’s arguments against a mind-body solution and give Reverse Therapy a try.

How Reverse Therapy Worked for Me

Learning to Be a Well Person Again

A funny thing happened to me in early November that illustrated to me how much relearning I have still to do.

One day I suddenly had a huge symptom rise, of a new sort of symptom. I spent several hours worrying about why I was suddenly experiencing fibromyalgia-like aches and pains. Headmind tried to convince me that I was relapsing with post-viral symptoms, that my whole recovery had been a sham and I was destined to slide back into bedbound chronic fatigue. (Thanks, idiotic headmind. What did I do in a previous life to get saddled with you as my frontal cortex?)

Awash in anxiety, I sat and grounded my attention into my body to ask bodymind what messages I was ignoring. My thinking mind reviewed Christmas shopping and Thanksgiving planning I’d been doing and wondered if I was falling back into perfectionist patterns, but it wasn’t headmind’s question to answer, so I kept grounding into breathing and body sensations and asking bodymind. All I got was, “Take care of yourself.”

Mystified, frustrated, and frightened, I took a bath and sat in front of the fire, trying to get warm, finally going to bed early with a rice bag and a space heater. It was not until halfway through the next day that I realized I had come down with a vicious virus.

It had been so long since I had been sick that I didn’t recognize the symptoms. One of the hallmarks of chronic fatigue syndrome is that people with it don’t get sick with ordinary viruses – something about the immune system being on high alert constantly and repelling all boarders.

So it was a good sign that I was sick, confirmation that my chronically over-active SNS/immune response had indeed subsided. Unfortunately, the virus going around was a whopper and it hung on for three weeks, prompting me to go to my doctor, who prescribed a course of antibiotics for a suspected secondary infection. Compounding matters was the fact that the week before I got sick, I’d developed a painful and serious eye infection with no clear idea of how I caught it.

Having two health issues at once triggered a lot of neurotic thinking. Over those three weeks, I worried that I wouldn’t get well. I worried that this was going to linger like the virus six years ago that started my whole cascade of illness/symptoms. I worried that there was some significant inflammatory or autoimmune issue underlying my eye infection and my failure to kick the virus (a worry my doctor reinforced by wondering the same thing aloud to me. Doctors are not the best people for those with hypochondriac tendencies to talk to). I realized how completely I had lost perspective on illness and wellness.

When I first figured out I was sick, I dropped Lyn an email, because I was amused that I had mistaken a virus for a symptom rise and tried to get bodymind to tell me what message I was ignoring. I expected her to say something along the lines of, “oh, everyone makes that mistake the first time they get a cold after recovering.” But she just wrote, “it’s all part of learning to be a well person again,” and I was faintly puzzled by her reply. Once I realized I was sick and not ignoring bodymind messages, wasn’t that all I needed to know?

Over the course of the next three weeks, I realized that in fact, I did have to re-learn how to be sick without fearful, neurotic thinking. I had to learn to be sick like a well person – to listen to my body, to follow my doctor’s advice (instead of second guessing the antibiotic prescription or taking bunches of random supplements) and to not stress myself out with worries about never recovering fully.

My headmind was relentless in its fears and worrying. I remember Lyn telling me during our early sessions that she sometimes had to stomp her feet and shake her head and say “shut up!” aloud to her head mind when it started driving her crazy.

At the time, I thought that seemed a bit silly, but I found myself doing the exact same thing over and over again during the course of my illness. I simply couldn’t afford to let headmind finish its neurotic thought about my illness.

I have indeed fully recovered from the virus. It took a not unreasonable three weeks. My eye infection and inflammation is almost completely healed also, though it took a week or two longer.

I have known for years that I worry too much about getting sick or about the kids getting sick, but I hadn’t realized fully how neurotic my thinking had become.

It started when I became a parent and felt panic at the thought of being sick and not being able to take care of my helpless infant. I was feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of parenting and making the headmind mistake of thinking I couldn’t ask for help (because I was trying to parent perfectly and nobody else could possibly step in and do a good enough job).

This anxiety kicked into high gear when my son’s every head cold became severe croup from the age of two to eight, landing us in the ER many times a year for most of those years.

Despite the fact that my children are teens now and perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and me when I am sick,  and my son’s croup is long outgrown, the fear of illness remains. A classic example of the cognitive error of overgeneralizing, assuming that because something happened in the past, it will always happen.

It was a slow slide from functional concern to dysfunctional anxiety and fear and I will probably have to mindfully navigate a few more ordinary (or even mystifying) illnesses before I can say that I have learned to be sick like a well person again, but I know it is doable and I know how to do it – be mindful, catch every anxious thought, and shut it down firmly. Reject the fears and the worries. Do not entertain them, even for a moment.

If I have to shake my head and stamp my feet and say “Shut up!” to my headmind, I’m even willing to do that. Better to look crazy than drive yourself crazy, is my new motto.

Next up on my re-learning how to be a well person agenda is continuing to navigate the holidays and family birthdays season without wearing myself down and sucking all the joy out of my life. I am definitely making a lot of progress, but bodymind has had occasion to speak up a few times already and tell me to stop pushing and go have some fun.

Part of undoing perfectionism is not expecting myself to be perfectly mindful this holiday season, but accepting that I will upon occasion slip into old habit patterns, experience a symptom, catch the message and change what I am doing. I may write a blog post about what I have learned in this arena, once the holidays are over.

Learning to Be a Well Person Again

One Hundred Percent

I’m returning to this blog to update how I am, a year and a few months out from the start of my recovery via Reverse Therapy, mostly because I remember reading recovery stories when I was ill and having that worried voice say, “what if it didn’t stick? They haven’t posted in a while. What if they’ve crashed again, or worse?” That voice. I’m so grateful that I stopped believing it and that it stopped plaguing me.

I remember my RT coach, Lyn White, urging me on several occasions, as I was wrapping up my coaching with her, to not settle for 90 percent — to not accept almost well for completely well.

I wasn’t sure in the months after I “graduated” from her coaching whether I would get all the way there or not. I certainly felt mostly well – and that was a deliriously wonderful improvement from the last several years.

Looking back over this blog, I see where early on I pronounced myself recovered because I could live my normal life again. But at some level I was still afraid to “push” my activity levels, and I still had symptom rises with varying frequency — only now I understood them to be messages and I tried to listen to them as such. I was very much still learning about the various ways I was pushing myself, not honoring boundaries or saying no to myself for arbitrary headmind reasons.

I don’t know if I just had to give my endocrine system more time to smooth out and rebalance, or whether the ongoing work I am doing to shift my life towards joy in so many small ways each day finally reached a tipping point that allowed the last of my CFS symptoms to recede, but I can report that despite having what I would once have called a hellish first half of this year, I am 100 percent well.

I feel normal in myriad subtle ways that were once so out of whack – how much less sleep I need now, how less likely to startle I am, the falling away of my salt cravings, how I can choose to push myself if life calls for it and not experience a symptom flare.

My energy is back as completely as I think I can expect it to be, given that the last time I was 100 percent well was six years ago, when I was 45. I am vigorously rehabbing long-neglected food and flower gardens for a couple of hours a day. I keep a much tidier house than I have since becoming a parent (long before the onset of chronic fatigue symptoms), and I revel in the ease with which I do so. I am back to hosting six- or seven-hour long game parties regularly.

I have begun practicing yoga again, but in a different way than ever before – now, I really listen to how my body feels as I move through the poses, and I adjust based on what makes my body feel good and what makes me happy, rather than pushing to get closer to the “right” pose or to do everything that should be in a “complete” yoga session.

And I am able to take on physically and emotionally grueling tasks with nary a symptom rise.

In the midst of all of my personal progress towards full health, suddenly and completely unexpectedly my father died in January and I have been traveling to California and back every month or two (sometimes flying, sometimes taking 1100-mile road trips) to help my mom navigate these early months of widowhood and to make the many necessary arrangements for the lovely Celebration of Life event we held last week.

On top of this grief came an unexpected economic blow — in February my husband walked away from a publishing gig that provided more than half of our income when his employer’s casual racism and homophobia turned into outright discrimination.

This is particularly significant because the final crescendoing of my chronic fatigue syndrome was in part precipitated by my husband’s previous magazine closing its doors unexpectedly and leaving us in murky financial waters. This time I am blessedly free of the anxiety I experienced then.

Perhaps its because we’ve been through this before and I know that work shows up eventually and we make ends meet through generous family members, new freelance projects, and money sometimes literally falling into our laps. Perhaps its just the cumulative work I’ve done on questioning my thinking and beliefs about everything but especially the future. Perhaps it’s my willingness to say yes to the things that make me happy, without my inner frugal tyrant automatically vetoing every discretionary expenditure.

Whatever the reason, I feel hopeful and happy, healthy and well. I am productive, caring and on top of the details of my life again because it makes me happy to do so, not because I think I’m supposed to do all these things to be a good neighbor, friend, homemaker, wife, parent, or daughter. And I am certain that this has been key to my full recovery.

I have internalized enough of the lessons and instructions of Reverse Therapy and I have so completely embraced the belief that seeking joy should be my guidepost from here on out that I don’t need the symptoms, the signals from bodymind, any longer.

Lyn talked about this being the eventual endpoint of a successful Reverse Therapy recovery. I wasn’t quite sure I believed her, or believed that I could get there. I feel that I have now, after 15 increasingly happy, meaningful, energetic months. Even in the midst of mourning my father, I am excited for the future, and grounded in a grateful, happy, fun, creative, connection-filled present.

As a final assurance to quiet any voices that might be worrying that it won’t stick (not mine, but perhaps yours), I solemnly promise to revisit this blog if I ever have a relapse, a resurgence of symptoms, or a crash. I have zero fear of this, but I also have no problem with sharing it should it ever happen.

I wish any who read this a full recovery and I hope the details I have shared of my experiences can help break down mental resistance to the idea of Reverse Therapy, for those of you who might be considering it. One hundred percent recovery is possible and we should settle for nothing less.

One Hundred Percent

Shifting Focus

I created this blog for one purpose, to share my story of decline over five years into completely debilitating chronic fatigue, and my recovery over the course of some months via Reverse Therapy.

I am not sure I would have ever recovered if others had not posted their stories of recovery (many, but not all of them, via Reverse Therapy). There is little hope held out for more than symptom management within the community of long-time sufferers.

I needed to read that full recovery was widely possible, I needed that hope to combat the fear and anxiety of being so ill, with little understanding and  no real solutions offered by conventional or alternative medicines. I wanted to offer that hope back in gratitude to the others who have taken time out of their new lives to revisit such a difficult chapter.

Now, 10 months after I started my recovery process, I am excited to continue what started out as a medical therapy but has whetted my appetite for more self-awareness, more insight into my self-limiting thoughts and beliefs, and more connection with what makes me happy, with my creative energies and insights, and with my larger world.

I find that I still want to write about my new explorations and insights, but not in the context of recovering from CFS; simply as a person reconnecting with her inner voice, pursuing meaning and learning to choose joy always.

So I am starting a new blog where I will acknowledge my experiences of illness and recovery, but they won’t be a focus.

I will close this blog with links to some of the recovery stories I found that helped me take a leap that my worrying, analytical mind fought tooth and nail, and try Reverse Therapy. And, as always, I wish anyone and everyone who reads this a full, healthy, happy life.

This was one of the first recovery stories I found, a youtube video by a woman who used Reverse Therapy and if I recall correctly, some other nutritional therapies to recover fully.

Kathleen Kettles, a Reverse Therapy practitioner, has an excellent collection of recovery stories from her clients.

This is a collection of six full recovery stories in which people each used different approaches.

This is my Reverse Therapy coach’s page of client testimonials.

This blog details one man’s significant improvements with Mickel’s Therapy.

This I consider to be one of the wackier stories in some ways, but also one of the more telling ones, and it was also one of the first ones I found. This young woman posted a youtube video about being increasingly debilitated by chronic fatigue, deciding to quit (or having to quit? I don’t recall exactly) her job and follow a childhood dream of being a numerologist. It echoes a number of other stories that people have from time to time brought to the online CFS/ME community of Phoenix Rising, stories of people recovering by throwing themselves into a yoga practice, or deciding to leave a marriage, or in some way make a major life change (and in my interpretation, listen to a major inner voice they had been ignoring.)

These are case studies from Dr. John Eaton, the creator of Reverse Therapy.

Shifting Focus