First the Hardship, Then the Healing 

It’s a frustrating, devastating and scary spiral when you don’t know how to help yourself.

The Struggle is Real:  Dealing with Complex Chronic Illnesses is Devastating

If you are feeling overwhelmed or stuck today, this article is for you.

Don’t you love to read stories where the main character, the hero, the heroine, overcomes great adversity and comes back to the community with marvelous gifts to share? I find it especially gratifying to read the nitty-gritty details of her struggles. 

Tell me how she handles the days when she hits a wall and feels she can’t take another step. Surprise me with the tale of how a miraculous fork in the road finally appears in the depth of her despair, possibilities arising that were previously obscured, and a way forward presents itself.

These are the stories that inspire us, am I right?  We want to know the behind-the-scenes details. Like author Glennon Doyle has written:  first tell of the pain, the depth of your struggle, and then the steps of your arising.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to walk alongside several women in my Fibromyalgia Coaching practice who in addition to managing their fibromyalgia, have additional serious physical and mental health conditions, adding layers of intensity and complexity to their experience of being chronically ill.

Sometimes it’s impossible to sort out which condition is causing what symptom as fibromyalgia acts as an amplifier and turns up the volume on all the symptoms.

You know what it is like: The IBS flares, the migraines increase in frequency, the depression and anxiety worsen, the pain and brain fog intensify, sleep, always fragile, is even more disrupted, and energy dissipates rapidly in the face of an onslaught of debilitating fatigue. 

It’s a frustrating, devastating and scary spiral when you don’t know how to help yourself. Yet, I see these women showing up in their lives with everyday resilience and so, so much courage.  Sometimes they don’t even realize how courageous they are, as they do their best to manage confusing and poorly understood chronic illnesses.

One of these women that I’ve been coaching for nearly a year gave me permission to share some of her complex health journey and her experience in coaching with you.

Descent into the Depths

Dale was a university professor teaching animal science and veterinary classes to pre-veterinary undergraduate students for nearly 30 years. It was a job she loved. It was a job she was good at. She thrived in the university environment until she didn’t.

She describes the year 2010 as a perfect storm of stressors. Her state was heavily impacted by the 2008 Great Recession and mortgage crisis, which led to severe cutbacks of faculty jobs at her university.

At the same time, her health started crashing from the stress in her workplace. She was plagued with intensely painful and disruptive GI issues that were eventually traced to pelvic floor muscle dysfunction, a condition she still struggles with on a daily basis.  It took years for her to also be diagnosed with fibromyalgia. 

It was hard on her marriage, it was hard to maintain friendships, it was hard to do her work.

Meanwhile, she was one of only four professors in her department who were allowed to keep their jobs, leaving her with intense survivor’s guilt. 

But while she felt fortunate to be able to keep teaching and doing the research she loved, she was only able to work another 7 years. She had to retire earlier than she wanted to because her health kept getting worse due to the demands of her job.

She wrote to me: “I was very angry that my body had let me down and I couldn’t work anymore.”

And let me tell you, I felt that loss and despair viscerally as I typed that sentence above.

I too have had to forego many opportunities in my career as an educator, psychotherapist, and health coach, because my physical and mental health conditions demanded all of my attention.

Twice over the course of my career, I had to take a two-year-long sabbatical from working to focus on healing and recovery. 

I’m sure you’re thinking of your own losses as well as you read these words.

It still bites, doesn’t it? 

The grief is real.

The loss of the things we wanted to accomplish and couldn’t, the disappointment of not becoming the person we set out to be because we have been sidelined by illness, hurts.

But Then Comes the Rising

But here is my favorite part of Dale’s story. When she began coaching last summer, Dale scored 56 in the high-moderate range on the FIQR, the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (Revised), an assessment tool often used in research studies.

Nine months later she completed a retake of the FIQR and scored 16, in the mild range of symptoms, a whopping 71% improvement. We were both so delighted we did a happy dance!

As we began her coaching program, she wrote to me:

I have no faith in my body…I need some help in figuring out my body needs and listening better to it.

So that is what we did.  Working together, Dale built a robust set of strategies to help her feel more confident and effective in handling her chronic conditions.

Here is what Dale had to say about her experience in coaching:

"I have been working with Robin for almost a year now.  I am delighted to say the improvement in my fibromyalgia symptoms has been significant thanks to coaching.

I am a person who has always just pushed through my symptoms and/or tried to ignore them, which only made my symptoms worse. I had pretty much given up hope that I could ever get better.

One of the first of many areas Robin and I worked on was to change my push-through mindset and my negative relationship with my body. It was hard for me to accept a body that no longer was able to do what I asked of it.  She has taught me how to treat my body with kindness and self-compassion.

I have learned that by making simple changes such as adding rest days to my calendar, decreasing the number of appointments per week, and listening to what my body needs will improve my symptoms significantly.

I have seen a decrease in my pain, more restful sleep and a decrease in anxiety and stress levels but most importantly, I know now I can get better."

Now, you may be wondering, what does an improvement like that mean?

Action Steps

Dale learned how to take action steps that gradually helped her feel more in charge of her own health, and you can too. 

There are great resources from neuropsychologist and best-selling author Dr. Rick Hanson on his website: rickhanson.com, where he has gathered a wealth of information on the science of changing your brain for the better.  He teaches a series of foundational micro-practices that are so relevant for Fibro Folks.

Practice #1:  Be kind to yourself. He suggests taking the same sense of being kind to someone and applying it to yourself. Just wish yourself well. Imagine soft thoughts directed at yourself such as “I see you. I see things are hard for you. I see your suffering. I see your sadness, your stress, your worry, your pain, your loss. I see that, and I have compassion for you.”

Practice #2:  Widen Your View. Get a sense of things as a whole or feeling in a widening way, in a more spacious way can change your perspective. I often refer to this practice as Zooming Out to get a sense of the big picture. He says, “Your life matters, your experience matters and it is simultaneously part of a vaster whole. You might find a real settling, calming, tender, sweet, openhearted peacefulness in the sense of this.”

Practice #3:  Rest in What is Not Ruminating. Ruminating is that experience of repetitive, obsessive, unproductive thinking about our chronic illness that accomplishes little and is very distressing. Dr. Hanson says, “When we ruminate or worry less, we function better. We become more able to really solve our problems and to really deal with hard things.” 

You can take a step back from the fearful thoughts, even imagine putting them in a box or a basket on the other side of the room. And then you can just name what is happening. You might say, "Oh, I’m ruminating again, or here come the worries, here come the regrets again."

So, you name it, detach from the worries for a moment by widening your view, and then find a way to be kind to yourself.