chronic illness

Accepting the chronicity of chronic conditions (no mean achievement)

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Realising that you have been, at some level, in denial that chronic really means chronic or that you even have a chronic health condition in the first place can be a learning milestone. Denial leads to frequent lack of accommodations such as pacing, leads to miscommunication with other people and, most of all, sets you up for powerful disappointments when that's probably the very last thing that you need...and there can be another kind of power to be gained from acceptance of what you are really dealing with here.

Are you becoming more aligned with yourself than you realised?

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Has your year been really challenging in lots of ways….but….when you allow yourself to pull back and gain the overview, you can sense just how positively impactful and on track it has all really been? Can you sense how you have actually been getting much more in alignment with who you really are all along the way, if not always by the most predictable or tidy means? Can you sense that it has all been part of a new level of alignment taking shape, as though something is being orchestrated, however chaotic it may sometimes seem to be at the ground level? If you can even mildly glean that this applies to you then take pause for a moment in order to fully allow the realisation of this to swell in your consciousness. Take some time out at the end of the year to appreciate just how far you have come, no matter how messy or symptomatic your life still seems from within, and maybe jot down some of those things that have improved for you. Because its just so important, for your ongoing sense of progression, to notice how much nearer you now are to some aspiration you hold dear, unfinished business though it may all seem in this moment, or to notice all those many pieces of self-knowledge you wouldn't want to give back in exchange for easier circumstances, as have been picked up along the way. This is how we give ourselves the ongoing momentum to continue moving forwards, not to mention how we come to see the bigger picture of the way our lives are truly playing out so that we aren't always bogged down in the small stuff.

A need for more (positive) stimulation

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Positive stimulation is just so important to a person's recovery out of the cycle of chronic illness. Life has taught me that through experience this year...you have to be almost brazen in your courage and willingness to be positively stimulated to break out of the snake eating its own tail effect of assuming that all you need is quiet, routine and rest.

Environmental illness: the living tragedy of a sensitive response to places altered beyond recognition

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

When you have come to know a place so well it seems to have become part of you and yet that place is subjected to an onslaught of negative environmental effects that alter it beyond recognition, why wouldn't the effects be physical and utterly dire as regards your own health?

“You’re looking really well”: The curse of the invisible disability

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

The way human society is devised, the very foundation stones of its connectivity networks, is based on us all having relatable, sharable situations and people being able to recognise when another person is in strife. When you have chronic conditions that not only isolate you from other people due to an equally chronic lack of spoons, also causing you to be misunderstood by other people (as people tend to assume you are making up lame excuses when they can’t see the energy deficits you are having to work with!) then having the additional pitfall of nobody being able to recognise that you are ill, because your disabilities are hidden from sight, even when you finally come out of the woodwork, is the final sting in the tail.

Freeze response: the intersection of autism, trauma and chronic illness

~ Helen White ~ 4 Comments

What happens when huge amounts of energy get stuck in the body as trauma, leading to a freeze response or shutdown? How does this intersect with chronic conditions such as CFS, fibromyalgia, sensory defensiveness or other syndromes and does being autistic make you more prone to this? How can somatic therapies be used to discharge years of trauma? Exploring through my own deep-dive into the territory.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is debilitating, devastating, isolating and often quite unbearable and yet nobody that has not experienced it for themselves can imagine what it truly feels like on the inside; there is no point of reference for anyone that isn't wired that way since it is the product of particular genetics plus epigenetics combined with a lifetime of trauma. As a common experience of both autism and ADHD and something I experience myself, this important topic has been on my list of most daunting things to cover for quite some time...here goes.

Chronic environment

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Environment is such a big topic when it comes to chronic illness, perhaps an obvious one too but I also think far too many people with chronic health problems get so wrapped up in their own situation that they fall into the trap of imagining all their problems stem from a faulty body. Even when they do realise the environment may be playing a considerable part, they don't seem to see what the issues are or they assume there is nothing that can be done about it, but that's not entirely true...awareness always leads to choices we may have overlooked.

Syndromes

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Suddenly, people like me, on the long-haul to solo self-recovery from "mystery" illnesses find we are not all alone in here. Amidst the sea of people embarking on the bewildering covid long-haul recovery path, I'm hearing such a lot of talk about syndromes that are painfully familiar turf. So, what would I share with anyone at the start of such a journey and what does (or will) the coincidence potentially tell us about chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, PoTs, MCAS and a whole load of other overlapping syndromes? Here begins the mass learning curve!