Coming to understand yourself is the single most important thing you get to do in your life! When it comes to healing a chronic condition, some of the tools you can use to understand your personality type can reveal explicit treatment approaches, lifestyle and even useful attitude modifications that might otherwise elude you, because they spotlight things about YOU that might not apply to the next person.
Introversion, visual or non-linear thinking, social anxiety, chronic or social fatigue, autism, high sensitivity...looking at all the many, often overlapping, factors that might make writing preferable to conversation for a lot of people and considering is this wrong, of just wonderfully different?
Being diverse has got to be allowed, as a valid possibility, from the moment we are born, which takes a new kind of culture; one that has reached a whole new stage of maturity and with emphasis to that word "whole".
As an adjunct to clearing the body of old emotional memories in order to heal, it's important to start a blank canvas of creating positive NEW body memories that invite the body to take part in choosing what makes it feel good. Here's how I'm using that understanding to move into the later stages of recovery from chronic illness, shifting me into a new place when it comes to how resilient and good my body feels (yes, we all still have our off days)...
Our personal version of alchemy is so often performed without even thinking about it, when lost in those tasks that take us deep into ourselves, into our innate knowing and our joy. So often, we learn to treat such activities as self-indulgent, pointless or plain weird and yet, the paradox is, they often hold he key to our deepest transformation...in other words, they are exactly what we need to be doing right now.
Stress has been the modern pandemic since long before covid-19 came along, which is why so many people and systems have been wrong-footed by it...but therein lies the opportunity to evolve. individually and collectively.
Imagine going through life at cross-purposes with most of the people around you...not because you are broken but because you are different to a degree you didn't realise until now. Plunging the challenging world of neurodiverse relationships from personal experience, from some books I can recommend and from the perspective of some fresh new approaches to autism that are (thankfully) starting to appear.
Are you an introvert, a sensitive, have you come to equate this with being alone? Then let me tell you, this is your time...and I have a story to share, from my own introversion, that will explain just why this is about to become the best gift of your life...if you let it.
Being a High Sensation Seeking HSP is a package of being both highly sensitive yet kind of addicted to the buzz of a thrilling experience and novelty; a craving for being in a regularly high state of mental or physical arousal. If you've spent years being almost painfully sensitive or even unwell, perhaps with chronic fatigue, you may quickly brush this off as nonsense in your own case. Yet, as I discovered, it pays not to be so quick to dismiss this possible trait because finding out you have it (if in some less obvious or conventional ways than other people) could shed an enormous amount of light on your long-running health or other issues.
Is this you? INFJ personality types can feel like they have the whole weight of the world on their shoulders though no one else around them seems to care quite as much about what is going on. People around them don’t even realise how alone or burdened they are feeling since they give the impression of being far more gregarious, up-beat and outwardly focussed than they really are. Rather, people love being around them and feel relaxed in their company as they have a knack of putting people at ease and uplifting their mood. The fact that they tend to process their deep-and-innermosts outwardly, even publically, seems to contradict their deep introversion (my blog-writing is point in case) and it sends people off track when they think they are getting to know someone far more extroverted than they really are. This can leave the INFJ feeling even more isolated because even their friends don’t truly “get them” and there is always that nagging feeling that they would be dropped like a hot brick if the extent of their introversion ever “came out”, like people would think they were a fraud (they’re not…they’re just a paradox).
Living whole 