coaching

Childhood Emotional Abandonment and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

I pay my bills these days by working as a confidence coach/therapist via Skype. I have clients all around the world. Some of my clients have CFS and contact me via this site, while others dealing with anxiety contact me via The Confident Man Project website.

I recently wrote an article on How To Recover From Childhood Emotional Abandonment which several readers have really related to. I avoided addressing this issue for a long time out of fear, but I believe it’s the core issue behind my illness.

Whether I got sick because my nervous system was just overwhelmed with existential anxiety or whether it was because I was always pushing myself too hard to try and compensate from a deep seated feeling of “not being good enough”, I can’t really say for sure. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

What Would I Recommend?

Just got this question via E-mail from a woman who has had ME since 1986 and thought I’d share my answer with you all:

Knowing how hard it is to be disciplined when one is exhausted, would you recommend Gupta, Dynamic NRS or something else?

My short answer is to focus your energy on getting the life that you want, rather than on recovery from ME per-se. That said: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

The Meaning Of Life Experiment

I’ve spent the last month completing Ashok Gupta’s Meaning Of Life Experiment, after being reminded of it on the Community Of Hope For Recovery group on Facebook. It sounds like Ashok is doing a Deepak and expanding his teaching beyond just CFS sufferers to the masses. Here’s what I discovered about the meaning of life…

I really liked the effect of making the commitment to doing a 20 minute meditation every day using the meditations in the iPhone app. It gives you the choice of a 10 or 20 minute guided meditation led by Ashok’s familiar soothing voice. The Soften and Flow meditation sounded particularly familiar… It’s exactly the same as the one in his Amygdala Retraining Program; which must make the references to symptoms sound a bit out of place to people without any physical health condition.

I enjoyed the daily teaching videos too. While the metaphors he uses are new, the videos encapsulate a lot of what I learned during my counselling and life coach training and my own life journey from head to heart. Not bad given that you get this all for free given what I’ve forked out for a zillion courses over the years.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Why I Highly Recommend Yin Yoga

Just over a month ago I joined my local yoga studio in the hope that it would help reduced the severity of my headaches. So far it seems to be working. At first I tried mostly regular yoga classes, doing about 5 a week. It was too much for me; after a few days I was starting to feel faint during the class, so I backed off and switched to the yin yoga classes instead.

Yin yoga feels much better to me as it is primarily restorative so I don’t end up overdoing it. Rather than moving through a fairly rapid sequence of postures as you do in regular yoga, the yin variant involves holding a supposedly restful pose for about 5 or so minutes and basically meditating there. Then we rest completely for a couple of minutes before the next one.

I say “supposedly restful” because the postures still involve quite a bit of stretching for my inflexible body. After a couple of minutes I start to feel increasingly uncomfortable and the idea is to relax into the discomfort and breathe through it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

A Breakthrough in the Healthy Expression of Anger

Up until recently, are used to suppress/repress/internalise my anger. In fact, I now believe this is one of the main reasons why I came down with CFS. But now, after a lot of anger expression workshops, therapy, and non-violent communication practice, things are starting to change for me.

Do You Express Your Anger Constructively?

Do You Express Your Anger Constructively?

On the weekend, I attended yet another anger expression workshop called “Feel and Heal Anger”. The idea behind the workshop was that when were out of touch with our anger, we often internalise it self-destructively or project it outwards onto other people as violence or other forms of abuse, both of which are unhealthy.

The aim of the workshop was to get in touch with our anger and express it in ways that didn’t hurt anybody else, or ourselves. There were boundary setting exercises, group sharing, and dynamic burn meditations to help us process the anger and the grief that lies underneath it.

At this particular workshop, I felt more sadness and grief that anger and rage. But I figure if I’m feeling emotions, then the process must be working. I had a fairly sleepless night after the workshop as my body was still processing feelings that came up for me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago