One of my most helpful mentors is a guy named Nicholas de Castella, who developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome after a series of particularly stressful life events. He fully recovered years ago, and attributes his recovery to developing and using emotional intelligence. I remember asking Nicholas during a private phone conversation Read more…
I recently came across a fascinating talk on YouTube by Dr Gabor Mate, a physician with a background in palliative care who wrote the book When The Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection. His talk covers the link between compulsive care-giving/people-pleasing behavior, and physical illness.
I really relate to what he says. I used to have a successful Engineering career from which I burned out several years before I came down with CFS. I too was a compulsive care-giver and people-pleaser.
While working as an engineer I was heavily involved at my local church and did volunteer work on a 24 hour telephone crisis line. I enjoyed the feeling of helping people in crisis, but I can see now looking back that I was in a constant state of stress. I often did late night shifts at the crisis centre with a migraine, doped up on codeine-based pain-killers and desperate for the shift to end so I could go home to bed before yet another suicidal caller rang. Meanwhile my relationship with my girlfriend of the time was slowly falling apart, I was losing interest in the career I used to love, and my faith in the religion I was brought up with was going down the toilet.
I recently read Joe Dispenza’s book Breaking The Habit Of Being Yourself, which is all about how to use meditation to free your mind and body from the effects of your conditioning. I also spent a month using the associated guided meditations every day.
Overall, it’s a great book. It’s the kind of book I was thinking of writing in fact, so perhaps he’s saved me the trouble; but there are a couple of things in it that I found distracting:
I’ve noticed a consistent pattern among myself and my clients recovering from CFS: We all have a history of taking on too much stress and not really standing up for ourselves when other people do things we don’t like. Most of us had parents who weren’t willing or able to teach us how to deal with our emotions, to self-soothe our nervous system when we were in distress, or to stand up for ourselves when our emotional or physical boundaries were being violated. Often the person we most needed to stand up to was one or both of our parents themselves, and that rarely goes well when you’re a distressed child trying to stand up to an adult who is being unreasonable because their wounded inner child is running the show.
All of this is a recipe for ever increasing anger, resentment and frustration. We end up overcompensating in a desperate attempt to get our needs met because nobody taught us how to do this effectively. Internalise that toxic cocktail and it’s no wonder we end up sick.
Behaviour patterns learned as a child tend to stick even if they never really worked well, and coping strategies learned as a child rarely works well in the adult world. If nobody shows us a better way, it’s easy to continue behaving in ways that increase our internal store of resentment and frustration long into adulthood with no way of releasing the stress pressure cooker.
I was recently interviewed by another life coach about how I work with my coaching clients, and thought you might find it interesting. The interview focuses on healing emotional trauma: As always, I’d be interested in any feedback you have via a comment.
Stress can make you sick, and being sick all the time is stressful. I can see how that can become self-perpetuating. One of the antidotes to stress is to share what’s going on for us with other people. A burden shared is a burden lightened. This goes against my suck-it-up-boy Read more…
A couple of days a go I posted a couple of new pages on my blog about the [intlink id=”795″ type=”page”]coaching that I offer[/intlink], and published it to a wider audience on Twitter in the search for my first paying coaching client. I had been holding back on doing this until Read more…
I recently took up Tai Chi as part of the never-ending quest for better health. Tai Chi seems like the perfect exercise for someone with CFS, because it doesn’t feel like exercise. It’s just a series of slow graceful movements that don’t exactly get your heart racing. Initially, I started Read more…
I recently got myself an empathy buddy and am finding it tremendously helpful to receive some non-judgmental emotional support, especially when I’m feeling like crap. The idea is to have a buddy who listens to where I’m at without judging me and occasionally reflects back how I’m feeling and what Read more…
I’ve been taking things a little easier lately, and generally feeling better for it. I cut my acting practise back to two nights a week (instead of four), so I can accommodate the pick-up course I’m doing on two other nights a week. I get overwhelmed when I think how Read more…