Written by: Christine Lutley, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Why fighting doesn’t help. Being a warrior against chronic pain, fatigue, and fibromyalgia is not productive. What we resist persists. What we fight in us expands because we are feeding it with our attention, emotion, and energy and literally giving it resources to grow. We definitely do not want our symptoms to last or get worse. Fighting fibromyalgia is a mistake.
Fighting symptoms is not the same as fighting a pathogen or wanting to kill a tumor inside. There is no pathogen. There is nothing inside us from Fibromyalgia that is known to be something we either can or would want to kill. Fibromyalgia is a syndrome, a collection of common symptoms described by a group who shares them in common. You cannot fight a syndrome and win. Fighting our situation or the facts of our condition does not help. We need to stop fighting. Accepting our reality is necessary before we can change it. Fighting also contradicts our natural feminine energy. The Divine Feminine accepts, listens, loves, supports, and heals. We need to heal, not fight. We need love, not war.
Fighting the enemy inside us is risky. Fighting makes it worse and we simply don’t have the energy to waste. Besides, our autonomic nervous system is already all about fighting for survival and we frankly need a break from that. It is triggered over and over, taking us from a peaceful and healthy rest and digest state and putting us into a sympathetic fight or flight state, or a dissociative freeze state, over and over many times a day.
Most of us face very few dangers requiring us to run from danger or to fight or freeze to protect ourselves.
We rarely require these quick survival responses.
Still, our bodily systems generate the stress response automatically, stress hormones are released, and our physiology reacts so we can fight, flee, or freeze.
Then, we don’t use the energy generated by these hormones and it doesn’t get released. The energy gets stuck. We spend too much time in this state which is called the parasympathetic state. The long-term effect on us is disruption and dis-ease, including chronic pain and fatigue. Modern life with constant news about all that is going on in the world, information overload, and constant interactivity is overwhelming and exhausting and contributes to sympathetic dominance which can lead to many kinds of disease. A history of trauma also predisposes us to this hypervigilance and parasympathetic dominance. Peace and calm are missing when we are sympathetic dominant. They exist in the opposite state, the parasympathetic state which is about resting, digesting, and rebuilding our cells. It is about healing. Our focus needs to be on healing, not on fighting. Our Vegas nerve communicates information from our brain to our body, including all our organs down to our gut, and back up our body to our brain. It is a perfect mechanism to communicate widespread and changeable symptoms and/or to communicate healing responses.
Suppressing doesn’t help
Most of us learned young to suppress our emotions, the ones others considered too exuberant, and the ones others didn’t want to deal with. Trauma further suppresses our emotions while adding on shame. Our bodies hold our memories, our wounds, and our feelings. Our systems can only hold so much before they start to gently call out for help, using symptoms like pain and fatigue to get our attention. But we often push through and ignore the symptoms. That delays the inevitable. Unaware of the turbulence in us and the cries for help, we keep going, pushing through all obstacles. Eventually, it caught up with those of us who have fibromyalgia. This is an oversimplified but true explanation of fibromyalgia. It is a state we get in, and it is a syndrome, a collection of symptoms shared by certain people.
Expecting doesn’t help.
We have been conditioned to believe we are ill and need an external medical cure. We have been taught, particularly by the pharmaceutical industry, to expect a quick fix in the form of a pill. Then, the opioid crisis happened, and it continues to worsen, so now painkillers are hard to get. That doesn’t mean we have a pain medication deficiency. It means we need another answer. It means we can’t have a quick fix which isn’t realistic to expect for a mysterious syndrome like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue.
Blaming doesn’t help.
The suggestion that there is a mental or emotional component to our condition is not a judgment. It is not a criticism. It is simply an observation by those who understand those parts of us more than we, patients, might ourselves. Our thoughts, feelings, actions, habits, behaviors, lifestyles, and results all affect each other. Fibromyalgia affects the whole of our beings and all our lives. Disputing that doesn’t change it. Disputing it is just another form of resistance. Our thoughts and feelings are no less human than our physical bodies. Those who disown the impact of chronic illness on us mentally and emotionally do a disservice to themselves and to the fibromyalgia community. There is a lot of negativity and misinformation in the fibromyalgia community. For example, many believe fibro is permanent and progressive, likely because doctors have said it is incurable and advised accepting it. That does not mean that it is accurate that it is permanent and progressive. It doesn't make that objectively true. The truth is that if we believe it is permanent and progressive, that will be our experience.
Blaming doctors is not the answer. There are no “stupid” doctors, but I hear and read about them all the time from women with fibro. No doctor is stupid or they wouldn’t survive 10 to 14 years of higher education to become doctors. They want to help but end up in a flawed medical system without the time and resources to be able to help everyone. Medicine is good for acute illness and injury; but is not nearly effective for chronic conditions.
Your doctor said it is incurable, so expecting a cure is unwise.
Your doctor said you must live with it. (S)he is right about that for now. We must accept the hand we have been dealt. That doesn’t mean it is permanent.
(S)he might or might not have said you can learn to live well with it.
(S)he might or might not have educated you about fibromyalgia and your treatment options. With doctor shortages, (s)he likely doesn’t have time to educate you, and it isn’t her responsibility to educate you. There are people who do educate, guide, coach, and hold us accountable.
What does it help?
Being aware that conditioning profoundly influences our thoughts and beliefs both in childhood and as adults through advertising and programming. This awareness gives us the opportunity to question our beliefs and to see who is responsible for our thinking that our health is the responsibility of our doctors. Only we can be responsible for our health. Our doctors can only help with health issues. They have given us a diagnosis and have told us there is no cure. Our waiting for a cure does not help.
We don’t need to suffer simply because there is no cure. It is not an external cure that we need. Accepting responsibility for our own health and our own healing is a much smarter response and it really isn’t that difficult. That is what we really need. Change is only possible in any part of our lives by making changes to ourselves and our habits to change our results. Following the advice and guidance of someone who has achieved what you want to achieve is a smart way to accomplish any goal whether that goal is to become a better runner, lose weight, fix a relationship, or improve your health or your life. Like everything else, there are people who live well with fibromyalgia and with a history of trauma. I am one of them. I am healthy, active, and productive. Yes, I coach and train others to heal themselves. I inspire, educate, guide, motivate, coach, and hold women accountable so they can heal themselves and improve their health and lives to achieve goals they thought they couldn’t.
It helps to learn that there is something we can do about our suffering from chronic pain and fatigue from fibromyalgia. It helps to know there are people including me who can help. We are walking-evidence we have already helped ourselves and helped others.
That awareness helps by inspiring us to listen to our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, and our symptoms. It puts us in the position to see the importance of removing ourselves from situations and people that insult our souls. It inspires us to look at our wounds, perhaps from over a lifetime with support.
Having goals, focusing on them, and setting out to achieve them helps. Knowing how to do that helps. Failing that, having access to someone who knows how to do that and can coach you helps.
Learning what is going on in us from a big-picture spiritual perspective helps. We are complex beings with a spiritual essence, an energy body, a physical body, a conscious mental mind, and an unconscious emotional body. The mind-body relationship is real and we can influence it to our advantage. We need to be whole, with nothing suppressed, to be healthy.
If we believe we are responsible for our wellness and can get well, it becomes possible for us to create our wellness. Everything exists as a thought first. Understanding this and learning to control and edit our thoughts, beliefs, and words helps enormously.
Our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings all affect our actions, habits, behaviors, and results. Changing our minds changes our actions and therefore our results. There is no other way. Knowing this helps. (Medication and surgery exist for those cases where we cannot change our results by changing our minds and therefore need surgical and medical intervention after a heart attack, or a severe injury, degeneration, or disease.)
Our thoughts and beliefs are also manageable and changeable. We can learn to examine them and figure out where they came from, whether they are true or false, and harmful or helpful. Many of our ideas about health, suffering, doctors, medicine, and healing are deeply ingrained and might or might not serve us. We can change our minds and our beliefs, or thoughts and our self-talk, how we feel, our actions, habits, behaviors, and lifestyles, and change our lives and our health and wellness in the process.
You can, too. I wish I had a coach when I was first diagnosed. I was lucky to have had a doctor whose specialty was fibromyalgia. He educated me especially, to seek information about fibro, provided resources, and treated me. He tried to cure me. I no longer believe I needed to be cured because many years later, I have largely healed myself and I am much healthier and happier at seventy than I was at forty-five.
Chronic pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia are cries for help and healing. Healing requires love, support, and nurturing. It requires a big-picture approach from a spiritual perspective. In my approach, we are spiritual beings using four bodies to experience life on earth.
Physical Body
Listen to your body and love and support it. It isn’t betraying you but crying for help. Listen and support it.
Eat a healthy whole-food diet.
Avoid any food, chemical, & environmental sensitivities you have.
Get some exercise & movement, without overdoing it.
Go outside in the sunshine and in nature, even briefly, on a regular basis.
Get enough rest and sleep. Sleep hygiene is important.
Create healthy habits to cause your wellness.
Mental Body
Focus on what you want and love because what we focus on grows.
Focus on solutions and hope.
Don’t focus on what you don’t want and what you hate.
Don’t focus on your problems and on negativity.
Increase the peace and calm in your life.
Reduce the stress and chaos in your life.
Say no when you don’t want to do something.
Examine your beliefs about the world, yourself, safety, success, health, wellness, suffering, complaining, blaming, and responsibility.
Find out what healthy, successful people you admire believe about these things.
Change your mind to change your life.
Change your ideas and beliefs if they are not your own, true, and helpful to you.
When we change how we look at things, the things we look at change, including our health, ourselves, and the world.
Emotional Body
Practice stress-relieving and refocusing techniques like meditation, journaling, walks in nature, play, and relaxing hobbies.
Have a support network & be a support for someone else and know that we are not the only ones suffering.
Feel free to express your emotions in safe ways.
Find something to laugh at and laugh.
Play.
Cry when you feel like crying. Don’t hold it in.
Express your anger in healthy ways.
Spend time with people you admire and whose company you enjoy (even a weekly call to a friend).
Energetic Body
Protect your energy.
Build your energy
Release stuck energy.
Shake, dance, scream.
Practice something like Qigong, Taichi, or Yoga.
Enjoy music. Sound can be very healing.
As a coach who has achieved the goals you also want ‒ to feel well and get your life back, even better, after all you’ve been through ‒ I can help you. All that is required is an openness to being coached to learn and practice healing yourself, and your commitment to the time, energy, effort, and investment in yourself. The investment is far less than the very real costs of staying unwell and perhaps being unable to work. I know because I did it the slow and expensive way; and now you don’t have to.
Christine Lutley, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
The doctors diagnosed Christine with incurable fibromyalgia. Accepting that & their medications, she was work-disabled for 20 years. She became interested in spirituality & healing. 20 years later, on her 65th birthday, having witnessed her mother’s suffering & death with dementia, she decided she must create a new life while she still could. She focused on what she most wanted & used a spiritual 4-body healing approach. She not only healed herself but created a repeatable process to help others heal themselves, called Fibro Freedom Formula: You Healing You. Get supportive advice and learn from one who has walked in your shoes, so you can learn and be coached in peace, without any anyone telling you that you are making this up, or that fibromyalgia is incurable. The last thing you need is to be misunderstood because of this invisible illness.
