Chronic illness and Resiliency

How do you bounce back from downturns or chaos?

Do you bounce back easily?

Or do you have difficulty with it?

Some minor stresses we can just bounce back from quite well but with chronic illness, we have a lot of stress; mental, emotional, and physical. Our health ebbs and flows and there are some serious rogue waves in there. Sometimes it is very hard to keep our head out of the water. Major downturns in our health can knock us down hard and it isn’t so easy to get up again. A lot of constant little setbacks can also really wear us down fast.

Resiliency to me is one of the most fundamental of all skills for those of us with chronic pain and chronic illness. We face a lot of adversity in life. Far more than average. Developing the skills to respond better to these is a skill I know we would all benefit from. I, naturally, learned this the hard way. Did I mention I’m stubborn? And that I like to learn a lesson more than once to really, really believe I need to do it? Yep. That’s me. The dumbest smart person around.

So, yeah, I have in the past had a problem with resiliency. When I got taken off long-term leave the first time at work back I was devastated. It quite frankly crushed me and also created a frantic sort of panic. I should have fought it. Everyone wanted me to. But instead, I gave up. I was tired. I was broken. I just told myself society doesn’t care about my suffering and apparently it was my role in life to suffer as much as possible, so might as well return to the hell of working. You have to understand I hadn’t improved at all then. I was seriously depressed as well and still suicidal. It is hard to fight when you are depressed. It just seems like a losing battle and so much effort and you’re just so tired. So the anxiety of returning to work and knowing how horrific that would be hit me very hard indeed.

That didn’t work out for me, obviously. But when high stress happens… I fold. I retreat. I isolate. I avoid it. And I just can’t handle it. I have known for a long time I needed some Fight in me and not Flight. I knew I had to have a better sense of self so I could defend myself when needed. Of course, in my example, what I needed was effective treatment and recovery. Not the exact opposite of that. However, it is true with chronic pain and illness I’m so prone to burnout due to the stresses of working with pain it is hard for me to cope. Eventually it all tanks.

I knew I needed resiliency to get through these stressful events and downturns in health. I knew I needed resiliency to handle stress better so I could function better in life. I knew I likely could never work full-time well and I was right about that but I knew without more resiliency I would have problems coping overall and my well-being would always suffer for it.

Now, I’m sicker than I ever have been and I do have some resiliency because I have been working on it. I know I will survive. I know I will persevere no matter what. I know I will fight for my rights, if I must. I’m coping significantly better with a situation that is so much worse and that is peculiar. It is the development of acceptance combined with resiliency that has enabled me to do this.

Here are some things I have done to build up the resilience I really never had for difficult situations. Some of these are going to be similar because I have talked about them before. They do more for us than just help with resiliency.

Self-compassion

This is a pretty big deal that I will mention again and again. When something happens and we are ill sometimes we can blame ourselves and just feel if we had pushed harder we could have done it. We don’t have our own back. At all. We disregard red flags in our health. We loathe ourselves for our weakness. We judge ourselves more than anyone else ever does. A whole lot of self-stigma going on. We never give ourselves a damn break.

Without the self-compassion, we deserve for the constant struggle we have. Living like this is a battle the average person does not experience. That means every accomplishment we have is hard earned and deserves our appreciation. It also means we have to be compassionate to our struggles. And understanding it is difficult. Acknowledge this is something we are having a hard time with. That emotions are normal. Negative emotions are normal. Struggling to cope is normal. Bad days are normal. Give ourselves a damn break.

Gratitude

We have to change our brain to focus on the good things we have, experience, love, are thankful and grateful for. To balance out the negative and give us some perspective. It is amazeballs (yeah, I said it) that doing this can be so effective for our brains. Something so easy can make such a major change in our perspective. It was hard for me to do in the beginning. Thankful? Grateful? For what? All this pain and suffering? Yay! But then you look for things. All those wee gleams of gold in the day, no matter how tiny. And I would write them down because sometimes those small things mean a whole lot for me on a craptastic day. Sometimes you just have to remember each of those little things to realize not every moment of this life sucks balls.

It really is an exercise in perspective. Nudging our brains a wee little bit to see a broader perspective than they want to. Or more of a perspective than they are currently.

Feel the emotion

This is very important. Something happens like your insurance company turns you down and you are devastated. A neurologist or specialist says they cannot help you and it makes you feel hopeless. Medical professionals will not listen to you or help you and you feel angry. I want you to feel the emotion, think about the reasons for it, then calm down with some deep breathing exercises and ask yourself what you can do to make forward progress.

Feel the emotion, don’t immerse in it. Do not just react, think about how a situation is making you feel. This sort of thing helps us not become entrenched in emotions and not being able to get through the experience we are having effectively. Sometimes it is good to acknowledge an emotion, feel it, let it flow through us Without attaching meaning and thoughts to it.

I am in a lot of pain and I feel angry and frustrated about it. Yes, it is frustrating. Yes, I can get angry about that. But not this whole existence is frustrating and it always will be and it infuriates me I can never have the life I want. That is a lot of thoughts and meaning to an emotional reaction to pain in that moment. A lot of extra meaning that doesn’t need to be there. Not when the emotion is spawned as a reaction to the pain and not something outside in the world that happened.

Just give yourself the space and time to feel the flow of an emotion without attaching too much to it. One way that you can learn to do this is a breathing exercise. You put your hand over your heart and take some deep breathes in and out first to start, then release some tension in your body. After that, imagine every breath in goes through your heart, feel it pass through your heart and then breathe out through your heart. Visualize it and feel it until you can distance yourself from the emotion enough to acknowledge it and understand where it is coming from. Think about the reason for it, accept it, and breathe through it.

Meditation

Utilize deep breathing and relaxation techniques and meditation. When we feel stress from our bodies, our emotions, or mentally it makes us physically respond in certain ways. For me, it is like this anxious feeling in my gut. So I breathe in deeply and out slowly over and over until the sensation goes away. I meditate to ground myself and calm some of the accumulated stress I have been feeling especially about problems I have no control over.

Maybe this isn’t for you. Maybe it is. I recommend it because there are loads of ways to meditate. Mindful meditation, visualization, guided meditation as well as so many relaxation exercises. They are worth exploring to find one that works for you. That you like and makes you feel comfortable and soothes you a little bit. And then do that on a routine basis.

Focus on hope

This is hard. I know it is hard. We can be in situations physically and financially due to an illness that makes hope seem impossible. And what I mean is, think of possibilities instead of, as I do, shutting down. The more you brainstorm possibilities the more you can see the potential of improving some aspect of your existence. Any progress is good progress. Understand no matter what happens you have learned and know how to persevere through anything. We will get through it. But we have to not fold.

Exploring possibilities that may improve your well-being or quality of life? What is it going to cost you to do it? What is it going to cost you to do nothing at all? When you think about it why not explore viable things? Why not have a wee smidge of hope we can develop an action plan that will improve our overall quality of life?

Connect with your support network

Friends, loved ones, family, online support buddies. These are all important. Because for resiliency we need to understand sometimes we need the support, the comfort, and someone to bounce ideas off of. It helps with isolation. It can make us feel more positive about the possibilities of our future. This is a factor in life satisfaction as well. It is far more important than we ever give it credit for. People need people, man. Human connection is vital for well-being and it will help with building your resiliency by having a nice solid support network.

Change is inevitable

My health has tanked, as I have mentioned, and has been three years now in this lower functionality state of being. And change like this with chronic illness is always possible. We always have to adjust. It always affects our lives greatly. But we know we made it through before and that we can again. We know life is change. The winds of change can be against us, but they make be for us again soon. We have to accept change as natural and accept we don’t have control over every aspect of our lives. This illusion of control is something we have to sort of get rid of. There is very little about life in our control. Our reactions to what happens to us is but not, often, what happens to us.

Focus on the problem

And any plan of action you have. Be it coping with new adversity. To try to resolve a particular problem. Write it out. Slowly conquer that list. Make steps in the direction you want to go, even little steps. Planning what I could do in the day. Using a mobility aid for the first time in my life. Working with doctors for a medication that could help a wee bit. Decreasing some of the things I was doing regularly for the few things I wanted to keep. The problem I had was ‘How do I cope with this extremely lower functionality’ and that is how I went about it. And knowing as a result I can deal with this if it does not go away.

Developing an action plan for long term goals is important to invest in. As long as we break it up into smaller, achievable goals and milestones. That we monitor our progress and celebrate every milestone in our goal.

Acknowledge your strength

It takes a lot of mental strength to live a life with chronic illness or chronic pain. That is pure fact. But at times when confronted with pain or illness I would say to myself ‘I can’t do this. I can’t survive this.’ But I have, haven’t I? I have a long, long track record of dealing with pain and illness, hard times and better times. We have to acknowledge the strength of the coping strategies we learned.

We have to acknowledge the serious difficulties we have had in the past and made it through, no matter the struggle we had, we endured and came out the other side. I bet with some serious new strategies for the next time. I sure did. Would I recommend that major struggle? NOPE. But I did learn some serious coping strategies I use today. Such that when that wall of vertigo suckfest nailed me down I was able to adjust much quicker and with far less mental and emotional agony. My preference would have been to learn an entirely different way but such is this life we have. Sometimes we learn by falling down a steep incline hitting every rock on the way down and slowly climbing back up with two broken legs.

Take care of ourselves

We know this. We know the value of self-care. But when everything goes wrong we have to de-stress so we can see the situation for what it is and what moves we can make. We all have self-care habits and plans that work for us. Use them.

Acknowledge our fears

This is an important one. For me recently my fear is ‘I will be stuck like this forever’ with the vestibular symptoms and lower functionality with other issues. But it could be things like losing our house or not being able to afford meds. Acknowledging the fears and core emotions we feel helps us begin to engage in solutions. And some fears come true. But what if they do? What if you lose your house due to less income? I did. And I live in an apartment. And its fine. Downsizing and renting wasn’t the end of the world. Sometimes when we think of a fear we can play it out- what if it does happen and then what and then what? And sometimes that can work through that fear.

It took me a long time to regain some resiliency as I was lost in my fears, my suffering, my lack of hope, and this desire to just give up. I wish this was a skill I could have picked up a long time ago. But maybe it is more of a mindset. I am not quite certain. I know I can get better at this. And sometimes I feel less resilient but it comes back. Bad days are just bad days. And sometimes we just have to take them as such.

Reprint from brainlessblogger.net

In the land of pain

Pin it