“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. ~Dold fashioned
In my thirties, my active and adventurous life as a broadcast journalist collapsed. It started with a trauma, followed by a virus that lasted thirteen years. Almost overnight, I lost the motivation to walk around the block, let alone write a story for the evening news.
A series of doctors diagnosed me with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), among other diagnoses. They said I had to live this way because there was no reliable treatment. I became one of the medical mysteries I once covered up.
Needless to say, I was scared and sad. To add insult to injury, I blamed myself for my “failure” to recover. I should be able to master my new profession: therapy, my Type A personality reasoned.
I spent all my energy researching my own health story. IV vitamins, antivirals, sage burn treatments—I tried them all. I cut out foods that I loved and used a lot of herbs to digest my elimination diet.
Sadly, I was also giving myself a bitter pill: self-stress and self-criticism. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t get my health back, save the career I loved, and have the family I longed for.
There are many causes of sadness. But there was no support inside or around me to feel this maelstrom of emotions. My thoughts hit me hard and distracted me.
I blamed myself relentlessly, even though my symptoms started after I was sexually assaulted by a man who got away with it. Although an American is sexually assaulted every sixty-eight seconds, according to the National Rape, Abuse and Incest Network, a society that rarely punishes rape is unhealthy.
We also know that people who experienced adverse childhood experiences have higher rates of chronic disease as adults. There is growing evidence that adult stressors and trauma can also damage our health. This is what happened to me, even though it took me years to make that connection.
Whether we’ve experienced the big “T” trauma, the small “T” trauma, or the inevitable indignities of being human, we all need self-compassion. This quality used to be illusory to me. But after years of illness, I began to soften.
The pressure to be the perfect patient is too painful. The painstaking approach I took to my journalism career didn’t work when I could barely cook.
Exasperated by the medical maze, my yoga and meditation mats became my remedy. I would stretch out on the grass in the backyard like a cat. Trees, birds and poetry became my companions.
Eckhart Tolle’s voice is a melody to my nervous system. I immerse myself in His Word every day. I stopped lamenting what I couldn’t do and began to truly enjoy the imperfect moment.
You could say I accidentally fell into self-compassion. It wasn’t that I gave up on treatment, it was that I started being kinder to myself for my real pain. I resonate with Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem kindness, In it she wrote:
“Before you know that kindness is the deepest thing in the heart, you must know that sorrow is the other deepest thing. You must wake up in sorrow. You must speak to it until your voice catches all the clues of sorrow, and you Seeing the size of the cloth then only kindness makes sense.
I woke up in sadness and spent many sleepless nights in it. As much as I wished happiness could be my teacher, pain became my teacher.
Soon, I began to notice the kindness within and around me. My parents would come to the movies. We would curl up on the couch, ditch my anti-candida diet with a bowl of popcorn, and lose myself in other people’s stories.
At the same time, my disability ended and I was shocked at how I was able to support myself as a single woman without a job. One day, a flyer arrived in the mail that read: “Kindness is like a boomerang and will come back to you. We are committed to providing financial support to members of the media who are in crisis in their lives.”
That’s me! I had never heard of this nonprofit and had no idea how I ended up on their mailing list. I applied, received financial aid, and managed to save my house from the clutches of foreclosure!
The generosity of life in the face of crisis. A friend listened to my heartbreak. My mom brought homemade chicken soup. A yoga teacher brings superfoods.
Since I put my pursuit of therapy on hold, I decided to use my spoon-sized energy to take an online writing class. Here I found a community of like-minded people. A fellow writer told me that she recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome through a form of mind-body therapy.
This approach was developed by John Sarno, Howard Schubiner, and other physicians who recognized the role of unresolved emotions in the persistence of chronic symptoms. Miraculously, her story suddenly gave me energy and accelerated my recovery!
I entered a new paradigm and realized I could overcome the seemingly endless flu symptoms. Instead of attacking the virus, I learned to calm my brain and nervous system.
No wonder I was on high alert. I first experienced tremendous trauma and then lived with the stress of chronic symptoms that I was unable to overcome. Subsequently, I lost the ability to support myself financially and live in the world during the prime years of my life.
My dear father also passed away during these years, as did three other close family members. My brain went into overdrive and went into a state of high alert—worrying that I would have a lifelong illness or worse.
At a training I attended a year later, Dr. Shubiner described fibromyalgia as the body’s post-traumatic stress disorder. I finally felt seen and understood. This is the opposite of what most of the 50 practitioners I saw in CFS Legends felt.
While allopathic medicine works wonders at fighting infections and saving lives, it often ignores the impact of emotional stress and trauma on our physical health. Doctor and author Gabor Maté writes: “Every diagnosis you face—depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis—is Largely stemming from trauma, they are manifestations of trauma.
I needed to explore my repository of trauma, which I did through meditation, writing, and somatic therapy. I also changed my perspective on my condition and slowly started moving again. I spent months practicing specifically to retrain my brain so that I could safely step out of my bubble.
I bring mindfulness to personality traits like people-pleasing, stress, and perfectionism because they can exacerbate chronic symptoms. I once heard a doctor named John Sterkes say, “When I think about why people feel pain, self-criticism is the most important thing.”
I wanted some tools to soften my harsh inner dialogue, so I dug into the work of Kristin Neff. The research psychologist says self-compassion causes our bodies to produce feel-good hormones like oxytocin, while self-criticism stimulates stress hormones like cortisol. This alone can cause a range of physical symptoms.
When our subconscious brain senses danger – even if it is an internal, psychological danger, e.g.There’s something wrong with me”——It activates our nervous system. In flight or fight, we may feel anxious or aggressive. In the frozen state, we feel motionless or dead.
Neff describes three elements of self-compassion: mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness. Here are the gist of each as I understand it.
Mindfulness: We acknowledge and witness our physical or emotional pain as a felt experience in our bodies. We might say something like, “It’s hard to feel so sad and exhausted.”
Human: We remember that suffering is part of being human. Although our situation is unique, we are not the only ones with this common experience.
Self-kindness: We treat ourselves like we would a dear friend, providing ourselves with the supportive words we long to hear. When we encounter difficulties, we sincerely ask: What do I need now?
Using self-compassion as my companion, I began to talk to myself gently. An indescribable sense of relief came over me. Instead of feeling abandoned by life, I felt seen and witnessed by the only person who knew what I needed: myself.
This aligns perfectly with mind-body therapy. An important part of my recovery was tracking the sensations in my body with open curiosity. Fatigue is severe. The pain is burning. Brain fog makes me feel confused.
To the best of my ability, I stopped fighting or running away from my feelings and started holding on to them with curiosity. Often, restlessness and brooding appear. When I keep at it, sometimes my system settles and my symptoms turn into emotions.
Other times, my body speaks to me. Please don’t use so much force. Don’t say “yes” when you want to say “no.” Tell me I’ll be fine just like that. I need to do something fun.
As I treated my pain in this new way, the physical symptoms began to subside. This requires patience and persistence. Many months later, I returned to the land of the living. Not only that, I experience life in a more real and tangible way than before CFS.
This is not nonsense. Neuroscience shows that our brains produce pain, fatigue, anxiety, and other stress-related symptoms. It does so based on a perception of danger, whether it’s a wayward car, an angry spouse, or harsh inner dialogue.
“Certain behaviors can put us on high alert without us even realizing it,” Alan Gordon writes in his book. way out. “There are three habits I see over and over in my patients that trigger fear and exacerbate neuroplastic pain: worrying, putting pressure on yourself, and self-criticism.”
When our nervous system enters a threatening state, it communicates through symptoms. Feelings from dizziness to sluggishness encourage rest and inactivity. Under constant stress, our brains become sensitized, sending memos to our bodies in rapid succession.
Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion confirms this. “Pain is often caused by tension and resistance, so when we soften a little instead of taking a harsh reactive stance, we tend to reduce the pain our bodies experience,” Neff says in Health.
I was nervous recently when I spoke with an abrupt customer service agent who couldn’t help me with a large payment I was supposed to receive. Clearly, it’s in trouble. My pressure was building and I felt a knot in my throat – it must have been filled with all the things I wanted to say to her!
Two hours later, my money was still missing. As I wasted precious time writing my blog, my frustration soared and I conveniently felt sorry for myself. (The irony is not lost on the author.)
Instead of trying to further resolve the issue or rush back to work, as I had done before, I admitted that I was angry and scared. I reiterate how impossible it is to be modern sometimes. I said to the trembling part of myself, “I’m sorry you’re under such stress. What do you want and need right now?”
Turns out I needed to rant (literally!). I need to walk (briskly). I need to practice somatic meditation. I did these three things and felt a calming energy. Maybe an oxytocin potion?
I’m ready to get back to work with energy and fresh material to provide my blog with enough handy information. This ties into research showing that self-compassionate people are less anxious and depressed than self-critical people.
If self-compassion is a foreign concept to you, you’re just a modern Homo sapiens. For a long time it seemed like a distant planet to me. Consciously, we can set our sights on self-kindness and get steadily into its orbit.
The next time you feel hurt, scared, or experiencing symptoms, you can stop and ask yourself: How do I feel right now? What words or actions will bring me support? You might be surprised by what you find in your inner medicine cabinet.
