Being heard

In my experience, clients have usually received no help with the emotional side of their physical diagnosis, before coming to therapy.

QCH practitioners like myself start by listening and taking a full history of how you’ve got where you are.

History taking at your medical appointments may have been thorough, but will usually focus on aspects which are most medically relevant to form a diagnosis, with little time or resources available for emotional support.

So therapy may be the first time when you can share the full impact of what’s going on for you. Being able to tell your story can be cathartic and revealing.

Therapy offers a time and space for you to talk through your thoughts and feelings. The therapist is there just for you to give you an opportunity to process this change.

Being treated with respect by a therapist can be especially validating if you’ve been dismissed by other professionals before.

It’s important to choose a therapist you feel comfortable with, so you feel safe to discuss the impact of difficult symptoms, your private feelings, or whatever is most important for you.  A trusting relationship and good rapport can help reduce isolation and relieve any shame or embarrassment you feel about your situation.

Changing your narrative

With an autoimmune diagnosis, you’ve probably been told that this is a lifelong condition with no cure. So you might find you’re believing (and saying) things like, “There’s nothing I can do…I’m never going to feel better…I’m going to be like this forever.”

My role is to listen to the language you use and the meaning you give to things. We’ll talk about your beliefs and what meaning you attribute to your health situation. I’ll guide you to identify what positive statements you would rather believe.

This could be something like, “There are things I can do, because I can learn about what can help, so I can try it myself, and that means there are actually things I can do to help myself.’

Therapy allows you to address past experiences that influence how you see your health and how you look after yourself. It helps you imagine positive instead of negative futures and can restore your belief that you can trust yourself and your body.

The importance of resourcing and self-compassion

I work with all my clients on building up your resources, to help you feel more positive, less overwhelmed and more able to cope with your situation. We’d work out ways to increase the amount of pleasure you have in your day, which might have vanished as a result of the sheer struggle of being ill.

Examples of useful resourcing techniques include:

• visualising a safe place where you can feel calm, relaxed and away from stresses and difficult symptoms
• in the evening, writing down three good things that happened during the day, and your part in them
• relaxation, breathing and tapping exercises you can use any time, to help your system calm down and regulate itself
• doing something nice for yourself
• exercises to increase self-compassion

Building self-compassion is especially important when you have autoimmune disease, because our relationship with our self can have taken a knock.

You might have complicated and not very compassionate feelings towards an immune system you’ve been told is attacking you. Maybe you feel your body has betrayed you, or you wish you could just chop off the bits that hurt the most.

When we feel this way, we’re rejecting part of ourselves. Similar to how our immune system is having a go at our cells in an unhelpful way, we’re attacking ourselves emotionally. Therapy can help us understand and improve how we feel about all aspects of ourselves. It can help us accept, appreciate and help all these different parts, including the ones that are really in pain and struggling.

Self-compassion exercises help us accept that we’re coping with something very tough, and that this is happening simply because we’re human, not because we’re a bad person. Developing self-compassion helps us feel more kindness and compassion towards ourselves and the predicament we’re in.

This softening towards yourself is a very important step in respecting your own needs and feelings as valid, and allowing you to care for yourself really well.

Therapy can help us accept the whole of ourselves, health challenges and all. It can help you turn towards your body, including your immune system, and instead of seeing it as causing your problems, to be able to love it in its struggle, and appreciate what it is trying to do for you.

This compassionate acceptance of our whole experience can be very healing and really reduce the idea of an ‘attack’ situation going on inside us.

Changing your ‘locus of control’

Autoimmune disease and other chronic illnesses can make us feel quite helpless and out of control, especially with the idea that it’s our own body doing it to us.

The fact that you choose to come to therapy to explore ways to help yourself is a crucial part of why therapy is helpful with this.

You may have experienced disabling symptoms and felt vulnerable as things you once took for granted became impossible. You might not feel in charge of your own situation.

Taking positive action for yourself, such as choosing to attend therapy, is a proactive step towards reclaiming your sense of agency and autonomy. By doing this, you prove you can help yourself. Therapists call this having an ‘internal locus of control’, meaning we realise there are things we can do to help ourselves, and we can choose to help ourselves, rather than feeling we don’t have any control.

Understanding more about what’s actually going on

I take time with clients to explore what is actually going on with the immune system in autoimmune disease. Most people have a limited picture of what autoimmunity is about, as we don’t need to until it happens to us. A good place to learn more about this is by finding out about the Autoimmune Protocol, or sign up for my mini course on Understanding Autoimmunity.

We saw earlier that as well as antibodies making mistakes and treating our own cells as foreign invaders, the  regulatory part of our immune system also fails. This means that the ‘attacking’ part of the immune system can’t stand down, because it doesn’t get the message that all is well, and it’s actually all a mistake.

This means we need to focus on calming a system that is on continual high alert, so that the ‘attack’ part can stand down, and our system can begin to regulate itself well again. The aim is to balance your immune system, not ‘boost’ it. 

I use language and techniques that support this aim of calming and balancing, because we want everything to calm down, not ramp up. Visualising and exploring what you believe is going on in your body can be very illuminating.

Personally, I don’t like the description that the immune system is ‘attacking’ us and I tend to avoid terms like attack when working with clients. The terminology we use with ourselves when living with an autoimmune condition is important.

The immune system is in fact trying to be helpful and has made a mistake. Our immune system is working extra hard in autoimmune disease, and intending to help us, because it thinks we need this.

It is not doing this out of any ill will towards us, or because we deserve it – it has simply misinterpreted a sequence of amino acids in our own tissues. It is reacting to something it thinks is a threat to us, in our best interests. It’s made an honest mistake about whether we are actually facing a threat.

This is a very interesting concept in terms of therapy, as we can do this unconsciously in our minds as well as our immune systems, so we feel on continual high alert, as if we’re constantly under threat.

In therapy we can help clients understand meanings they’ve given to things that aren’t accurate or helpful interpretations of the actual situation, and change them, so they can feel calm and safe again – just as we want the immune system to do. This is an idea we can explore further in therapy.