Sorting Myself Out First

We've been having a bad couple of days; the first bad patch for 8 weeks. There are numerous reasons (aren't there always) but chief amongst them have been my husband's struggling to complete some work that he took on months ago, and some emotional fragility on my side brought on as the result of my trying to tackle some of my long-standing demons with EFT.

The EFT started with me, and my husband feels strongly (and I've now agreed) that I'll have to work on myself first, and my husband second. I have a huge backlog of issues from my past that mean I react badly to many of the things that ME throws up in our lives. EFT is really helpful in allowing me to deal with those issues as they arise, but it seems a whole pile of ancient history is arising now, practically queuing up to be dealt with, and as I have also taken on pretty much 100% of the household chores, I've been feeling quite overloaded at times, and have reacted badly, a couple of times, to my husband snapping at me when he is tired.

Recovery from ME is not a smooth path, so this isn't a setback. In the end, I hope it will prove to have been a positive development, a way of making progress. I'm desperate for my husband to be well again, but desperation is a negative emotion, and creates a sense of pressure. So I'll see if I can tap away my desperation, as well as many of the other negative emotions that loving a man with ME brings up in me - all of which are rooted in my childhood (where I was routinely misunderstood and underappreciated).

I'm still very sure that EFT is going to be our way out of this. It's remarkably powerful, and I feel the benefit of it every day. Yesterday, some melted plastic dripped onto my thumb knuckle when I was stoking a fire, and even though it blistered up instantly, I managed to tap away the pain in less than a minute. Emotional pain is more knotty and multi-faceted, but I am making progress there too, piece by piece, event by event. It's just going to take some time. And when I'm more solid, I'll be in a much better place to help the man I love.

On No Longer Being Useless

One of the things that used to really get to me about my husband's ME is that I couldn't do anything about it. No matter how hard I tried to help him, I couldn't make him better. I felt so helpless (and hopeless) in the face of this relentless illness that for the last two years I have often avoided being with him when he has been at his most ill because hanging around his ME was so frustrating and depressing.

Particularly, I'd be working (I work from home) and would hear him having a sneezing or coughing fit - a sure sign that he was having a bad day and getting worse - and I would just try to blank it out and plough on with my work, knowing that when I emerged, he would most likely be angry and miserable. I knew he would want me to stop and take over the childcare, but I was resistant. ME would have me doing childcare 24/7, and who would earn a living, pay the bills? I did what I could but I also felt that what I could was pretty much nothing. Barring giving up my life completely, what could I do? ME had already swallowed his life - I'd be damned if it swallowed mine too. Damned if we fell into debt for it, lost the house. And anyway, it seemed that no matter how much I looked after our daughter, my husband would continue to be chronically ill.

EFT has changed all that, because now I feel there is something I can do that genuinely helps. When I hear him sneezing, or notice some other symptom that is the start of the daily downhill slide, I stop what I am doing, go to him, sit him down, and encourage him to do some EFT. He feels cared for, I feel useful, and above all, we have something that helps him feel almost immediately better.

Last night he had a severe headache; when I got in I relieved it with EFT in minutes. As always seems to happen after a late session of EFT, he then relaxed into an unusually deep and solid sleep, which helps him enormously. It is my goal to tap him every evening if I can for just this reason, if I can.

He's doing a little EFT himself but it seems much more effective when I tap him than when he taps himself, and I'm very happy to be in the position of "healer" rather than "person running away and exacerbating the illness." There is a long way to go, of course - and we are miles away from core issues, which he will come to when he feels ready - but for now we have drug-free instantaneous pain-relief, refreshing sleep and healing at our fingertips.

EFT is empowering - not only because it's so good to be able to help him, but because it helps me banish my own negativity and health problems, leaving me more able to cope with anything extra his ME might need me to deal with. So even though he is still unwell, he is a great deal better than he was a couple of weeks ago, and I am thrilled to be instrumental in healing him.

I am hopeful that he will be considerably better by Christmas. Time will tell.

Energy and the Lack of It

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been blogging. For the last few weeks I have been putting my energies exactly where they are needed, which is into sorting my husband out. While he was being Brian, his angry, depressed, illness-centred alter-ego, spending more time with him and giving up six to eight hours a day to childcare and housework wasn’t in the slightest bit appealing. But we finally reached the bottom and both had something to kick against. We are on our way up, and I have every hope that we will be surfacing in a matter of only months. Not from depression and marital strife – that has happened already – but from ME.

For the first time in two years, I genuinely believe he is going to recover now, and that we will be able – at last – to fully live the life we deserve. Enjoy a healthy, happy, life together.

When we first visualised his recovery, some time ago now, I pictured (as positive thinking demands) the image of us that would signify his recovery. I said going on holiday and being able to do the amount of walking and sightseeing and doing that we both want to. Venice (our honeymoon) was ruined by the ME. It was the first time realisation really dawned. He had been ill for six months but both of us were in denial. Neither of us wanted it to be ME. So it wasn’t. We didn’t want to talk about. But just a short walk out to get breakfast and see one sight would exhaust him. We’d go back to the apartment (a beautiful apartment not far from the fish market and The Rialto Bridge) for lunch and he’d go to bed for the rest of the afternoon. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I came back from my honeymoon an expert level electronic solo backgammon player. I think that was probably the time I started getting (ever so gently, and deniably) depressed.

ME is all about energy. Lack of it. And with all I’ve read about this illness, all I have thought about it over the last three and half years – coming at it from many angles, both physical and psychological, has benefited from what I already know about human biology (which I have to degree level), and my interest in energy fields and energy moving, and my yearning to understand, and to able to allow something you might call “spirituality” despite my scientist side.

In ME, something is wrong with energy-generating capacity of the body. At the cellular level, research has shown that the mitochondria (the energy-producing organelles) of people with ME don’t function normally. Under stress (such as the exertion of exercise) they fail and even die.

Energy medicine is where all my research seems to come together.

This post was written six days ago, when my husband was very ill, meaning I didn't have the time to finish it.

EFT & ME

Some of you will have heard about EFT. You can learn it for free from Gary Craig’s website. It sounds ridiculously simple to the point of impossible: you tap on the ends of the energy meridians (those that are used in acupuncture) while repeating an affirmation, and you can heal yourself: of emotional trauma and physical ailment alike. From toothache to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Oh come off it, you say.

But it only takes two minutes to apply, it’s easy to do, you can self-administer at a moment’s notice. What if it works? And what if it can cure M.E.? I watched the 7 minute video and tears came to my eyes. I want my husband to be well. We have suffered his illness for three and half years, and its about time we clawed our way out the other side.

Over the last three years I have spent hours studying the condition in order to understand it better. I understand it is a severe physiological illness, involving the immune system, the nervous system, and pretty much every part of the body. But here is a man who says EFT has allowed him to completely recover from Multiple Sclerosis. How could I not give it a try?

I downloaded the free manual and read it in a couple of hours. I tried it on some shoulder tension (which usually leads me to headache). The shoulders seem to loosen and relax some. I tried it on my back pain. A couple of times. The back pain went. The next day I started to develop a headache. I tapped for it but it didn’t go completely away and after a few hours I had to resort to painkillers. I was disappointed.

The next day I was feeling really energised, having tapped myself to wake up for an early swim. About three in the afternoon I started to develop allergic cold symptoms (runny nose, sneezing). I thought about all the times this has happened in the past year or so and it is always on a day when I’ve been swimming in the morning. Then it dawned on me – it was the chlorine making me ill. I reread the section about why EFT sometimes doesn’t work, it became obvious that chlorine was acting as an inhibitor – because the day I’d developed the headache that wouldn’t respond to tapping, I’d also been swimming first thing. And now, I had the warning signs of a migraine.

I scrubbed myself thoroughly all over with water (no soap or detergent), got into clean clothes, and did two rounds of tapping. My migraine went away. In minutes. Without drugs. Since then I’ve had success with what you’d call recurrent infections: women will be familiar with these regular visitors. But I banished each one of them through a few minutes of tapping. Aren’t they supposed to be caused by infectious agents? Then how come I could heal them completely with my mind?

I desperately wanted to tap on my husband from the outset, but he was sceptical and when I talked about what it involved, got rather angry about it. It was the affirmations, in particular, that he found offensive. Which I do understand, but I also knew I was having some astonishing results. So I decided I should just carry on using it in my own life and see if at some point the patent benefits might intrigue him. I thought a change of heart might take weeks, but it took only a couple of days. There's a reason why they're called wisdom teeth.

My husband has wisdom teeth coming through, and has been in a lot of pain. He saw a dentist six weeks ago who said one tooth was so near the nerve that he was afraid to operate in case of nerve damage, so there was nothing for it but take painkillers and wait it out for weeks or even months. The pain had increased day on day, and now the painkillers couldn't touch it: my husband was in agony to the point that he couldn’t look after our daughter for even five minutes at a time, meaning I couldn’t work, so the whole house was ruled by his toothache. I, on the other hand was benefiting so hugely from using EFT (including ensuring that I didn’t fall ill myself) that I was able to handle everything he threw at me (not, I hasten to add, literally).

He could see that it was having a very real and positive effect on me, and finally, after I'd been tapping myself for a week, he asked me to tap out his toothache.

In five minutes it went from “severe throbbing in tooth and jaw” to “dull ache and throbbing in tooth and jaw” to “dull ache in jaw” to “strange feeling in my tooth”. Painkillers hadn’t worked, but EFT had reduced his pain to zero in a few minutes.

Ever since then I have been using EFT on my husband. He finds it hard to tap on himself and finds the effects much more powerful when I tap on him, which I guess would make sense given our very different energy levels.

We’ve been working symptom by symptom, to start with. Usually he’s in pain by the end of the day so it’s pains we’ve been eliminating, and I’ve been longing to get past these to his chronic fatigue: his having no reserves, his being so easily drained. EFT has appeared to help him sleep better (even though we haven’t tapped for that) which has helped him make gradual improvements over the week (he’s only been doing it for a week) so last night we had only a minor pain to tap for. So last night, at last, we tapped on his "feeling drained" and on his “fuzziness”. The key seems to be, as the EFT masters stress, find ingthe right words. We will do that more often, I suspect, as we get better at this.

We are on the way out of the ME nightmare. My husband's health is improving. It’s very noticeable. He woke this morning with more energy than he’s had in months, and so far, he has been able to sustain it. For quite a few months now, my husband – if he has slept at all - has woken exhausted. The last good spell was so long ago I can’t really remember when it was. He said the other day that he can’t actually remember what it feels like to feel healthy.

Today, he woke refreshed and feeling pretty good. It must be two years since he woke up not feeling exhausted. Five hours later he is still good - he can do maybe an hour or two of activity more today than he could do yesterday; he’s been up for five hours, and he seems in very fine fettle. A week ago, he was exhausted and in constant pain.

EFT has given us a way to eliminate pain and every symptom of ME that we have so far tapped on. But what’s more, it is – I am certain about this – relieving the underlying condition.

So we have peace and happiness here. We have tenderness, affection, and an enthusiastically renewed sex life. Above all, as we repeatedly experience the effectiveness on EFT on specific problems, we have hope.

The trick now is to my husband’s ME into its elements – its myriad specific contributors - and zap each one.