I've noticed it before, and maybe it's not peculiar to the ME community, but there is a tendency for ME sufferers to discount the experiences of those who recover. If someone has recovered, the logic goes, then it can't have been ME. Suddenly our four years of struggling with neurological and immunological impairment are wiped out, or downgraded. Never mind that three years ago he couldn't get up and down stairs without a stick, that he couldn't read (even to the end of a paragraph) for two years because of brain fog, that he had severe pain from blood pooling in his legs, that his underarm lymph glands were so swollen that he had arm-mounds rather than arm-pits. If he has recovered due to something as seemingly bizarre (and unconnected to himself) as his wife's use of EFT, it must have been all in our heads.
I understand what a nightmare it is to have one's life taken over from ME and see no way out of it; I understand also that everyone's journey is different. But what we have experienced here is real.
My husband, I should say, is in recovery rather than recovered; and we are both careful about how much he does, but our lives are no longer dominated by illness. ME is not actively present. From all I have read and experienced over the last ten months, EFT is very effective in relieving the root causes of physical illness, even very serious conditions like ME, but only if the afflicted person is willing, and my husband is not. Though EFT proved itself extremely effective in terms of symptom relief, and we could have gone further with it, he didn't like the fact that it worked much better when I tapped with him than when he tapped alone (ME is disempowering enough), and he balked at using EFT to address any emotional issues. Plus I'm afraid I was both inexperienced and evangelical, without the experience to approach the problem with sufficient subtlety. As a result of all these things, my husband stopped doing EFT many months ago. He knows it works for physical issues, but he wants to do things in a more traditional way. Slowly.
Still, (and he would agree with this) EFT has been behind his recovery. My daily use of it, on my own issues, has enabled me to remove myself from what had become a vicious circle, and go from being equally needy to being fully supportive; to being able to meet all the physical and emotional challenges of being with someone who is struggling with a chronic illness. What has resulted is a supportive environment in which my husband can recover.
I appreciate that many people reading this blog do not necessarily subscribe to the idea of a strong mind-body connection, meaning that emotional/mental dis-eases show up in the body as physical diseases. Because of the battle of ME sufferers to have their (very real, very physical) condition taken seriously, and not something that's "all in their head" or even worse, as some idiot said to me about my husband the other day, "lazybones disease", there is a fierce denial of the body-mind connection in the ME community. I really do understand that too; I spent a lot of time defending the physical reality of my husband's condition to those harbouring the illusions that I was somehow making it up.
What is odd is that now that I am, at least in some sense, on the other side of ME, there are suggestions from members of the ME community, including some who supported me through my husband's illness, that it "wasn't real ME."
I'm not here to meddle with anyone's belief systems. And I have real compassion for everyone with ME who has not found a way out (yet). Everyone's answer, if there is one, will be different. In my experience EFT is difficult to self-apply when you have ME because you are already energetically compromised. I'd recommend, if you are an ME sufferer interested in exploring EFT as a possible solution, working with an advanced practitioner who has some experience with chronic illnesses of this nature. They don't need to be local; EFT can be done very effectively over the phone.
But if anyone reading this is the partner of an ME sufferer, I would highly recommend learning EFT and applying it to yourself. For me, I wish I'd known about it years ago. But there has to be some positives to suffering, some silver lining to the cloud, and this has been it for me. I don't know if I'd have tried it at all if I hadn't been desperate, and desperate is certainly where ME pushed me. Now I can be glad of the learning experience that was my husband's ME. It is good to be able to see it not as years of waste and pain but to know that something has come out of it that is proving immensely valuable to both of us.
