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.
2 comments:
I think the main problem is that there are lots of people who can tell you they have M.E. Some are self-diagnosed, some have been diagnosed by their GP by exclusion and some are 'lucky' enough to have been diagnosed by a Specialist who really knows his onions (as much as anyone does).
However, common sense tells me that when any of these people say they 'have M.E.' they are really saying they have an illness that exhibits a particular set of symptoms and traits (many of which are also exhibited in other more easily/readily recognised conditions). These people have a collection of symptoms that are very, very similar but they may not actually have the same virus or infection. I think 'M.E.' is a collective label for a collective set of symptoms and illnesses.
So when you and 'Brian' see an improvement in his condition because of EFT it is no doubt true for you both but he may not have the same illness as me or as other PWME who read your blog and therefore they won't respond to EFT in the same way as him.
It's not that I (for example) don't believe you. It's just that I don't think that if you talk about treating him with EFT and treating me with EFT (and I've tried it now - to no real effect) we're not talking about treating like with like.
The whole area is a sea of confusion and interpretation and misinterpretation. We're all finding our way. You seem to have found the right way for you and I'm sincerely glad for both of you
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Hi Cusp, thanks for posting.
You say "I think 'M.E.' is a collective label for a collective set of symptoms and illnesses".
Actually, if you know any GPs they'll tell you that's true of pretty much all illnesses - illnesses are diagnosed from a collection of symptoms, and if you have enough of the symptoms associated with x, they'll say, "you have x". ME is harder than most illnesses to diagnose because they don't have at their disposal anything like a simple blood test (for example) but there are nevertheless a comprehensive set of symptoms - listed on the hummingbird's guide to ME site and in many other places - which are associated with ME. If you have enough of them, and can rule out all other conditions by the various tests available, ME is the diagnosis. This is the same process GPs go through to diagnose ME - they observe the symptoms, rule out everything else, then diagnose ME (unless they are one of those GPs that has a problem "believing in" ME).
As I said, this is the same process a GP will go through to diagnose any illness, and as a result all sorts of conditions can be diagnosed as 'this' and turn out to be 'that' because many illnesses have similar symptoms. This happens frequently with physical illnesses and even more so with mental illnesses (I have a friend who was told she was bipolar, then schizophrenic, then that she had PTSD).
All we ever have is a collection of symptoms that someone, somewhere along the line, puts a label on - but you'll notice that most physical illnesses will have significant crossover with a whole host of other physical illness, symptom-wise. ME, for example, shares many symptoms with MS. My brother's cancer (which turned out to be fatal) was initially misdiagnosed as a rugby injury. Diagnosis, then, can be critical - but it is still a hit-and-miss affair, and the only thing that decides whether our illness has this label or another label is the symptoms.
In a sense everybody's illness is very specific to them - you might think you have the "same" illness as someone else because you have both been given (according to a similar symptom-set) the same label for your illness - but each illness (even those with the same label) will follow a different course, respond differently to treatment, have a different prognosis. ME in this respect is no more or less predictable than other illnesses such as leukaemia.
If my husband (he's really no longer Brian, I'm glad to say) had experienced a different set of symptoms, his GP would no doubt have come up with a different diagnosis. (Or non-diagnosis; what he came up with, in fact was "I don't like to diagnose ME" - which is not to say ME doesn't exist, or that ME didn't exist in my husband, but only that this particular GP doesn't believe ME exists or doesn't want to diagnose something for which he couldn't write a prescription).
In the US, where the label for this set of symptoms is CFS rather than ME, an extra label, CFIDS - Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome - has been introduced to define a subset of patients who have it more severely. It is not, in my view, a different illness - in my experience, ME (CFS to Americans) is very much to do with immune deficiency. The label is there to identify those patients who are considered unlikely to remit; and to some extent, those who have been living with this illness for a long time perhaps feel heartened by that label as it gives them a reason for the unpleasant reality that some people have recovered from this illness while they have not.
It does not, however, make it a different illness - except in the sense that each person's illness is a very individual affair.
For that reason of course treating my husband with EFT would be very different to treating you with EFT (though I should stress he also found no real effect doing it on himself). It is my experience that PWME cannot self-treat, probably because they are so compromised, energetically. Getting professional help is expensive and not everyone who claims to be experienced with EFT will actually have the necessary skills to work with something as complex as ME. I couldn't recommend anyone as I'm a DIYer. So I'm afraid I've no easy answers for anyone else. But for what it's worth I'll keep reporting our own (individual) journey here from time to time, just in case it's useful to anyone dropping by.
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