The End of Our Journey with M.E.

Perhaps it is time, now to sign off for good. My husband is fully recovered from M.E. Our relationship has been salvaged and renewed. We are happy together, peaceful, no longer arguing. The last time he was even grumpy with me was New Year's Eve (i.e. technically last year. And it is now April). We can have disagreements without war ensuing. The cycles of anger and depression have stopped. As have the pains in his muscles and joints, the weakness in his legs, his brain fog, his insomnia, his breathing difficulties, his sneezing fits, his rhinitis and sinusitis, his allergic reactions, his persistent cough, his exhaustion, his swollen lymph glands, his need for many days of recovery after physical exertion etc etc.

My husband decided in February that what he really wants to do with his life, for the time being, is bring up our daughter. She had started full time school in September but wasn't particularly enjoying it as she is very into creativity - drawing, painting and making things - and there was very little room for it in the curriculum once she transferred from the nursery into the main school. My husband had been considering the options for what he wanted to do with his newly regained health but decided nothing inspired him as much as being her full-time father. So we withdrew her from school just before half-term and he is taking her out of the house every day, finding exciting things to do. It is wonderful he now has the energy to do it. He's also getting more deeply involved in a community project and taking on a day here and there of paid work. He is also - now that he is fully well - able to be completely supportive of me and all that I want to do. It is wonderful.

EFT has transformed our lives utterly and in ways I could never have imagined in the dark days when I began this blog. Whereas I used to see my husband's illness as a curse, and detested it, I now see it as a blessing in disguise, because it sent me on the desperate hunt for solutions, and led to my learning EFT. I had no idea that the end result would be so much more than the recovery from ME. We have good health, personal peace, marital harmony, and deepened understanding of our place and purpose in the universe. I no longer fear illness, old age, and death, or indeed many of the other things that used to limit my enjoyment of life. I'm not sure one could ask for much more!

I note that EFT has become much more widely known and accepted in the last couple of years since I began this blog. EFT is part of a new paradigm that is outside most people's belief systems, and its profound and rapid healing effect is hard to explain, thus the logical brain will want to dismiss it. Mine certainly did - I was raised as a scientist - but luckily I was desperate enough to suspend my disbelief and give it a go. The persistently good results dissolved my skepticism. So I would say simply, don't try to work out how it works, just TRY IT. If you're new to it, I'd recommend learning it properly - you'll get much better results.

Those wishing to try the same path that lead us out into the light might consider starting with this book, which according to the reviews is excellent guide to using EFT with ME. I only wish it had been out there 5 years ago, when my husband fell ill.

I'll sign off by sending blessings to everyone out there suffering from ME, and also to their carers and loved ones, who also suffer deeply. I wish every one of you a rapid and full recovery from your distress.

Since "Brian" was the name I gave to my husband's illness, I must now sign off

The Former Wife of "Brian".
x

Peace and Balance

m It's been a busy old month. But peaceful, and happy, and now I have a moment to take stock of the last few weeks. I've got a huge amount done. My husband has been fantastic - in good health, on the whole. A couple of weeks ago he said to me "I'm not ill any more" (previously he'd refer to himself as "in recovery"). He walked for miles and miles over a couple of days last week and not the slightest bit of payback - no muscle pain, no exhaustion 24/48 hours later. Just fit again. He got a multigym off Freecycle for nothing (if you don't know Freecycle, I thoroughly recommend it) and now he's working out in the garage five mornings a week, getting back in shape, getting some muscle back. His mindset has changed. He's facing forwards, looking at what it is he wants to do with his life. We're making plans together.

And is he doing EFT? No, he feels well enough without it. Though he's asked me from time to treat him for particular aches and pains, and everyone in the house apart from eldest teenage boy (understandably) now accepts it and uses it from time to time. And the house is a peaceful and balanced place. Even when I unbalance it by working too hard, it stays balanced, because other people cope. I had a project to get in, and my husband had no problem at all with me working late, indeed he told me to just knuckle down and get it done, while he made the tea, put our daughter to bed etc. I got it in and despite really long hours (and several nights out) in the last few weeks he is well and happy and we are getting on brilliantly. He is patient, supportive, loving, and - right now - a hundred per cent well.

And is it down to EFT? Absolutely, yes. (And he would concur that my transformation through EFT has changed everything.)

Nothing has ever made this kind of difference in my life; it's completely empowering, and I apply it everywhere. And I am seeing extraordinary results, things I barely believed would ever be possible two years ago. Like peace, harmony, love, support and good health in this house.

When conventional treatment fails...

For anyone interested, here's a press release regarding the use of EFT with chronic illness by an MD (a Urologist) in Los Angeles. CFS (the US term for ME) is mentioned in passing.

http://www.emofree.com/Press-Releases/chronic-illness-robins.htm

Wife/therapist, husband/client. Bad idea, obviously, but what choice did I have?

When the gaps between blog entries gets longer, it tends to mean things are going okay. Here I am, though, with a need to offload to the (possibly no longer bothered) blogosphere. It's just a way of feeling like I'm talking to someone when there's no-one to talk to. Is anyone listening? It doesn't matter. Does anyone care? Probably not. But who knows, maybe there's another EFTer out there who is attempting to help a spouse with a chronic illness who might know where I'm coming from.

We've hit a wall. I guess it was a predictable problem, and if I didn't have so much invested in the outcome of his illness it probably wouldn't occur. But it's not easy to work with the ones you love. A spousal relationship cannot easily accommodate what is essentially a therapist/client scenario. Though in my mind it is framed otherwise, and is a function of my love for him, I can appreciate for him it might feel different.

Part of me feels I should have insisted on the daily EFT that was working so nicely - but then, no, what kind of respect is there in insistence? So when he stopped being willing to do it on a daily basis, I let it ride. That feels like a mistake now (since 6 weeks without tapping has led to him walling himself off from me again) but maybe it was an inevitability, since what we have come up against is his fundamental belief that my passion about my work (which he sees as me prioritizing my needs over his) is the fundamental cause of his illness.

I accept that is his reality, but it isn't mine. What that means, unfortunately, is that we're living two mutually exclusive realities and though I'm prepared to work with him from the starting point of his reality he wants me to agree with him that his reality is The Truth before he can go any further. I could do that with ease if I were his therapist and not his wife. I'm happy to agree that his reality is the truth for him, but that's not enough for him. He wants me to accept culpability for his illness, and I can't. If I were his therapist (and not his wife) there would be no issue. But how can he accept any input from the person he feels is the root cause of his illness (and denies that they are)?

The upside is he's a lot better than he was. He describes himself as "in recovery". But in to achieve the profound healing necessary for his full recovery we need to get to the emotional root causes. I feel they lie much further back, but for him, those root causes are to do with my passion about (and commitment to) my work. Work which is more than work but in fact my identity, my vocation, my passion and my life's purpose.

He says I can't have it all. I can't have this thing that I love so much and expect to have a good relationship with him too. So there we are: impasse.

I don't know where we go from here. I expect it will all look different a few days from now. Each small crisis resolves and moves on in relative peace until we hit another crisis, and these crises have tended over the last year or so to be less confrontational and further apart. I suppose it's all part of what love faces us with: ourselves.

More and more, when we hit these points, I find myself having to accept the possibility that we are just two very different people who may become more and more separate as we attempt to find our own happiness. Perhaps that happiness doesn't lie with each other. Often, a crisis will be the catalyst for a period of renewed closeness. But one of these days, maybe not.

On the upside, he wasn't personally abusive as he has been on previous occasions, and after an initial emotional reaction on my part, I regained my composure and am able to go to bed calm, if a little resigned. Whatever happens, at least these days I am able to deal with it.

Breakthrough

Coming out of chronic illness is a long slow climb; every improvement is noted and appreciated, and sometimes it is just so wonderful not to be at the depths of it that we feel 'this will do' without realizing there is still some way to go - that is, we should expect and hope for more (after all, when we have coped with so much less, we are grateful for any perceived shift towards 'normality').

As any regular readers will know, my husband stopped doing EFT many months ago, despite having experienced symptom relief when we did it together. There were many reasons - one being that it didn't seem to work at all when he did it alone, which made him feel disempowered (and ME is quite disempowering enough). He also strongly resisted the idea that there might be emotional contributors to his illness - which I understand completely, especially after so many years of suffering such powerful physiological symptoms and continually meeting with the attitude from others that it was "all in his head". I gave up hope of him allowing me to work with him many months ago, and since then used EFT only to work on my own issues with his illness and the impact it had on our lives, enabling me simply to cope and support him better. I came to terms with the fact that his recovery would be as slow as he needed it to be, and that I must watch him continue to suffer even though I could - if he would only allow it - help him to find relief. In the meantime I've been undergoing formal training, and treating other friends and family where my offers were accepted.

Last week, my husband turned to me very suddenly and unexpectedly and came out with a rush of love, apology, and a plea for forgiveness, saying "every time I fight you I just come up against the wall of your love". He then asked me if I would do EFT with him and help him come out of the other side of his illness. Since then we have worked together every night for an hour. What astounded me was how much pain he was still in (and accepting as "normal") despite my perception that he was, to a very large extent, "better". (He had certainly been functioning better - his brain fog has lifted, he is now able to read, he can walk for a reasonable distance without serious repercussion, he is sleeping better, his allergies have pretty much disappeared - all that without him doing EFT). The first night we worked on his constricted breathing, which has troubled him daily for the last four and half years. He hasn't been troubled by breathing difficulties since, and although they may resurface I'm fairly confident that one will hold. His persistent cough has almost vanished (we worked on that as part of the breathing issue). His joint pain has decreased His leg pain is very persistent and although we can reduce it enough for him to get to sleep, it it still recurring - we have not yet got to the core of it yet but I feel sure we will. Persistence is often mentioned as a vital part of EFT practice, and a complex chronic illness like ME requires it especially.

People who develop ME have in common, it appears, the kind of personality where they are great supporters of others, and a huge part of recovery seems to entail learning to stop when they reach their physical limits, give themselves a break, and accept the support of others. This can be the hardest thing - I know my husband developed his habit of totally supporting those around him during a time in his childhood where he felt if he didn't he would not be loved (and worse, he would not, in the specific circumstances he was in, be physically safe). So taking this kind of support from me has been a huge and difficult step for my husband, but a vital one.

For any partners of people with a chronic illness such as ME who are considering learning EFT to assist them I would say learn as much as you can, get and watch the DVD sets (they are truly worth every penny), practice it daily on your own issues, and be persistent. If your partner rejects it, keep doing it on yourself. Tap to understand your partner's perspective. Tap for your frustrations. Tap for guidance. Tap for miracles. You may well need them!

At last we're on the right road together. My husband is experiencing huge waves of love for me which I have to confess is almost alarming, but I intend to get used to it! There are so many aspects to ME, many of which feed into each other, so his illness will take some time to unravel, but he is already feeling significant improvements. I am lucky that he is a very sensitive individual - he can feel the energy moving in his body while we tap and is good at identifying the source and specific nature of his physical pains with precise language. I expect we'll make very good progress now. He's beginning to tackle the problem of how he will pick up his life once he has his health restored, since he feels a need to change direction and doesn't know what it is that he would like to do. I feel sure the answers will come as we work together.

To everyone still suffering who has posted here; I think of you all often, and hope each of you will find your own way through ME. I send you blessings and thanks for all your support in my many, many hours of darkness.

ME and us

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.

Spring

Three months have passed, I see. The reason I don't post is because I'm happy... not all the time, obviously, but mostly. Happier, in fact, than I've been for years. My husband and I are getting closer and closer, my home life has settled down, and we are tackling the challenges around us reasonably well. If something blows up, it's quickly mended. Life is on the turn, a permanent turn, for the better.

I do EFT every day - it's part of my routine now. I've also taken up meditation, and find the two extremely complimentary. In fact tapping is a good way of reaching a more relaxed level very quickly. Relaxation means I get more things right - I work more efficiently, I communicate more effectively with my loved ones, and life is generally better. If something is bothering me, I tap it away with EFT and can get on with my day.

I'm going to do the EFT Level 1 training in July - not because I want to set up a commercial practice (I already have a vocation) but because I want to be more confident in using EFT with my friends and family. I realized at the weekend that I am quick to offer to help friends relieve their physical pains, such as headaches and toothaches, but shy away from applying EFT where the pain is emotional. There is still much I want to learn about, and do better, and training seems like the most time-efficient way to make a marked improvement.

I gather a handful of people are still dropping in here from time to time, which is why I thought I'd come back to let you know how we're all doing. But you can safely assume that if the blog is silent, the answer to that question is 'very well, thank you.'

I came to the blogosphere in distress, and leave in peace.

Blessings to every one of us.