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.

Losing Sleep For The Right Reasons

Sometimes you have to get to the very bottom of things before it gets so desperate that there are no further choices: it’s decide to end it all (your current state of life) or start going up.

We descended to the bottom through layers of increasingly bitter shocks. There was the Venice honeymoon blighted by his ability to walk for any time or any distance before needing to sleep all afternoon while I got disconcertingly good at, and addicted to, playing solo electronic backgammon. There was the first time he said “Fuck You” and didn’t start laughing after a few seconds. Really meant it. Locking myself in the car once, because he scared me. Shocks of all shapes and sizes, constantly surprising, all slaps in the face. That was all him (or ME) shocking me. Waking me up to what this illness is and does. Once I was fully awake, we were miles apart, and he was furious with me. He was a stranger: angry, and resentful, and insecure, and full of rage. I dreamt his ME as a poisonous substance-abusing lodger called Brian, who we'd inadvertently invited in as a friend of a friend, who refused to move out, and now we were stuck with heavy drinking and emotional warfare. After that dream, I woke up to the realisation that my husband had become, was enveloped by, Brian.

But I never stopped wanting my first husband to return. Desperation pushed me to my own edges, until I started to do things that shocked him back. Six months ago I responded to the launch of another verbal assault by throwing a glass of water in his face.
Ever since then, by slow levels, we have been ascending to the light. Shocks from me to him help us surface.

Last week, realising the extent to which I was drowning without his emotional suport, I finally began to feel that if I couldn’t have it, when it came down to it, that I should start making progress, in a very real way, out of the marriage. I didn’t want him to move out; it isn’t that I don’t love him any more, because I do. Painfully so. But I had begun to feel that he treated me so much better when we weren’t married, and since treating me better was what I wanted him to do, I reasoned that maybe the best thing to do was to stop being married to him.

When the woman you love is lying there awake next to you at four o’ clock in the morning, and says, quietly, that she wants to get a divorce, it’s a one of the bigger shocks. What is telling is how a husband reacts, and mine reacted like my real husband. Became, in less than an hour of talking, my original husband, the man who genuinely loves me and is horrified to wake up in the middle of making his wife so very unhappy.

He came in a few hours later while I was reading people's comments on here and I didn't hide it. "It really makes me sad," I said, "that there's a bunch of people you've never even met who knows more about what's going on in my head than you do." We talked. I cried. He held me, and said sorry; he was truly, truly sorry.

This was last Thursday morning. It’ll be a week tomorrow, and things are feeling firmer and safer day by day. We’re getting better at being happy with each other, and enjoying having our connection back. We’re losing sleep for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. For a long time now, my husband’s insomnia was lodged upstairs on a sofa, watching movies, passing the hours in draining isolation. For the last week we’ve had more positive forms of sleep-loss: long talks in each other’s arms, and kissing. We are lovers again, as we were right back at the beginning.

I’ve been wrong before. But let's hope I'm not.

Back On The Slide

It has become a necessity of our situation that I stay as buoyant as I can for as long as I can. Frequently, when I "crumble" in some way, he gets angry with me. He sees it these days as me placing unreasonable demands on him; as me, either blindly or selfishly asking him for emotional support when he is the one that needs support. He has said several times in the past he is tired of being the one to prop up my confidence when it flags. Yet he doesn’t do that now, hasn't done it for a couple of years. I relied upon him for this kind of support before he got ill, but I don’t think he sees it as his job anymore. As he points out, I do have other people around that are currently wonderfully supportive in the way I need them to be. But none of their support means as much as his would. If he felt he had the energy to give it.

These days, he just doesn’t. He can’t muster up the enthusiasm. His life has been taken apart piece by piece until there’s nothing left. Compared to what he is suffering, my losses are pathetic, not worth the energy. What on earth do I have to complain about? So some biggish piece of work has to be torn up and started again; so what? He can barely get through the day. Every day. You can see why he is unable to support me. But I miss having that part of him, the friend who won my trust with his support, because that man seemed to really care for me.

The things that were always important to me, like my work, don't get any less important to me now that he's ill; in fact, in some ways they become more important. I run to my work when I feel I don't matter to him like I used to. And so the gap gets wider again.

Downs and Ups

Things seem to improve much more quickly, now, than they have been doing for the last year and a half. There are still some problems, some areas of conversation that are possibly still not ready to be discussed. But we are coming together more quickly after things go wrong. It frightens me when it collapses - I'm send right back into despair; everything feels insoluble. But he is less unreasonable than before. He is more willing to take steps towards me. When he sees I am upset, his resentment evaporates more quickly (instead of being provoked).

We had the nicest weekend I can remember for a long time. We just relaxed together, doing very little. He's still really ill from my overloading him (which finished ten days ago or so) and I'm doing what I can to help him feel better. On Saturday evening we went for a long, gentle stroll along the seafront, further than we have walked since we were courting. [Both of us, in the last seven years, have had health conditions that have prevented us walking very far at times.] We had our daughter with us; she was happy and playing, and clambering and "doing excercise" (she's not yet four) and saying the sorts of things that make adults laugh. It was so lovely to be together, and just talk about stuff. He was the man I remember, the man I fell in love with, explaining the world to me in a way that makes sense (his philosophies about the nature of people, and of happiness, always seem absolutely right - and are reassuring). I didn't want it to end; it was like being transported back to the time before ME, before we had a daughter.

This is hard to say, and I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't blame our daughter for Paul's ME in any way. She is a joy, and we are both devoted to her. But the ME coincided very closely with her arrival; the big viral event that he never seemed to recover from began less than three months after she was born. He was overdoing it. I had a pregnancy-induced instability of the pelvis (SPD) that meant I couldn't walk without great pain, and we pretty much sofa-bound for three months before and three months after the birth. Because he felt so responsible, in that way that impending and new fathers do, he was working two jobs - the job he loved, which didn't pay but involved being out until late every night, and a cash-in-hand physically demanding job - removals - which meant he had to get up early. He was also taking on more than his fair share of running the home because of my physical impairment. Once our daughter was born, he was also helping to look after her, doing nappies, taking her with him when he could, pacing or dancing her to sleep when she was restless. He was brilliant. He was totally over-doing though. Then he got a bad cold and he didn't stop for it. He said he "couldn't". I can't remember if he dropped removals - quite possibly not. It was Christmas, I wasn't working, had only state maternity benefit, and we were struggling financially. Nor did he drop the job he did for love, which kept him out till midnight, or later. Perhaps he cut down a little on looking after me and his daughter (my pelvis was stabilising, I could do more) but was still doting on us both, and therefore wanted to continue doing whatever he could. He said he would stop working and have a proper Christmas holiday from the 21st December; three weeks off. But at the end of that three weeks he was still ill. Six months later, he was still ill.

This whole three years since has been one long struggle to come to terms with this illness; to, on some level, accept it and accommodate it. We still fight it, both of us. I am still so angry, sometimes, when I think of what it has done to us. But there is no way out of here without accommodation. And there may still be no way out of here.

I don't wish we'd never had our daughter. Enjoying her, together, was a large part of what made Saturday night so special. She is the bridge that enables us way to fight our way back to each other. She is so precious to us, and we are both so proud of her, and thank goodness, when times get really tough, we have something we can agree on.