8 Coping Skills for Chronic Illness Flares: A Trauma Perspective with Metaphors from My Kitchen Renovation (and a Personal Update)

I’ve had a number of chronic illness flares since my father died a few years ago. These symptoms have increased significantly since I have begun offering more support to my mother, who is 91 now and still living independently in their house. Her story is not mine to tell, however, so today I share how I’ve been working with these chronic illness flares and ways I’ve used the trauma and nervous system perspectives to cope, manage and begin to recover. I love sharing pictures of home transformations. I will use metaphors with the big updates I made to our kitchen this summer to describe some insights and tools that you may find practical and useful too.

1. See Symptoms and Flares Clearly: Identify Triggers

A few years ago we moved to a house with a huge new kitchen, highlighted above with one of the staged pictures in the sale promotion.

Looking at a new living space with clear, nonjudgemental eyes can help us see what is really in front of us to the best of our ability. Seeing clearly, in turn, enables us to explore what we want to leave as is and what we might want to change or work with. Maybe we want to be more comfortable, welcomed or in a space (or a body) that simply feels more “like me.”

Seeing clearly is about looking at something from your core Self, as IFS (Internal Family Systems) might describe it. Our core Self has no judgement. It is matter of fact. Looking from a trauma state, however, tends to mean a lens that is colored by states of distress. That lens can obscure what we see when we are feeing anxious or angry, negative or filled with shame.

Seeing clearly also applies to working with chronic illness flares and symptoms.

In clearly seeing the situation as I experience it with my mother, I have been able to identify many of my triggers. I feel it in the sensations of pressure in my chest and gut for how being in a supportive role is a trigger for me. It evokes what it was like to provide ongoing emotional support to my parent as a child. The sensations I’ve gotten curious about in my body have shown me that this situation also evokes the fear, anxiety and terror of a child who takes on a supportive position for survival when they are too young to actually be able to know what to do, figure out what is needed or take action. The main triggers for me are linked to complex PTSD and adverse childhood relationship experiences (ACREs).

Seeing clearly has provided a huge context for me to understand why I’m having such significant chronic illness flares, including the severity of fatigue that meant I needed to take naps again after hardly needing any for years; having to do half the length of walks I’ve been doing every morning for over a decade; feeling like climbing the stairs in our house is a slog; and initially being too tired for many days to run even one errand, which had become a simple task for many years.

2. Start with the Good: Allow Yourself to See It

The picture above is more consistent with how the kitchen looked to us when we first saw the house in person and later when we moved in.

In seeing our kitchen clearly, we could appreciate things we liked, which included a terrific layout, a vast amount of storage, and great functionality.

Being able to see ourselves and our bodies accurately, including that we are imperfect humans who have unique impulses and preferences that make us the only person like us in the whole world, can be a learning process for many of us with chronic illness. The research finds that people with a chronic illness have often experienced misattunement in some form in their childhood relationships with primary caregivers (complex PTSD) and this is observed in the ACE survey on this blog as well. This means that many of us have internalized beliefs that we are not good enough, that we are a failure, that we take up too much space and other negative self perceptions. When we access our core Self, we can see, feel and recognize that such perceptions are not actually true.

Seeing and acknowledging what works for us as well as the positives in who we are is an easily underestimated aspect of our healing journeys. Even at our worst, or when we are suffering the most, there is usually something that is, at minimum, neutral or ok in the present moment.

When spending time helping out my mother, I recognize that I am actually doing a good job, including by listening, learning when to nudge and when to stand back. When there, I continue the resource of taking my daily walks. I’ve been doing so for years and have carved out a space for it as a habit so that it’s now just an expected part of my routine when I’m there. I walk in the evenings too and the fall colors were just starting to emerge on my last trip, which delighted my soul. I can also feel that my support is a choice I am making because to not do so would feel worse and leave me with shame and intense regret, even worse than how badly I’ve been feeling in my body knowing I need to show up in this new way for my mother.

3. What Doesn’t Work? What do you Want?

In working with our preferences for our kitchen, we decided to take down two cabinets by the sink. They were the most functional and useful ones, but I felt as though they “loomed” and by removing them very soon after moving in, we never got attached to their presence. Despite the clarity I’d had, I was surprised by how much better I felt when cutting veggies on a board at the peninsula after taking that first cabinet down. I also painted the walls a warm white (Benjamin Moore’s Simply White) to lighten up the space.

Looking at our kitchen with clear eyes also enabled us to acknowledge what worked less well for us, which was that we have a personal preference for a more contemporary style. Being okay with the impulses we have, even just by “hearing” them and feeling how option A feels better in our gut than option B, which makes us feel heavy and discouraged, provides us with guidance towards possible options and decisions. We don’t have to act on those options. Sometimes we don’t have the energy, the will power, the funds, or the desire to make changes. The same goes when working with chronic illness flares and symptoms.

Having options means we have choice, even if some of those options might seem out of our reach.

4. Understand Triggers. Gain Options

Knowing that providing support for my mother is intensely stressful for me and my nervous system and that it is a trigger for my body has given me options. Even though this feels like a situation I cannot control, I know that offering my support is actually a choice. This is helpful for my brain and body to name. I recognize that I feel better choosing this option, even though it is very difficult, because I would feel profound regret if I did not offer support. We often face similar options with chronic illness that may seem impossible, but that we can actually choose to investigate if we really want to – or not.

As an example of how helpful it is to understand my triggers, I use this information when preparing for a trip to help my mom out. I choose the days that work best for me when I travel; I plan a schedule that can be as easy as possible for my mom that will also support my own needs, such as trying to keep afternoons open for us both to take a nap if we need one. If her outdoor cat is interested in being inside for a while, I’ve sometimes had the great pleasure of either playing with it or having it lie next to me while I tackle tasks on my laptop. There are lots of details we can tweak when we are clear about what is inducing the stress and the patterns that affect our symptoms and exacerbations.

5. Make it More “Like You.” Access the “You.”

Our new kitchen had a high-end countertop and newer backsplash. We loved the shape of the backsplash tile but weren’t excited about the color, nor how it clashed with the cabinets and the colors of the countertop. What appeals to one person is not necessarily what works for another or makes their heart sing.

Over the next few months we decided to replace the countertop to further lighten things up. Wanting to change something perfectly functional and highly recommended, something that others love or that is lauded by professionals and specialists, can feel wrong. It might feel selfish. Wasteful. Or ignorant.

I had been inspired by images of kitchens with blue cabinets and open shelves. All of the pictures I was drawn to also had white countertops, which made things feel calmer and more spacious. I had found a possible goal that enthralled me and replacing the countertop was a next step. We donated the granite to a local nonprofit recycling business that could sell it for their own gain. We patched and I painted the drywall where we’d removed the backsplash tile that had surrounded the cabinets we’d taken down.

Working with chronic illness flares and symptoms from trauma and nervous system perspectives can also feel ignorant, out of step, or anxiety producing. This is especially true if no one you know is familiar with this trauma-informed way of thinking or with how one works with it, including your medical professional(s). This is where it is can be helpful to take your time, to keep listening to what feels good / supportive / intriguing / calming / exciting / enticing or interesting to you and to your body. You can also keep researching and seeing if this is something that has been helpful for anyone else in a situation that might be similar to your own.

Replacing the countertops was a big expense that we were in a position to choose. After that, our kitchen started to feel more “us.”

The process of healing chronic illness from trauma and nervous system perspectives has a lot of options that are free, but almost everything is expensive in some way. It is costly in time, for example – it has been taking more time for my own journey of healing than I ever imagined. It takes willingness to stay curious, to practice and develop skills of mindfulness, to make the effort to pay attention and make room for things that are supportive or resourcing (such as my daily walks, or hanging out with my mom’s cat while it purred).

The reward can also take time, as in a renovation or a remodel, yet over the weeks, months and years each of these practices and elements brings us closer to who we are underneath the states of activation that can influence or drive our lives, our decisions and our symptoms.

6. Look for the Impulse. Symptoms as Motivators.

The impulse to paint the kitchen cabinets took 2 years to emerge. It came a few weeks after a recent visit to see my mother.

I’d been feeling extraordinarily fatigued and was experiencing a lot of body pain after that visit, which were both new. I knew my chronic illness flare was caused by triggers, so I also recognized that I hadn’t actually lost ground or regressed. I was not where I’d been 10 years ago or 15 years ago when my symptoms had been similar because my system had already worked it’s way through many times. I also had a lot more tools.

With this knowledge, I took action to work with my triggers: I did a number of somatically based trauma therapy sessions, went to acupuncture, took Chinese Herbs, had interesting sessions with two new health professionals, and made sure I continued walking every day. I used mindfulness practices and an understanding of trauma to be with the intense feelings that arose (feeling burdened, sad, mad, emotionally very uncomfortable in my body, as well as resentful). I believed some of these symptoms had elements of truth in the present moment (anger, grief and emotional discomfort) and knew others were old yet not entirely unrealistic for a variety of reasons (the burden and resentment).

From this understanding of experiences that can trigger chronic illness flaresI kept a lookout for anything my body might want to do that felt good or resourcing, We’ve learned that resources unique to each one of us can help mobilize our systems away from survival states and towards something more real and more mobilized in present time.

I was drawn to painting my kitchen even though I knew it was a huge project.

This is what can be so enticing and satisfying about a house or some other external space: you can make concrete changes and fix things. Kind of like the way so many of us living with chronic illness wish we could just order new parts, slap on a little paint and remodel our bodies into healthier, more fully capable states. You also see renovation results very overtly and in what is often a much shorter time frame (weeks or months) instead of the years it takes many of us to work with symptoms.

I recognized that I could paint my kitchen if I had enough time to rest as needed. I had practiced with bathroom vanities in the house that had only a few doors and drawers. The paint transformations looked terrific and held up very well. In this process I found a kind of paint designed for this very task (Advance, by Benjamin Moore). I loved the idea of refinishing our kitchen with just an investment in a few supplies, sweat equity that I had more of than in the distant past, and a little bit of help.

Then, I waited for the impulse rather than pushing through to get it done, which would have made the process a total drudge and a chore.

I used the waiting period to prepare: finding just the right blue, getting more lights with David’s help for the basement where I’d lay out the cabinet doors and do the work, figuring out a good nontoxic degreaser, and then waiting a little more.

And one day, while speaking with a friend who had come for a visit, I finally felt that desire to paint the kitchen cabinets.

Before I reveal the full kitchen, I want to share where I am right now after working with my chronic illness flares throughout the summer. Then I’ll give you full before and after pics.

7. The Reaping. My Personal State Today.

After working intensively all summer on my triggers and flares, I kept my recent trip to support my mother shorter than I’ve previously done. I sat with the cat, took my daily walks, and enjoyed an outing to see Downton Abbey with my mom, who was really interested in going. For the first time ever, during any trip home since I started observing the triggers, symptoms and flares that arose, I didn’t get dissociated. Instead, I felt like me and continued to feel “like me.” The feeling stayed with me the whole time, and I even slept well compared to recent visits. As a “kicker” and an even more concrete example of improvement, my physiology rewarded me with regular bowel movements almost every day while I was at my mother’s, when for decades my baseline states of significant constipation have increased severely whenever I’ve visited.

During my trip back to where I live, in which I have sometimes relaxed from relief straight into dissociation, my system and I stayed present and embodied, even after arriving home here in Colorado. I had a lot of feelings to process during the first two weeks. Having feelings instead of being dissociated are indicators of less overwhelm and thus for me, are a sign of progress: I was able to be with what was actually happening in my system rather than falling into freeze. And I have had the impulse, creativity and bandwidth to write my first personal update in a long time.

Since my return I have felt more functional than during my huge post-trip flare over the summer, as well as more present than I’ve been in 25 years after a visit. I still have more fatigue than usual, but it’s improved and the pain is almost gone. I’m still not back to my regular chronic fatigue baseline of the past few years but this is a process that I’m taking one step at a time for a situation that will continue to provide me with motivation to keep chipping away at triggers and old patterns. For now, I’m appreciating the reminder that it’s possible to work with flares, even in situations that feel impossible or overwhelming.

I’m on the lookout for my next impulses and projects.

8. Drink in the Completions. Each Step Counts.

Kitchen Before:

Kitchen After:

This is what our kitchen looks like as of last month. It is complete. It took me 6 weeks and some help from David and a handyman for final steps. I degreased, cleaned, lightly sanded, cleaned again, removed the incredibly sticky and hard-to-remove little nubs on the doors that soften the sounds of them closing, primed with an extra sticky primer, and then applied 2 coats of blue (Benjamin Moore, Advance, Newburg Green). I prepped the wood and put up the shelves. We put a new cabinet back up near the sink and this one that has glass doors that make it feel completely different.

What. A. Blast!!!

It was exhausting and simultaneously exhilarating. Being able to do something physical after so many years of illness despite being in a huge flare. Laying on the floor to paint the kick plate. Contorting to paint the backsplash tile that took 6 coats (!) to hide the underlying color that we hadn’t thought were so dark.

I was limited by the flare, but I could play with that. I worked 2 hours or less at a time, taking long deep naps and rests, waiting 18 hours between specialty coats of blue, and drinking in the transformation with each step.

I’ve been appreciating with deep pleasure the calm I feel from seeing and working in my new kitchen every day. It is now its own resource that keeps feeding the sense that I can keep healing. One step, one impulse, one trigger at a time. And sometimes even multiple triggers at a time.

Resources and Related Posts

See other blog posts with tips for working with symptoms

A detailed post about my story

Adverse childhood relationship experiences (ACREs): read the post, take the survey

Clues about flares and triggers