Chronic Illness Trauma Studies
How Adversity Shapes Health & Why It's Not In Your Head
Spring in my garden is a riot of color. I caught the above pic of my poppies just past their peak after deciding to replace them and wanting to document the process. Because uprooting a cheery, bright colored perennial that makes me happy in order to take the chance that something else might do an ...
This is Avdeep's chronic fatigue story, a chronic illness also known as CFS, for chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis or "ME", ME/CFS, and CFIDS (chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome). I call her story a #Chrillog, which stands for “chronic illness weblogs,” in which we ...
Even though I'm a doctor myself, I felt anxiety when my primary care doctor retired and I had to find someone new. By that point I was 15 years into my illness, had consulted dozens of health care professionals in all kinds of specialties who were well respected in their fields but whose ways of ...
This is Harper’s chronic fatigue syndrome story, also known as CFS, myalgic encephalomyelitis or "ME", ME/CFS, and CFIDS (chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome). I call her story a #Chrillog, which stands for “chronic illness weblogs,” in which we look at our journeys through a nervous ...
I don't really "want" to write about shame and other difficult emotions because it means having to feel into these feelings. And as many of you know, shame, in particular, can feel annihilating. But the origins of shame are sneaky and we tend to think it's because something is wrong with US. The ...
There are empowering, encouraging things about understanding the role of adversity and trauma as risk factors for chronic illness. Among the most important are that it provides opportunities. Opportunities for making sense of symptoms. Opportunities for removing blame. And opportunities for planting ...
Are you a WOMI (a woman with a mysterious illness)? Or a MOMI (a man with a mysterious illness)? A person of any orientation with an autoimmune disease? Or chronic fatigue syndrome (which research is beginning to suggest may also be an autoimmune illness)? Or who is not responding to treatment, or ...
In the few months before writing this article, I had an exacerbation of symptoms which I came to recognize as a trauma response. It had slowed me down to a crawl and to the point where I couldn’t even write a blog post. Here, I describe how symptoms can stem from trauma in a family system and ...
I've described how chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a disease driven by a cell danger response (CDR) and a nervous system caught in a threat response of freeze and some of us with an underlying fight/flight response (wired and tired) in Part 1. This second post describes how the CDR gets stuck ...
