How To Learn From Chronic Illness and Turn It Into a Positive Experience

Having suffered from a chronic illness (chronic fatigue syndrome) for 15 years I am well aware of the restriction and emotional turmoil it can wreak on life, however in the process of recovering I found that there were numerous factors that were within my control, and were significantly contributing to my ill health. Therefore, the learning and greater perspective I gained from “correcting” these factors became an enormously valuable experience for me.

So from initially being a “life destroying” occurrence, my illness in fact guided me to an expansion of understanding of myself and health and all sorts of other factors, that I don’t think I necessarily would have got, if I had never become ill in the first place.

I learned to question what is generally accepted by most people, such as the conventional medical view on chronic illness. Most people in my situation are told that they have a chronic illness, for which there is no cure and their only hope is to manage their symptoms as best they can for the rest of their life, usually in the form of drugs.

I was slightly lucky in this respect, in that there are no real drugs or other treatment options offered for my illness, so I was left with the option to either accept the diagnoses I was given and resign myself to a life of limitation, or to look by myself for any other possible ways in which I could help myself.

I soon found stories and testaments from many hundreds of people who had not only recovered from my illness, but all manner of other chronic problems, from autoimmune to degenerative and everything in between.

No two stories were exactly the same, but I noticed general veins running through most of them, which seemed to hint at at least some degree of truth to what these people were saying had helped them recover from their particular ailment.
So I began experimenting with what seemed to be the most popular of these or what most appealed to me and made rational sense.

It certainly wasn’t easy, and I certainly didn’t get any sort of immediate improvement, but I saw that some things did help and others did not or even sometimes made me feel worse. So I kept doing the things that helped and stopped the things that didn’t, whilst all the time researching and looking for other ways in which I may be able to make changes.

I would say that the most important thing I learned was that my decline in health was mainly due to the way I was living my life, in terms of the degree of physical, mental, emotional and nutritional stress I was placing on myself. As soon as I began to address enough of these areas, and tip the balance enough, then my health began to improve and return to what it once was.

Its natural when finding yourself with a chronic illness to want to look for the magic bullet treatment, but I found this to be a fruitless pursuit on my journey. I found that it is more a case of stopping the unhelpful things that we are doing and thinking and feeling, more than it is that we have to find some special treatment out there that is going to “fix” us.

I suppose the main point I want to get across here, is that if you are suffering with a chronic illness, then there is always hope that you can change things for the better. Chiefly because there isn’t one chronic illness that conventional medicine knows absolutely everything about, in terms of why it occurs and whether it is recoverable. So If they don’t know, then there is always at least a possibility that there is a way out of your problem. And when you do look, there are people who have recovered from pretty much every illness ever recorded.

I think the reason why we don’t see that many, is because it is so easy to completely accept the word of a doctor as gospel and to therefore discount any plausibility that you could actually heal your own body on your own, and this is what most people with a chronic illness do.

Living with a chronic illness can be a dark and lonely place, but it really doesn’t have to be. In my experience, you have way more influence over your own destiny than I ever thought possible, previous to learning what I have.

The answers are out there, and somebody has felt just as ill as you and recovered back to full health, and so can you.

Best Wishes

Jack