How to not be miserable when you have a chronic illness

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Thomas Robinson

Here is something I have learned from being a life coach for people with chronic illnesses that may surprise you: How happy or miserable you are does not depend on how serious your illness is or how painful or debilitating your symptoms are.

Now, I’m not saying that there is no correlation between your illness and your happiness. Most people who have chronic illnesses have good days and bad days, and we usually feel better on our good days than we do on our bad ones. But I have known many people with relatively minor symptoms who are very miserable, and have also known many people with very serious symptoms and illnesses—sometimes even terminal ones—who are not at all miserable, and many times are actually very happy.

If whether a person is happy or miserable does not depend on how bad their illness is, then what does it depend on?

I could write a book about that to add to the many that have already been written. But what I will say here is this: how we feel often depends on how we feel about how we feel. Okay, I bet you’re either thinking that doesn’t make sense, or at the least wondering what I mean.

Here’s what I mean: when we are happy, we are also happy that we are happy. That’s because when we were growing up, we felt happy when we were loved, we felt happy when we were rewarded for doing something well (like getting an A on a test), we were happy when we got presents, etc. So in our minds, happiness has a lot of positive associations.

On the other hand, we felt unhappy or miserable growing up when we were criticized or punished for doing something our parents thought was wrong, for falling short of their expectations (getting an F instead of an A), feeling like we were different and weren’t accepted by others, etc. Because of that, feeling unhappy or miserable has lots of negative associations.

When we feel unhappy or miserable, we don’t remember those negative associations. But they are there. And there is a part of our mind that thinks that being unhappy means the same things it did when we were growing up: we’re not okay, we’re not good enough, we’re different and not acceptable, etc. And so we become even more unhappy and even more miserable than we already were.

But the truth is that being unhappy and miserable does not mean those things it meant when we were growing up. We can be unhappy because a friend canceled a lunch, because we overcooked our dinner, because we got stuck in traffic, etc. None of those reasons mean that we are bad or not okay.

We can be unhappy and miserable for all those reasons and many more. But if we realize that those feelings don’t mean what they meant when we were growing up, we can allow ourselves to just have them without feeling bad for having them. And when we do that, we will feel a whole lot better.

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How to Make Good Decisions When You Have a Chronic Illness

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Thomas Robinson

Every day, all of us have lots of decisions to make. When you have a chronic illness, many of those decisions involve which providers to see, which treatments to try, and things like that. So they can affect whether you get better or worse and many other aspects of your quality of life. So you definitely want to make those decisions good ones.

But it is often hard to make good decisions, especially when you’re struggling with a chronic illness. However, no matter what you’re struggling with or what is going on in your life, it is still possible to make them. In this post, I’m going to share with you a way to do that which works well for me.

I have found, both in my own life and from coaching hundreds of people during the past 10 years, that one of the main things that makes it hard for us to make good decisions is our feelings, especially the unpleasant ones, such as sadness, rejection, fear, etc. We don’t like having those feelings, so without even thinking about it, we automatically make decisions that allows us to avoid them. But those automatic decisions can often have a negative effect on our health and our quality of life.

Knowing that, one of the ways I make better decisions is to think of my mind as a room with windows at both ends and think of my feelings as scents in the air that blows through it. Looking at feelings that way, I’ve found that if I just notice and observe them coming into my mind—the way I would notice and observe scents–without getting caught up in them, the window at the back of the room stays open, and they pass through. But when I get caught up in and dwell on those feelings, the window at the back of the room closes. And I end up making more and more bad decisions in an attempt to either avoid them or pretend they’re not there.

So as I’ve said, I make much better decisions when I just notice and observe my feelings. I know you will too. But there is another benefit—a very big one–that comes from allowing the unpleasant feelings to pass right through the room rather than reacting to them. The more we practice allowing those unpleasant feeling to pass right through, the more our ability to do so increases. I have found and seen that as it does, the more confident we become that we can handle the many challenges that we all experience in our lives. And with that confidence comes a deeper and deeper sense of peace.

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Are you a people pleaser – or a YOU pleaser?

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Thomas Robinson

Recently, I gave a coaching session to a woman I’ll call Brenda. We were looking at things she could do to make her life with Crohn’s disease, arthritis, and several other difficult challenges a lot better. As we did, Brenda started feeling so much emotional pain that she started to cry. That had happened earlier in the session and in several previous sessions as well.

As I coached her, it occurred to me that she could probably work through a lot of the pain that came up in coaching sessions by blogging. I told her so, and I also told her that blogging had the added benefit that if she wrote about the challenges she was going through and the painful feelings she experienced as she did, she would very likely get supportive comments from people who read her post.

Brenda agreed that blogging would probably be helpful. She didn’t commit to actually doing it, but she did commit to considering it and deciding if was the right thing for her to do. As I listened to Brenda, I had a strong sense that blogging would be very beneficial for her

In her session the following week, I found out that Brenda had not done what she had agreed to do: she did not spend any time thinking about blogging and its potential benefit. I asked her if she still thought that blogging about her challenges and her feelings would be helpful, and she said that she did.

But I sensed that something essential was missing and I said so. I told Brenda that until we found out what the missing piece was and added it back, blogging wasn’t going to be helpful for her.

Brenda quickly identified what the missing piece was. The previous week, she meant it when she said she would consider blogging, because she saw that it could be helpful. But the next week, when she said that she still thought blogging would be helpful, she said it not because she still believed it, but to please me.

Not surprisingly, that was not the first time Brenda said something to please someone else instead saying what was true for her. She saw that she had been doing that her whole life.

I told her that the person for her to please was not me. It was the woman in the mirror. I suggested that several times a day, she ask that woman how she could please her.

She said she would, and I’m looking forward to Brenda’s next session to find out how she’s pleased herself. I know that doing so will do her a lot more good than blogging just to please me would.

How about you? What will the person in the mirror tell you? Whatever it is (assuming that it doesn’t hurt anyone else) I encourage you to do it, and then leave a comment here telling my readers and me what you did.

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Not being critical of yourself is a GOOD start

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Thomas Robinson

Recently, when I suggested to a client that she give herself compassion because of the difficult challenges she was going through, she told me she was doing that. Then she explained that in spite of making a couple of mistakes, she wasn’t being hard on herself, getting down on herself, or calling herself names like “Stupid” or “Idiot.”

I was very glad to hear that. Many years ago, I used to talk that way to myself, but am glad to say I no longer do. Talking that way to ourselves is far too common, especially for those of us who had critical parents. If you do it, I strongly encourage you to stop.

In her book, How To Be Sick, Toni Bernhard writes about how she learned to stop doing that from a teacher at a spiritual retreat. The teacher described realizing that she would never talk that way to someone she cared about, and Toni saw that she wouldn’t even talk that way to a stranger. So they stopped!

Not talking harshly or critically to yourself is a good thing. Talking to yourself in an encouraging way is a good thing. Acknowledging your accomplishments and your special qualities and gifts to yourself is also a good thing to do.

But none of those are the same as giving yourself compassion. And I have found that giving ourselves compassion is one of the best, most effective things we can do to heal the emotional wounds we get when others say and do things that hurt us or upsetting or traumatic things happen to us.

At first, my client had a hard time giving herself compassion. Many people do. She’s a very productive person, with a demanding job, and she had a strong desire to “do something.” But giving yourself–or anyone else—compassion doesn’t require you to physically do anything.

Thinking about the way she was with her pets and the way they were with her was helpful, and since she knows a lot about the energy of the heart, my suggestion of giving herself “gentle heart energy” was very helpful.

It’s important for us to be good to ourselves and it is important that we not be critical of ourselves. But to heal our emotional wounds, what works much better than either of those is to give ourselves a great deal of  self compassion. I hope this helps you give yourself a lot more.

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Happy New Year!

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Thomas Robinson

We made it! The world didn’t end a week ago like many people told us it would. But you still have a chronic illness (or several of them), and it’s very likely 2012 had a lot suffering and struggling in it. So what I would like you to do for the new year is to take a hard look at doing whatever you need to do to much better, happier, and fulfilling life, with a lot less struggling, in spite of the fact that you’re living with a chronic illness.

I was a well-paid software engineer for over 25 years. But I didn’t find it satisfying, so I decided to change careers. For several reasons that I don’t have room to go into here, I became a life coach. And because I had learned to live well with a chronic illness (Crohn’s disease) and saw that there were (and still are) many people who haven’t learned how to do that, I decided to coach them. I don’t make as much money as I did when I was an engineer, but I am very grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to help people who were struggling and suffering turn their lives around in spite of their illnesses.

And if this post helps more people with chronic illnesses turn their lives around in 2013, I will be even more grateful.

If you are one of those people who will turn their lives around in 2013—and I hope you are, reading this post is a good way to start doing that. You can also read the other blog posts I’ve written over the past three years and get suggestions and ideas to help you from them. And if you are ready to take a big step to make your life a LOT better in 2013, I highly recommend that you sign up for a no-cost How to Have a Better Life than You Ever Thought Possible coaching session with me. I will give you personalized suggestions to help you with your biggest challenges, whatever they are.

Happy New Year!

Tom Robinson, who has Crohn’s disease himself, helps people with chronic illnesses feel a whole lot better, and live lives with much more joy and fulfillment

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Are you a safe person for people to share their problems, concerns, and fears with?

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Thomas Robinson

Let me start by saying that if you’re wondering what a post about whether or not you’re a safe person for people to share their problems, concerns, and fears with has to do with living well with a chronic illness, then keep reading and you will soon find out.

As I’m sure you know from experience, there are many people with whom it’s not safe to share them. If you’re like me, you learned the hard way that if you did, they would respond in a way that made you feel worse than you already did. Some were dismissive and said “Just get over it!” Some would condescendingly tell me how they had easily solved a problem they saw as much more difficult than mine was. And others were just plain critical. They would let me know that if I just had my act together (or words to that effect), that I could easily solve whatever problem or concern or get past whatever fear I had.

Since learning the hard way that it’s not safe to share those things with everyone, I’ve become wiser. I can often tell whether a person is safe or not. And if I can’t tell, I’ll say some things to test the waters, and will only share my those concerns and fears—especially the major ones—with people who “pass.”

I bet that you do something similar.

I think it’s really important for us to have people in our lives that we can share our problems, concerns, and fears with for a couple of reasons. Obviously people who care about us will support us and try to help us with them. And besides that, in the process of sharing them, we often see ways to manage, solve, or overcome them that we wouldn’t see if we kept silent about them.

So sharing those problems, concerns, and fears is a good thing. And there’s a person I haven’t yet mentioned that you can share them with: YOU. When you do that, then in the same way that you can get support from others and in the same way that you can see new possible solutions just in the act of sharing, you can get support from yourself and you can see new perspectives and answers by sharing your problems, concerns, and fears with yourself.

The idea of doing that may sound strange, but if you try it, you’ll find that it works very well. But—and this is important–it only works well if you are a safe person when it comes to sharing those things with yourself.

If you are often dismissive of your concerns or if you tell yourself that you shouldn’t have the fears you do or if you weren’t so messed up (or whatever word you use), you would have solved your problems a long time ago, then you have shown yourself that you are not a safe person to share your problems, concerns, and fears with. And, without knowing why, you won’t.

But to solve your problems and address your fears and concerns, it’s important to share them with yourself as well as with others. And to do that, you need to be a safe person to share them with. So if you have been dismissive or critical of yourself, start being gentle, understanding, and compassionate (and this includes being understanding of yourself and compassionate and gentle FOR having been dismissive and critical).

I know you will find that making these changes will be a big help in dealing with the challenges of living with a chronic illness, as well and with your other problems and concerns.

If you would like more helpful ideas, I invite you to click here get my free report: Finally! Real Hope for People Suffering from Chronic Illnesses.

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Is there a connection between having an unhappy childhood and having a chronic illness as an adult?

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Thomas Robinson

With very few exceptions, everyone I’ve talked to who has a chronic illness (and I’ve talked to LOTS of people who do) has wondered why they got it. I have too. Many of them believe what I do: that one of the main factors that caused their illness, was having an unhappy and often traumatic childhood that included not getting nearly enough love from their parents or caretakers.

I believe there is a strong connection between our childhoods and our chronic illnesses for several reasons. The first is that the majority of the people with chronic illnesses I’ve coached over the past 10 years have told me that their childhoods were emotionally traumatic and that they didn’t feel very loved by one or both parents.

One recent client, whom I’ll call Lillian, is a good example. Neither of her parents was emotionally there for her when she was growing up, especially her father. And she’s had cancer – not once, but twice. She was diagnosed with lymphoma was she was seven years old. It responded to treatment, but she never fully recovered her health.

Then, 10 years ago, when she was 38, Lillian was diagnosed with leukemia. She had to undergo a bone marrow transplant. That cured the leukemia, but her body, including her immune system, were severely damaged and she hasn’t felt well or had what she considers to be a good day since. Is is just a coincidence that she didn’t get the love she needed (and still longs for) and that she has had cancer twice. I sure don’t think so.

The second reason I believe in that strong connection is because researchers have been finding more and more evidence that people who’ve had unhappy or stressful childhoods are much more likely to be diagnosed with chronic illnesses (and also chronic pain) as adults. The illnesses include fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and many others.

The third reason I believe in the connection between an unhappy childhood and developing a chronic illness is my own experience. As I’ve written elsewhere, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when I was 47. I feel strongly that having an unhappy childhood was one of two main causes (for reasons I won’t go into here, I believe that the other main cause was my many mercury-amalgam fillings).

There is one more reason I think there is a connection between having an unhappy childhood and developing a chronic illness. It comes partly from what I have learned and understood about  my clients, but more than that it comes from my own life. As a child, I developed a serious chronic illness that resembled polio, but wasn’t. I eventually recovered from it.

In a therapy session many years later, I had the profound but completely unexpected realization that I had deliberately but subconsciously acquired the illness to get  attention and love from my parents that I desperately wanted and needed, but wasn’t getting.

I wish I knew and could explain how I acquired the illness, but I don’t and can’t. But more than enough corroborating evidence came along with the realization to convince me that, beyond a reasonable doubt, it was true.

If, after reading what I’ve written, you suspect that you may have unconsciously decided to acquire a serious chronic illness, please don’t blame or criticize yourself for having done so. If you did that, it was because, like me, you had an unmet need. What you needed and didn’t get then was lots of compassion and understanding, and what you need and deserve now is lots of compassion and understanding. Please give them to yourself.

You also need lots of compassion and understanding if you had an unhappy childhood and there is a connection between it and the chronic illness you have now. Please give them to yourself – as much as you possibly can. Doing so helps bring about physical and emotional healing.

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Are You Being Yourself?

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Thomas Robinson

This blog post is not for everyone who has a chronic illness. If you’ve let the important people in your life (except for those you work with or for) know about your illness and have given them at least a general description of how it has affected you and your life, you’re welcome to skip this post. Or, if you like, you can read why disclosing your illness was a good idea.

On the other hand, if there are important people in your life you haven’t told about your illness, please keep reading, because by the time you get to the end of the post, I think you will agree that disclosing is a better choice in almost all cases.

Note: as I wrote above, in this post, I’m not recommending that you disclose your illness to your coworkers or your boss. The decision about whether or not to do that depends on many factors that I’m not going to cover here. If you have a question about your work situation, you’re welcome to submit it as a comment to this post, and I will do my best to answer it.

One reason why it’s almost always a good idea to tell the important people in your life about your illness is this: keeping secrets from people and pretending you’re healthy and okay when you’re not isn’t easy. It takes work and can be very stressful. Living with a serious illness isn’t easy either; it’s often very difficult. Given that, I think it’s just common sense to be truthful with our friends and relatives and use the energy we save by doing that to deal with and manage our illness and symptoms.

A second reason why it’s usually a good idea to share about your illness with the important people in your life is that they almost always respond in an empathetic and compassionate way, even when we think they won’t. When they do, we feel cared for and supported, and we both feel closer to each other. It becomes a win-win.

So if there are important people you haven’t yet told about your illness and your life with it, I encourage you to do so. And if you do, I hope you will write about your experience in a comment below.

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Have You Asked for What You Want and Need?

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Thomas Robinson

Our interactions with others can be and often are one of the most stressful, difficult, and painful areas of our lives. That is especially true for those of us living with a chronic illness for lots of reasons. We may feel guilty because we can’t do what we think is “our fair share.” We often have additional needs that healthy people don’t. And if we have pain, resentment, or other illness-related negative emotions, they can creep into our interactions and communications and make things even more stressful, difficult, and painful than they already are.

It may feel like some relationships with important people in our lives are so painful and trying that they’ll never get any better. While that may be true, I have learned, from helping many of my clients improve their relationships and also from dealing with problematic ones in my own life, that damaged or broken relationships can be mended restored even when that doesn’t seem possible.

That is good news, especially for us, because we are often more dependent on others for both physical and emotional support than people who are healthy are. What’s even better news is the fact that sometimes all it takes to greatly improve a difficult relationship is to ask the other person for what you want and need.

Asking for what you want and need can be scary and difficult; difficult because because if you don’t do it correctly, it’s very likely that you won’t get the response you want and scary because even if you do do it correctly  they still may say no . But it’s also very possible that the result will be better than you could have imagined.

That’s what happened for a client I’ll call Sally. She contacted me to help her find better ways to live with Crohn’s disease. But it soon became very clear that one of the biggest stressors in her life was her marriage. Her husband had stopped being demonstrative and affectionate, and she told me she was dying inside.

For reasons that would take too long to explain in this post, she wasn’t able have a conversation with him and tell him how she felt. With some coaching, the approach she decided to use was to write her husband a letter telling him what she told me: that she was dying inside.

In the letter, she didn’t blame him, she didn’t plead with him, and she didn’t implicitly threaten him by telling him that she divorced her first husband because of a lack of love and affection. She just told him she was dying inside and that she needed to feel loved. And she put the letter in a place she knew he couldn’t miss it: she pinned it to his pillow.

Since Sally wrote and delivered that letter, her marriage has improved dramatically. Her health has gotten better too. And she is continuing to work on and improve both.

One more example: a friend I’ll call Robert was in a long distance relationship and was finding that telephone conversations had become boring and unsatisfying. He began to feel more and more emotionally distant from his girlfriend, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. Finally, after several weeks, it occurred to him that he could forthrightly tell her he wanted deeper, more meaningful conversations – and he did! Not surprisingly, the conversations became enjoyable and satisfying and he again felt close to her.

It may seem strange that a person could overlook such an obvious solution, but all of us do. So if you’re having a difficult time with someone in your life, chances are good that you can make things a lot better by asking yourself if you’ve asked for what you want and need, and if you haven’t, doing so.

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How Much do Things Affect You? More Than You Know and for Longer Than You Know: A Fascinating Study!

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Thomas Robinson

I want to tell you about an experiment that I read about that can help you live a much better life when you have a chronic illness*. Actually, it can help anyone have a much better life, but since those of us with chronic illnesses often have a low quality of life because of our symptoms and difficult challenges, we’re the ones that I’m going to focus on.

While the  experiment was done several years ago, it was only recently that I discovered it. What the researchers did was to mail advertisements about non-prescription drug to large, random groups of people, but not to random control groups.

Then, after waiting about 10 weeks, they randomly selected people from the test groups and from the control groups and had people interview them. An important fact to keep in mind is that the people who did the interviewing did not know about either the mailing or that there were different groups. And because so much time had passed since the advertisements were mailed, it is very unlikely that the people in the group that received them ever considered the possibility that the interviews were connected to them.

The people being interviewed were asked about their awareness of the drug the advertisement was for and also whether they had purchased it. As you would probably expect, the percentages of people who were aware of it and who had purchased it were higher for the groups that had received the advertisement than they were for the groups that hadn’t.

Besides asking people about drug brand name awareness and their purchases of the drug, the interviewers asked another question that unearthed a result I would not have predicted and I bet you wouldn’t have either. They asked people in both groups about their overall health. And what they found, consistently in seven different trials, was that the people who received the drug advertisements were in worse health than  were the people who didn’t!

When I read about the experiment, I was very surprised that the effect of reading the advertisement lasted 10 weeks. But I can’t think of a better demonstration of how what we think about affects us.

That said, I don’t think the lesson here is that we should pretend we feel well when we don’t. If we do that, there’s a part of us that knows we’re trying to pull the wool over our own eyes, and doesn’t buy it.

But I think it does mean that both our health and our lives will very likely be much better when we find things to be grateful for (and we all have them no matter what our illness or circumstances are), and then focus on them.

I hope you will share your comments and also what you’re grateful for.

Do Unto Others as You Would Have Others Do Unto You
but also
Do Unto Yourself as You Would Have Others Do Unto You


*http://www.goodsamiam.com/SSEPaper.pdf

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