How To Deal With The Loss Of Self In Chronic Illness

And often what happens is when we have those people being unsupportive, this can impact on our sense of self. Yeah. So if you think about when before we had a condition, before we had a chronic illness, but a certain identity, and that identity was about being self sufficient as a human being, being perhaps productive in society or autonomous or confident in one's own abilities. And when we get a chronic illness which then stops us from perhaps working or studying full time, that becomes a new identity. And that new identity is often related and connected to the condition. We can't do as many things in life. We're needing to be supported by others around us. And that new identity, unfortunately is not as supported in society as the old identity that you had. And that then means that with this loss of identity and not feeling supportive, supportive, that can lead to kind of lower. Self esteem. And what can make this worse is doctors or family around you not believing that you have the condition, for instance. And if that leave you, then that can mean that, that once again you feel judged. And your inner approval seeker, your sense of approval starts reducing. And here at the Gupta program, we actually use certain puppets to remind us of these different parts within us, that we have a certain part within us which is the approval seeker. And we represent this with Tina the ballerina. So this means that Tina the ballerina, our approval seeker part within us, starts feeling much more lower and rejected because doctors and family members aren't believing that this is a real condition. Yeah, I'm thinking just snap out of it, you'll be fine. Or they just say it's in the mind. There can be a sense of pressure to go back to work. Yeah. Feeling I need to be a productive member of society to have a stronger sense of self. And this can be related to the achiever part of us. Okay. And so the achiever part of us is represented by Leo the lion here. The part of us that feels that I should be working, I should be productive in some ways way and so on. There can be pressure to do activities so we can feel like from family and friends, they want us to do certain things at weekends with them or go for dinner and we can't. And often we can't commit to doing things because of the unpredictability of these types of conditions. Long Covid chronic fatigue. And therefore we feel like we might be being judged by those around us because we're not able to actually engage or commit to those types of activities. And there can be a worry about burdening others. So especially if you have what we call the helper trait. So we represent the helper within us as Anita, the doctor that represents the part of us that always wants to keep helping others and supporting others. Sometimes we get into that identity and, and we can't then accept support and help from other people. And we worry that I'm burdening other people. I don't want other people to feel that burden. But in doing so, once again, that reduces the sense of self esteem through this helper trait because we feel like we're not supporting others, others are supporting us. And in those situations, it's really important to realize that it's okay when we have a chronic illness to gain the support of our family, our friends, our loved ones, because we all have a time of need. And in the future they may have a time of need that you're going to support them with. And it's perfectly okay in this juncture with this condition to get that love and support that you need to help you through to your recovery. And then finally, sometimes we may have family members or doctors who expect the brain retraining that we do here at the Gupta program. They expect that brain retraining to give overnight results. And for some of our patients, within days and weeks, they can reach a really good recovery. But that's not for everyone. And therefore it can take a little time. And so sometimes it can be ongoing judgments from people saying, well, you're doing the brain retraining, you're doing the neuroplasticity. What's happening? Are you better now? And it's about helping them realize it's a step by step learning, a step by step process that can be very quick or it can take a certain amount of time as well. And so this is what's happening. It is reducing our sense of self and our sense of self identity because we now unfortunately are identified with the condition. And some people refer to this as ableism, which is when able bodied people devalue people who have disabilities. Yeah. And they may even be dismissive and say, oh well, everyone gets tired or you know, just, I'm sure if you just eat healthily you'll be fine. Right. And that can once again impact on our sense of self because people aren't taking it seriously. And we feel like we're being judged for a disability, especially if it's an invisible illness. So a lot of these conditions that we've talked about, so we've talked about chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, main long Covid mold illness, Lyme disease, pots, Dysautonomia all of these conditions that we treat, there are invisible conditions in the sense that someone can look perfectly fine on the surface. And this type of ableism and devaluing people with these conditions is something to watch out for. And what are the consequences of all of this? Well, we're very lucky to have with us today Francis, who's one of our coaches, one of the Gupta program coaches. Hi there, Francis. How are you?

Hi. I'm good, thanks. Yeah.

Yeah. I've just given that introduction around, you know, some of the challenges that people may face and anything you want to add in terms of some of those challenges and then secondly, you know, some of the consequences of, you know, this judgment this people may experience or the sense of a lack of identity.

Yeah. I just want to briefly just say it's just so hard at first, I think, when all the identities of what you were doing in your life previous to illness have to drop away and can be very challenging to, to. To work with those, work with that. The parts work is great for that. And, and then of course, yeah, if you're not seen and understood by doctors or friends or family, it can also add on new layers of.

Yeah.

So there's many ways you can sort of work with that. Give yourself all the love and compassion you can and find people around you who can see you, who do support you, do understand you, and finding your best way as well to communicate your needs and your truth with the medical community or with friends and family as well.

Yeah, absolutely, Francis. No, that, that makes sense. And for everyone who's watching, we'd love for you to share this content with other people on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. So please do just take our stream, Please share it with your friends and family, with other groups who might benefit from this and do give us a, like a thumbs up. The hearts always be lovely to see those coming across the screen. And so moving on to. As Francis has touched on some of the solutions, some of the ways that we can actually deal with unsupportive people. And I think the first point I want to talk about here is sometimes it can be disempowering when we are feeling judged by people, our doctors, our friends, our family members who don't understand us. That can lead to a certain part coming up which we call Jess the Princess, which is our victim part. Our victim can feel like we are a victim of other people's responses, their lack of support. Okay, yeah. And when that gets triggered, that's disempowering. So how do we re. Empower ourselves. Where is that? Self empowerment? I think the first port of call is really understand that you cannot force other people to change. Yeah. And that's a universal principle in life. You can share things with them, you can try to educate, but ultimately you can't force other people to see your point of view. Instead, what you can do is inspire them to a new possibility. So I think we're going to go through six ways that we can handle people who don't understand what we're going through.