Dear Mima37:

Welcome back. Your husband reads like a loving, supportive husband. As you probably know, your kids will be better if they believed you don’t worry so much about them. Children want their mother to be okay, content. So do your best, again, to help yourself. Don’t pressure yourself to enjoy the activities you enjoyed before. Allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you feel.

Be gentle and patient with yourself, do not put pressure on yourself  that is not necessary.

Let your son recover from his social crisis without being further burdened by the idea that his problem is making you miserable.

Remind yourself that there is so little in the world that you can change: from the current global pandemic, to .. the global drug crisis.. all the way to your son’s former friends turning to drugs.

The Serenity prayer:”.. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”.

anita

Dear Mima37:

I am glad that you are back, and you are welcome to stay for as long as you want to, post anytime, and I will be glad to reply to you.

“I’m doing enough” reads good enough to me!

If you don’t ask your son how he is “about 1000 times a day”, he will be better of. Ask him once a day, maybe?

* I just came back from my daily walk, and it occurred to me as I walked that something I posted to another member today may be helpful to you. Here it is: “Expressive Therapy is about using the creative arts (drawing, painting, collage, clay, music, movement/dancing, drama) as a form of expression and healing.

Unlike traditional arts, that require skill and talent, and that emphasize performing in front of an audience, or exhibiting art to an audience, expressive/ art therapy is not  about performing to an audience, or about a final product to be exhibited in a museum. And you don’t have to be skilled or talented. Expressive/ Art Therapy is about.. expressing our emotions so to heal and to maintain your health.

in a website: innerself. com/ content/ personal/ happiness-and-self-help/ counselling/ 4130-express-your-emotions-through-art. html, a Lucia Capacchione, PhD., ATR, an art therapist, writes that the Latin roots of the word emotion are: e (out) + movere (move). Feelings either move naturally, like a river, or get blocked. It is the nature of emotions to move.

If our emotions naturally move, we feel alive; if they are blocked, we feed like life is hardly worth living. When emotions are blocked, because their nature is to move, they keep moving in that blocked context, creating stress disorders and illnesses.

And so, (Mima37) find your art medium, maybe painting, or collage, and/ or dancing to music.. find your medium and express your emotions!”-

– I was wondering, Mima37, if part reason for your CFS is caused by those blocked emotions that “keep moving.. creating stress disorders and illnesses”.

anita

Dear Mima37/Ju:

You are welcome.

“I was diagnosed with CFS/ME in 2016… I never feel relaxed, I always feel tense and worried.. my tests showed my cortisol was high.. I always feel tense and uptight” –

Cortisol is a hormone that causes an increase in the concentration of sugar (glucose) in the blood. This is how I understand stress, much simplified: there is acute, time-limited stress and there is chronic stress.

When a deer notices an approaching predator, its heart starts pumping blood fast so to provide the leg muscles sugar and oxygen for the purpose of running away fast. As the heart does that, and a fast running is anticipated,  the blood sugar depletes and is expected to deplete even more, so a hormone called cortisol is released to the blood. It travels to the muscles and breaks down protein in the muscles, converting them to sugar, so to get more sugar to the blood.

It is not a good thing for the deer to have some of its muscle broken down, but the logic of nature is: I’ll deal with less muscle later, for now I have a higher priority: I need more sugar because I have to run fast to save my life!

So the deer, energized with sugar and oxygen pumped to its legs, runs very fast. After a short while, when it perceives that it is safe, it is exhausted. It has no energy to eat or anything, so it lies down and rests, for a long time. During the long rest, its muscles rebuild. After the rest and restoration, it is as good as new.

Now, take this deer and place it in a small cage in a zoo. It is stuck, it perceives danger: how can it escape if a predator approaches; how can it look for food? (it doesn’t rely on being fed; it is not a domesticated); perceiving danger, its heart pumps blood to its legs, muscles break down, and this happens for a long time. The deer doesn’t get to run away, nor does it get to rest, so it stays cages, stressed and exhausted.

In other words, in an acute stress situation, the brain/ body attends to the immediate need of running away from danger/ flight (or fight a danger); some damage to the body is done, later (when the danger is over) to be corrected. In a chronic stress situation, the danger is not over, the body doesn’t get to run away from the danger, or fight the danger, and it doesn’t get to rest because .. the danger is still there.

The damage done to the body of an animal who prepares to run away or fight danger is not limited to breaking down of muscle protein, it includes a compromised immune system, a compromised cognition (ability to concentrate, to remember, etc.). But all the damage is supposed to be temporary and corrected once the animal is no longer in danger.

Unfortunately, when an animal, including a human, perceives danger but cannot run away from it or fight it, the damage done to the body in preparation to do the impossible (flight or fight), does not get corrected, health is not restored, and therefore damage can be permanent, such as ending up with chronic high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, neurological conditions and other illnesses and syndromes. And these illnesses and syndromes create even more stress!

I know that your doctors already guided you toward all the relaxation practices possible since you were diagnosed, and indeed you’ve been experiencing improvement in your stress responses. Better do more of what works, persistently and patiently.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by .

Dear mima37:

You are welcome.

I’ve suffered severe stress from early childhood and throughout childhood. That severe stress damaged my body, leading to OCD (including multiple compulsions, every hour, every day) and Tourette Syndrome. I no longer do the OCD compulsion for the last 25 years or so, but I do suffer from motor and vocal tics, although not at the severity of early on, but these tics still lower my quality of live every day, and significantly so, because a tic is involved with a subjective distress, and it happens multiple times per hour, all day long. So I know body damage as a result of stress.

You wrote: “I wish I knew how to work on the chronic stress response I’m stuck in and how to get out of the anxiety for good. Even though it’s much better I’m still stuck”- I used to hope that I will heal and no longer suffer anxiety; I used to hope that I will no longer suffer these tics. What I learned is that although I am healing, there is no way I can live long enough to heal completely. Healing of this kind is simply too slow. Even if life was unlimited in time, I don’t think all damage can be undone.

All we can do, I believe, is heal as much as is possible for us. No longer expecting complete healing is in itself healing. Like the Serenity Prayer I quoted yesterday, we have to accept the damage that we cannot heal, and heal the damage that we can heal.

With realistic expectations- we heal; having unrealistic expectations- we get stuck.

anita