What Is Your Chronic Illness Telling You?
I was recently fortunate enough to attend a workshop by Lissa Rankin, MD and Dick Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems Therapy, called “Healing the Trauma That Surrounds Medical Syndromes”. As a therapist who often works with clients coping with chronic illness, and a patient myself, I found the presentations transformative.
There is a growing body of evidence that confirms that adverse experiences in our childhood can increase the risk for a variety medical conditions in adulthood including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, among others. Perhaps one of the most well known studies is the ACES study, which was completed by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente to better understand the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and health outcomes in adulthood. The ACES survey is designed to ask about adversities you may have experienced in childhood, and allows you to score it and understand possible implications for your own health. This survey is something I routinely give to new clients seeking therapy. It is one way for us to understand together how events they may have experienced in childhood could be connected to any current symptoms, and also where further exploration may be needed in therapy. If you have not taken the ACES survey yourself, it is free and widely available online. A good place to start is the CDC website for more information: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html. Please know that this survey does ask questions related to traumatic events you may have experienced in childhood, and be aware to support yourself and have resources available to you before taking the survey, if needed.
As a clinical social worker who spent many years in the medical setting, I am a firm believer in research, science and Western medicine. Where our current system falls short, I think, are in the best approaches to treating medical concerns that are rooted in adverse childhood experiences. What if it were best practice to offer trauma focused psychotherapy along side standard medical treatment, where both symptom management and healing of any root causes could be addressed concurrently? Research published in 2013 in the Journal of Rheumatology https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23950186/ showed that when combining an Internal Family Systems approach to treatment in addition to standard medical care, patients had a reduction in depression and pain symptoms, and experienced greater physical functioning as well as greater self compassion.
For many of us struggling with a chronic medical condition, it is common to want to quiet the symptoms, push away the effects of the illness and constantly strive for a return to “normal”. All of this is absolutely understandable. At the same time, if it feels possible to get permission from the parts of ourselves that hold that frustration towards our symptoms to give us some space, what might we learn from those symptoms of our illness if we can approach them with curiosity and compassion? For some, like the patients in the rheumatoid arthritis study cited above, their symptoms were telling them they needed to take time to focus on themselves, that they could no longer continue putting everyone else’s needs first. If you could write a letter from your disease or physical symptoms to yourself, what would it want you to know? With this approach we can begin to understand the parts of ourselves connected to the physical symptoms in our body, and begin the process of connection with self compassion. We can begin to write our own prescriptions for healing, allowing for medical, psychological and spiritual support in the ways our body needs.
If you are interested in learning more about how I practice trauma focused therapy, and ways it can help you in understanding and coping with your medical conditions, I offer free 15 minute consultations. Best wishes on your journey! Stephanie
