I found out today that the back pain I’ve had for 6 years, acutely in the last year, isn’t going any time soon. Painkillers won’t help in the long run. There are no injections or obvious fixes. I have degeneration in my sacroiliac joint and managing it will last my lifetime.
It’s not the news I wanted or expected in my mid-forties. My movement is currently that of a much older person. Coupled with mid life changes in both my appearance and inner world, it feels like a shift in my identity that I can’t bridge yet. I’m left asking, how did I get from there to here? How have I lost my strength and vitality so quickly?
And yet questions remain. It’s not as simple as that damage leads to that pain. It’s hard to separate the physical pain from the enormous life changes I’ve navigated in the last 5 years. How is that emotional pain interacting with the physical? As therapists we know that the body keeps the score and there’s been a fair bit on the ole score sheet recently.
It brings to mind clients that I’ve worked with facing chronic health issues, the mountains we find ourselves facing that we neither envisioned for ourselves, or wanted to face.
One thing that I am drawing on personally is Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapy which encourages to see ourselves as made up of parts. There are protector parts shielding the exiled parts that hold our rawest of feelings. And there is Self energy contained clarity, connectedness, courage, compassion, creativity, curiosity. A part of me is facing disability, this part of me feels humiliated by it and saddened, as is in pain. But it is not all of me. I can cultivate the Self energy in me. Here’s what it might look like for me:
Clarity – I know what the problem is with my back. I have the answers I’ve been waiting for
Connectedness – Others too suffer with chronic pain. My loved ones will be there for ne
Courage – I tackle challenges with my best foot forward and with a smile on my face
Compassion – this is not what I expected or wanted. This is hard.
Creativity – Can I strengthen my arm muscles and feel strength that way?
Curiosity – Improvements can come with time and strength can be rebuilt. What combination of movement don’t aggravate the pain too much?
If there’s a challenge that you are facing today – can you perhaps ty as I did above and explore it using those 8c’s of self.
If that’s too much, what about can I move from self-judgement to self-compassion? Can I find things that I’m grateful for right now in this moment? Can I do one thing now to move towards something more hopeful?h
With love, Rosie
Book recommendation on this issue of facing chronic ill health:
What happens after the climb?
When the summit has been reached but the landscape of your life is unrecognisable?
Still Living is a luminous and radically honest memoir of the mountains we never choose to climb and what it means to find our way home to ourselves in the aftermath.
Through the guiding metaphor of a mountain, Asta traces her intimate journey through breast cancer, chronic illness, ME and identity rupture.
This is not a story of being ‘fixed’ or restored.
It is the slow cultivation of a new ecosystem of self in altered ground. A remembering that we carry within us the embodied intelligence to begin again even in the harshest terrain.
Tender, wise and deeply compassionate, Still Living offers strength, solace and a new language for life beyond survival. An invitation to rewild the self not by returning to who we once were but by honouring who we are still becoming.
