Your diagnosis and label is a way of understanding a collection of symptoms you are experiencing at the time. Accepting the status quo or worst case prognosis can limit your ability to heal. What we believe about any disease process can be a self fulfilling prophecy. If we believe we will never be better – we will never be better. It doesn’t mean we can cure ourselves but we open up the possibility for any increment of improvement when we release the limits and believe in possibilities.
We know that there are improvements and healing that happens beyond what a doctor’s prognosis might be.
To maximize your healing potential and reduce the amount of your ownership that your condition has over you bring awareness to the following:
1. Notice your speech – are you owning the label and calling it yours? “My anxiety? My fibromyalgia. Try depersonalizing. Remove the word “my” and replace with “I’m just experiencing symptoms of _____ today”. Keep it time limited. It can change tomorrow.
2. Are you talking about it a lot? What would happen if you had a buzzer that went off every time you talking about your symptoms or your condition? How bout every time you thought about it? What if you put a moratorium on how much you talk about your condition outside of your health care providers?
3. What limits have you accepted? What if you could imagine feeling 10% better? 25% 50% 100%? If you imagine those percentages – what does that look like? What if you really believed that was possible? Try pretending that it is – what would you do differently in your life? What limits would be removed?
4. See an SRT (Self Regulation Therapy) practitioner to work with your medical conditions, your thoughts and emotions around them, your limits within them. A healthy nervous system is the beginning and end for all health, just as a dysregulated nervous system is the beginning and end for many disease processes.
There’s a potential for healing that we will not be able to fully realize if we hyper personalize or really own our labels in our thoughts and even in our speech. Stop owning your label and limiting your healing. You might not be cured – but wouldn’t it be worth the experiment to see if you might achieve incremental improvements?
You are more than the label you have been given for any physical or mental health condition.
I was the wheezy puffer kid all through school but then was an accomplished national competitive and then professional dancer despite the limits and recommendations of doctors that I’d never make it. I no longer have fibromyalgia – a chronic condition that doctors said would be life long and limiting. I have none of those symptoms and I am stronger and more fit than I’ve ever been. I had to do the work. I had to change my habits and lose my ownership. It took courage but it was worth it. Give it a shot.
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