Just passing

Was just passing (metaphorically speaking) and thought I'd pop by.

I'm still on track. I've had a few blips this year, but LP does the trick. I was gutted when I realised that I still had to use LP, but it's better than the alternative. I've realised that I now have - or maybe always did have and ignored - an early warning system with regards to stress. Some particular things do trigger quite an strong stress response, mostly to do with relationships with friends and family and I do have to work at getting the stress button to switch off, even when the stressful situation has passed.

I had a situation with members of my family this year, that I won't go into, but I did experience bad sleep, tense muscles and other "stress" responses. My husband, who has never had ME, gets the same thing when he is stressed - to put it in perspective.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm still recovered from ME and I have the capacity to do an amazing amount both physically and mentally, but I have to watch my stress levels. If I get too stressed, I experience stress responses that don't necessarily automatically switch off, so I need to use LP to do that.

I think I kind of thought that once recovered that would be it, but RT and LP are about a lifestyle change. It's sometimes easy to slip into old habits. So I have to keep my eye on the ball.

A friend of mine who had ME and recovered is now working in Morrocco teaching English. She did RT and LP. Another person that I met through this blog is well now and expecting a baby, she did LP too. Keep the faith people....keep the faith!

Thanks again to all those lovely messages, it's great to hear that my ramblings actually give something positive to people.

Adam and Abigail, sorry for the very long delay in response, but I rarely log on these days.

I learned LP from a woman called Gill in Bath. If you google her company hypnotherapy-bath.co.uk you will see a bit more about her.

Joe, for me I don't think it would have been posible to teach LP to myself in such a meaningful way. It has so many subtleties that you only get by experiencing the training. I think you could do a lot with NLP, but for me, I needed help.

Anyway, good luck to those of you still on the path to recovery, I wish you all the best in getting there.

Tracy
aka Little Miss Reverse

Thanks for all the well wishes...

...just thought I'd stop by to tell you my latest news and I saw the comments you guys have left & just wanted to say thanks. I've been completely free from my old illness since my last post and my life has gone off in a completely different direction.

About 3 years ago, when I was very ill, I realised that it wasn't travelling the world that was the thing I grieved for so much, it was the potential loss of having a partner and a family. I really didn't think it was on the cards at all, due to all the challenges that having M.E. faces you with. I didn't realise I wanted to be a mother so much, until I was confronted with the possibility of it not happening.

As I recovered I was very honest with my partner that I wanted a baby. He wanted one as much as I did. So....to cut a long story short....about a month after I considered myself fully recovered, we decided to stop trying 'not' to get pregnant. We expected to have to wait 6-12 months at least, but we got pregnant immediately.

So we decided to go the whole hog and get married too. So in a month I will be a wife and in 6 months time I will be a mum too.

I have everything I could have wished for and thank my lucky stars every day.

My old next door neighbour once said to me, you have to believe that you can recover and then you will. He was absolutely spot on.

If you are interested in trying Reverse Therapy or Lightning Process, go to their websites, which you can find on Google. I saw an RT practitioner based in Clifton, Bristol and an LP trainer based in Bath. I can recommend them both.

One last time!

Hello people out there! Well what can I tell you?.... I've been waiting to reach the magic 100% before coming back on here to tell you all about it. The truth is I've been waiting and waiting until I had it just right and then last night I was lying in bed, jetlagged from being on a trip to Canada, unable to sleep as I'd slept 15 hours the night before, when it suddenly dawned on me...I've been wating until I had got it 'perfect'. Now those of you who have done LP, will realise that this is something that some of us do that keep us stuck - PERFECTIONISM! Yep, that's one of my things! Anyway, the thing is even with ridiculous sleep patterns and exhaustion from travelling, I'm leading the life I want to live or in LP terms, I'm living the life I love. So I'm recovered, yes absolutely recovered!

Now, you may ask if I still have 'issues' and the answer is yes I do, but then don't we all. I had a bad week a month or so ago because I got stressed at work and completely forgot to use LP as I hadn't needed to use it for so long. So I still do stress occasionally and it still does have an impact on my energy and focus, but it seems more like 'normal' stressed-out as opposed to M.E. stressed out. That doesn't mean that I find it easy, not at all, but I know that's something to keep an eye on, I'm getting much better at it and I can get back on track pretty quickly.

The biggest change for me is that the anxiety has gone - I don't do that anymore. I didn't bat an eyelid knowing I was getting a night flight back from Canada on Friday night, missing a nights sleep and then going back to work this morning (Monday) and doing a full days work. My relationship is all smooth and fluffy now and any anxiety I had about living with my BF has completely gone. I can't imagine living apart from him anymore.

I was going to work full time as a test of full recovery, but it became apparent pretty quickly that I could work more hours on more days if I felt like it (I did for time-off-in-lieu for a while) and then I didn't feel the need to 'prove' that to anyone. I also wanted to put my energy into other things, so I decided to stay at 18 hours a week.

As for the other things that I wanted to put my energy into... I've been getting fit! I've been doing a lot of belly dancing and performed in a show a month ago. I was rehersing 3 times a week for 3 or 4 hours at a time. It was totally full on and I loved it. My feet blistered and my muscles ached but I just felt liberated. I've also been doing Pilates about 3 times a month and going to the gym a few times a month.

Apart from work and excercise, I've been going out socialising a fair amount as well as going away for weekends. I had a run through March, April and May where there was something on most weekends. Just had a weeks holiday in Canada, and in a week and a half I'm off to Glastonbury, working as a Fire-Steward.

The first half of this year has been hectic! It took me a couple of months to get my head around the whole LP thing. At first I was doing it too much and 'hunting' negative thoughts which was just amplifying things. Then I wasn't doing it enough and got caught out that way. Then I forgot to use it (as it was working and I hadn't needed to do it for so long) and got caught out again. But it didn't take long for me to get the hang of it and reap the rewards.

I've stopped counting how many days or months it is since I last had 'symptoms' and I think that has been very helpful as the aim of this is to focus on what is going right, not on what is going wrong. That's also why I stopped blogging, because I felt blogging required a balanced view and I felt that giving a biased positive view (although that has been the key to my recovery) was a bit unfair to blog to those who might want to hear of the difficulties as well as the achievements.

Now I gently nudge myself back on track using LP quietly in my head and that generally keeps me on track. Every day I feel lucky and blessed that I have such a nice life. I love the city I live in, I enjoy my job, I have good friends a great boyfriend and have opportunities to indulge in my interests and passions and holidays abroad on top! The more you look for the good things in your life, the easier they are to spot and the bigger and brighter they become.

I also want to say that I feel that doing Reverse Therapy and Lightning Process has been a very powerful combination. For me, having done RT and getting familiar with my bodily sensations of emotions then informs the things that I do LP on. RT has helped me identify what I want and LP helps me make it happen. LP has helped me overcome the stuff that goes on in your head that stops you from doing what you really desire. I'm not really explaining it very well, but for me I think I needed both.

Anyway, this is getting incredibly long and my man is just calling me for my dinner, so I must go now.

Miss B
xxx

Love you and leave you...

I've been doing the Lightning Process for a couple of weeks and as a result have realised that I can no longer do this blog in the way I have been doing. Usually I go away, do something then come back and tell where it has worked and where it hasn't, where it has been easy and where it has been difficult.

This isn't going to work with LP because of how I need to do the process. I'm probably not making any sense to anyone who hasn't done it, but if you decide to go for it you will probably understand. If I continue to do this blog as described above, I will be undoing all my hard work towards my recovery and I'm not willing to do that.

So, I'm going to have to love you and leave you. I'm absolutely committed to a full recovery and I'm going to make this thing work for me.

I promise to come back one last time at some point in the future when I am fully recovered to say 'I've done it!', but until then, good luck and the very best of health to everyone who has been following this story.

If there is one final message from me, it is: there is a way out, just keep the faith, keep you mind and your eyes wide open and don't give up hope.

lots of love

Miss B xxx

Lightning Process (long post)

Last week I did my Lightning Process training. It comprised of two lots of two and a half hours in a pair and then a one-to-one session lasting an hour and a half. It cost £420.

The first two sessions focused on showing you how your brain works and how it filters information. You can skew your brain filters positively or negatively and the theory goes that when you are 'stuck' ie you have M.E. you are filtering for negatives. This is something that happens subconsciously and the more you filter for negatives the more you are able to see the negatives. LP trains you in a technique to stop the negative thoughts and to re-focus your thinking towards the positives in your life. You do a conscious process which then has an effect on the unconscious mind. It is based on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), so basically you are re-wiring your brain in a positive way. The more you use the new positive neural pathways the stronger they become and the easier it becomes to stay on track. This is my own way of describing it, if you want more information, just google Lightning Process. I might get around to adding a link at some point.

In the first 2 sessions I was trained with another woman who had M.E. for 8 years. It was really good to do it with someone else as you could spot someone else's patterns of behaviour that is keeping them stuck, a lot easier than you can spot yours, which then helps you to become aware of your own. It is also useful in terms of learning, as LP uses a lot of different learning methods.

After each session, you were asked to go away, put the process into practice and then come back the next day to work on it. On the second day I kind of fell apart a bit, when I realised what I had been doing to myself and how that was sabotaging my health. It was quite a tough day emotionally, but I'm really glad that it was pointed out to me and I was able to do something about it.

In my final one-to-one session, I was really getting the hang of the process, the trainer and I worked on some of my specific issues and worked out practical ways to work with them. It turned out that I was doing something that she called 'parts' which meant that although the most part of me believed and acted in one way, a smaller part of me was believing and acting the opposite, a bit like a child having a tantrum. We worked on bringing that small part of me, back in line with the big part. After that I was sent out into the world to start living my life.

The next day was brilliant. I went to work, found it a breeze, came home and then went out in the evening. The day after I started to strugle a bit and went into a bit of a wobble. I managed to get back on track each time I wobbled until Tuesday when I fell into the 'pit'. The pit is where you are when you get stuck. I fell right in and started to think lots of negative thoughts, but then something amazing happened. Part of the LP process had been working it's magic on my subconscious and I had a 'eureka' moment, then the tiredness I had been experiencing lifted completely.

I know this all sounds a bit vague, but I have decided not to describe the actual process. This is for 2 reasons. The first is that it would sound ridiculous and would be meaningless as it is something you have to experience for yourself. The second is if I described what we did in the training, I personally feel that for those who might like to do it themselves, it would be detrimental to their experience. I have described it to some others as like telling someone exactly what happens in a film, its better to see the film yourself. Hearing someones recollection of the film will not give you anywhere near the same experience and could actually ruin your own experience of it, should you choose to go and see it.

Anyway, after my penny-dropped moment on Tuesday, I've been plain sailing. I've been using the process although hardly at all the last couple of days. I've felt 'normal'. I've been told by my BF that I look different. I feel well and I feel able to do things. I just started a Pilates class today.

The biggest difference for me though, is not in what I am able to do, but in how I feel about it all and how that affects me. Up until I did LP, I have been gradually building up the things I do, using Reverse Therapsy. Each time I tried to push out, I experienced a lot of tension and anxiety to the point of it bringing on fatigue and making me feel rubbish. I was able to do things, but I couldn't really enjoy them fully at first as I felt crap. It would take quite a while for things to settle in. After doing RT for a year and a half, I found no way to deal with this. It was really blocking my progress. I knew it was to do with my 'headmind' but knowing what it was didn't really provide me with a solution.

LP has helped me, within a matter of days, to be able to sort out this 'headmind' business. It's just removed the fear, the anxiety and the tension and fatigue that go with it. I just feel much more like 'I CAN' now. If I start to have doubts, I just do the process and it's keeping me on track.

Out of all the things it has had a positive effect on, the biggest of all is in my relationship. I have been having real difficulty settling in with my BF, now that we live together. Each time I feel I have a handle on it(like when I got back from India), somthing insignificant would set all my fears off again and I would feel distant in my relationship again and unable to feel my love for him (to the point of doubting it completely). I have been struggling with this for 4 months. A 2 week holiday got me almost back on track, but 3 days of LP has irradicated these insecurites completely. I feel absolutely at ease in my relationship now. I can feel my feelings again, I'm not cut off from them. I feel SO different and it is such a relief and such a pleasure again.

I'm hoping to build my fitness up over the next month or so (I feel so excited about getting fit!), then I'm planning to sign back up at the employment agency to work on the 2 days of the week that I don't currently work, meaning that I will be working pretty much full-time (about 30 odd hours a week). I want to do this as a kind of test of full recovery and I don't actually intend to work full-time after that. I feel if I can work full-time, exercise twice a week and have a full social life whilst being happy and content, then I am fully recovered. I am confident that this is what is going to happen.

India

Just got back from 2 weeks in India. Had a fantastic time. Coped fine with the long flights, the heat and felt like a normal human being again. Think I really needed a holiday to break the downward spiral I was in.

After the holiday, living with my BF feels really normal now and the stress I was experiencing around that seems to have vanished. I'm feeling very stable and happy in my home now and my cats are well happy too.

I'm feeling pretty chilled again and ready to start the new year in my new job(well... old job, increased hours). I'm looking forward to doing my Lighning Process Training on the 9th January. Hopefully after that, will no longer be thinking like an ill person in a well persons body and can just get on with being a well person.

I'm thinking that if I get what I'm expecting out of LP, I will end this blog and stop using the forums that have been a great support to me whilst I have been ill. I know that I will experience more blips along the way, but as long as LP gives me better tools for dealing with stress, I think I will consider myself completely recovered.

I know I'm jumping the gun a bit, but hell, I was the same about RT and that worked for me too. Can't see any reason why this isn't my last hurdle before I reach the finish line.

I'll obviously post on here my experiences of LP, but hope to be off just living my life, free from this post-ME anxiety and fear VERY soon.

things are finally settling down

I have NEVER in my life experienced such a traumatic move. I struggled with it before I moved with all the planning and the fear, then I found the physical side of moving quite tough and pulled the muscles in my back and after the move I found the emotional side of moving in with my boyfriend quite challenging.

I can remember back at the beginning of September I started to wobble and it has continued in one way or another up until this week. Last week I had a horrendous day and thought I'd had a relapse but it turned out it was my period and PMS exagerating all of my anxieties and draining all my energy. I arranged to work from home for the next week as I had felt so crap. On Tuesday I had some injections as I am going to India in a week, then something really interesting happened...on Wednesday I felt the best I had in ages. I think I've been carrying so much stress and anxiety (even about going on holiday and injections) that I haven't felt 'normal' for months.

I'm finally feeling good again after 3 months of turmoil. I haven't had a relapse, I just freaked myself out. It's been incredibly hard and I really thought I'd blown it last week. My biggest barrier to my health is my anxiety and the chemical memories that relate to past upsets. I can't wait to learn LP so I can put this all to bed.

Like I said, I'm off to India on Saturday and I know that I will be able to enjoy it now. It's going to be a really significant thing for me because my ill health started after I returned from a trip to India 5 years ago. It feels really good to be doing it and almost like I can pick up where I left off last time, but this time take a different route.

I feel like I've finally arrived at a point where I can just enjoy my new home and enjoy living with my partner and stop being so stressed. Phew!