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Fibromyalgia can often leave you feeling sad and anxious, sometimes without even knowing why. It may be due to clinical depression which is common in fibro patients. But let’s face it: more often than not, it’s probably because you’re sick of feeling like crap all the time, not to mention all the run-of-the-mill life activities that you miss out on so frequently. You know the ones I’m talking about because they are the events and moments that everyone else takes for granted. Of course, this often leaves you with anger, sorrow, resentment, and frustration. Did you know that negative emotions can often exacerbate your symptoms? Let’s try to minimize some of this negativity and anxiety by examining ways to treat fibromyalgia through emotional health.
There are at least two facets of emotional health to consider when it comes to treating your fibromyalgia. First there are the undealt-with emotions that contribute to your physical symptoms. Second is the emotional toll that dealing with fibromyalgia can have on you. Marcelle Pick is an OB-GYN Nurse Practitioner and co-founder of a women’s clinic in Maine. Having treated many patients who deal with fibromyalgia, she states that “one of the most interesting [aspects] is that for each emotion we feel (both the positive and the negative) there is a biochemical signature that occurs in our bodies. To put this in clearer terms, it means that if we hide our emotions and don’t adequately express them, then eventually the emotional issues display in physical ways.”
The emotions Pick is referencing are those garnered from traumatic events or moments in time. We tend to stuff them away using thoughts like, “It’s really not that big of a deal, I’ll deal with it later,” only often later never comes, and we end up not addressing it them at all. One key feature Pick notes about many of her fibromyalgia patients is that they tend to be highly critical of themselves. However, healing the fibro symptoms is better facilitated when patients learn to love and forgive themselves. This implies a willingness to examine those unaddressed or poorly-addressed emotional issues. Doing so improves fibromyalgia symptoms for many patients simply because they learn better coping strategies. In other words, your emotions are going to express themselves in one way or another. You can choose whether you’d like to address them and learn to cope with them in a healthy manner, or you can choose to ignore them and allow your body to express them through chronic and debilitating pain.
That is not to say that fibromyalgia patients are unnecessarily suffering just because they have undealt-with emotional issues. Rather, it is to say that for many patients, symptoms are often mitigated and sometimes disappear after they address the issues that have been lying in wait. This is best approached through a professionally trained counselor. It is important to explain to your counselor that you have fibromyalgia because that in turn will help address the second facet: the emotional toll of having fibromyalgia in the first place. Not knowing what to expect from one day to the next, feeling like you are a burden on others, the fatigue and pain without let-up…. the list goes on. Dealing with all of these things and so much more is one thing, but what they do to your heart and soul is no joke either. Consider talking with a trained professional. Psychology Today has a vast database of local professionals whose bios and pictures you can sift through in order to find a good match. But if leaving your home is a problem due to your symptoms, then you may want to try Thumbtack, where you can access counselors from a worldwide network who are willing to video chat or talk on the phone.
There are various insurance options and many that even work on a sliding scale. Questions to consider for any practitioner include:
- What degrees do you hold?
- What schools did you attend?
- How long have you been in practice?
- What other types of special training do you have?
- Have you ever worked with fibromyalgia patients before?
If you are not comfortable with a counselor or if the timing isn’t right, you may wish to consider journaling. Only you can determine what you need to write down and work through. However, if you feel you need some direction, life coach Amelia Harvey offers a variety of journal prompts for emotional healing to kick-start the process. Don’t bog yourself down here, just get things moving and over time you will likely notice emerging patterns, perhaps patterns that seem tied to certain symptoms. And often where there are patterns, there is healing to be done. A word of caution: addressing emotional health is not always a pleasant experience. But in doing so, you may find not only the weight of the world lifted off your shoulders, but also a noticeable relief or even disappearance of many fibromyalgia symptoms. Give it a try and tell us about your experience.
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