Therapy for Chronic Illness
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It can be exhausting to feel like so much of your life has to be planned around managing symptoms, attending appointments, or adapting to changes in your health, especially when that effort seems invisible to other people.
Living with a chronic illness can bring unique challenges and experiences that affect your mental health, relationships, identity, and sense of what feels possible.
The onset of new symptoms, a serious medical event, or receiving a life-changing diagnosis can be a traumatic experience in and of itself. These experiences can disrupt your sense of safety, predictability, and control, especially when your health, abilities, or future suddenly feel uncertain.
While a diagnosis may provide validation, answers, and access to treatment, it can also bring up feelings about the loss of autonomy and its impact on your identity, security, and expectations for the future.
These changes can also require significant adjustments and ongoing effort to manage daily life, including monitoring symptoms, navigating unpredictable flare-ups, changing levels of functioning, and uncertainty about what your body will allow you to do from one day to the next.
Chronic illnesses can be further complicated when:
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There is no clear diagnosis
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Your condition is poorly understood
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Treatment options are limited
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There is pressure to try experimental treatments
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Your experiences are dismissed by medical professionals
You may also need to coordinate care with multiple specialists, leading to repeat your story and medical history over and over or continuously advocate for yourself, while navigating numerous appointments and testing without answers.
The combination of these experiences can create a significant emotional and practical burden. Alongside the physical impact of illness, you may also be adjusting to new treatment regimens, navigating financial strain, systemic barriers, fear, grief, social invalidation, and stigma, all of which can significantly affect your mental health.
Some examples of chronic and long-term health conditions include:
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Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)
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Fibromyalgia & Chronic pain
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Post Viral Syndromes (Long Covid, Active Epstein–Barr Virus & Post-Treatment Lyme Disease)
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Autoimmune disease (Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumatoid Arthritis )
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Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and Connective Tissue Syndromes
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Neurological Disorders (Dysautonomia, POTS)
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Diabetes, Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), Hypothyroidism/Hyperthyroidism, HIV
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Treatment & Recovery from Heart Attack, Stroke, Transplants and Cancer
These experiences can affect more than physical health, shaping identity, relationships, work, and the sense of what feels possible.
Therapy can offer a space to process both the practical and emotional impact of living with chronic illness without having to mask or filter yourself.
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Navigating the emotional impacts of chronic illness
Therapy can offer a supportive place to talk through:
1. Relationships: Changes in your relationships, navigating the ongoing challenges in expressing your needs, limits, and capacity
2. Other's Perceptions: The emotional impact of being dismissed having your condition minimized, or misunderstood in medical settings and in your relationships
3. Medical Appointments: Navigating the ups and downs of treatments, preparing for and processing your experiences with healthcare and medical appointments
5. Managing Roles: Balancing your health with the demands of work, partnership, caregiving, and other roles in your life
6. Identity: Exploring the ways your illness has shifted your sense of identity, and your relationship with yourself over time, uncoupling your self worth from your productivity
7. Grief: Processing the losses, the life you expected, the old version of you, the relationships you've lost, alongside the reality of what life looks like now and in future
8. Isolation: Feeling withdrawn, unseen, and unable to continue putting effort into people who don't understand in your experience
9. Uncertainty: Navigating the ongoing uncertainty about the future and how to plan around fluctuating capacity
10. Relationship with Yourself: Processing the emotional weight of ongoing symptoms including frustration, anger and shame, and the impact the illness has had on your self-trust, confidence, and self-worth