From Subconscious to Conscious, The Journey of Recovery

A few weeks ago someone asked me about anger and how it relates to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He had observed that many people with CFS appeared to be angry, although they denied feeling angry. The question was  wether the anger was caused by the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or was Chronic Fatigue Syndrome caused by anger. I love this question, because I can speak to it from a variety of angles, both as a nurse, as someone who was very sick with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and as someone who has researched how our emotions affect our health. ( something I researched even before I became ill).


From my experience as a nurse, chronically ill people, and especially those who feel they have no hope of recovery, are angry. And rightfully so. They may or may not admit feeling anger, but the anger is tangible. It's not hidden or suppressed. They will behave in an angry fashion, most often lashing out at the people who are trying to help them.  This is understandable. Someone whose life has been severely curtailed for years on end is going to be rightfully angry. It would be odd if they weren't angry...it's expected and I even think it's healthy to feel angry when you have a debilitating condition.

In my own experience as someone who was very sick, I was more scared then angry. I was scared I would never get better, that I had some horrible, undiagnosed illness that would kill me, and that I would never be able to live a normal life. My fear propelled me..it fueled my desire to recover. It helped me to find an effective treatment. It served me well.


During the process of recovery, I learned that suppressed and repressed emotions were behind my debilitating illness. As I began to recover my health, I began to feel. So as my energy returned, my mood actually dipped. I started to grieve. I would find myself going about my day, only to feel suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed by a wave of grief. It was this emotion that I had been suppressing.  Somewhere in my life I had pushed the feeling of grief below the surface of my awareness. But because emotions are such a key to who we are, they need acknowledgement and expression. They serve an important purpose. And if we don't listen to the message, if we don't acknowledge and respond to the message the emotion is trying to send us, then we get sick. Our body will start sending messages of symptoms and ill health in order to get our attention that something important needs to be addressed.

 The difficulty is that this is all underneath our awareness. For example, I would have never guessed that I was so full of suppressed grief. I don't even know exactly what I was grieving, but as I went through the process of recovery, it was the most dominant emotion that I felt. As I started to feel again, I started to recover.

So an emotion that is so close to the surface, like the anger that many chronically ill people feel, is really not the cause of CFS. The theory is that suppressed emotion, (and remember emotion is the language of our soul, our higher self), is underneath the surface of awareness, and it's the energy of suppressed emotion that causes illnesses like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

When you start to really understand what this all means, that emotions are the language of the soul, then your perception of life really begins to change. You start to see all of life through a very different lens, and you start to understand human nature in an entirely new and different way. Understanding these concepts goes far beyond our traditional views of health and wellness, and my hope is to spread the message that we are so much more than we ever dreamed we could be, or that society ever told us we could be. But that is what I learned when I recovered from CFS...