How Can Therapy Help With Chronic Illness?

Everything is fine.

To have chronic illness is often to have traversed a multi-year gauntlet of medical specialists and self-doubt. Along the path toward diagnosis you might have heard things like psychosomatic or it’s just anxiety or are you sure you’re not just depressed? You finally receive a name for what’s going on! A name that tells you: No, it was not merely a mental issue and also, no, there is no cure (yet). A mix of validation and depression is a common reaction. Sometimes you just feel relief.

Effective psychotherapy for chronic illness will not reduce your experience to the psychological, rather affirm the biological reality of your illness while meeting you as a whole human being exactly as you are.

From there, you and your therapist can become curious about your life as it is and the goals you have for your future—no matter the prognosis. What medical doctors appointments don’t often have time for is moving beyond treating symptoms and into deeper relationship building. That relationship building happens between you and your therapist, but also between you and yourself, with a focus on the whole of your life.

You are more than your illness and so is your life. While there is a focus on easing emotional suffering, how you experience yourself in relationship to the bigger picture of your life (interpersonally, systemically, vocationally, spiritually) is the heart of psychotherapy as I practice it.

Grief Work Applies to Illness, too.

When you’ve always understood yourself as a healthy person, there’s a strong pull to find a way back to that old identity. I know because I’ve tried myself. Meghan O’Rourke (2022) wrote about this in her memoir, The Invisible Kingdom. She describes the wandering she did in the early stages of realizing she was seriously ill, a desperate attempt to make meaning as means of fixing the physical problem. She writes,

“Initially, the illness seemed to be a condition that signified something deeply wrong with me—illness as a kind of semaphore. Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel, in some unarticulated way, that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.”

—Meghan O’Rourke

To grieve is to move through the reality of a loss. In this case, to let go of grasping for the magic story that will transport you back to your old self or whatever previous version of healthy person you had as an identity. You can find a new equilibrium.

The grief happens as it happens, often not in linear time. Having a therapist on your side to work through this process can help immensely, we’re meant to have our grief witnessed. When attended to, the grief allows your past to become fertile soil in which you plant the next phase of your life. It can help to have a therapist that has walked this path themselves.

Imagination and the Mind Body Connection

Your body is always telling you something. If you have chronic pain with your illness, it can feel more like shouting or a constant battle. By working with the relationship between your body and mind—through breath work, grounding, and tapping into your somatic imagination, we learn how to listen at a deep level. Therapy gives you the space to get curious about the relationship between your pain and your awareness. This can start off as a difficult task, but with time, you might even shift the way the conversation unfolds. It’s surprising how much is still available when you do the work of listening to and deeply respecting your body’s needs and limits

You Just want a therapist that gets it

Talking about your illness in psychotherapy is vulnerable, especially if you’ve had your experience reduced to anxiety in the past. It’s appropriate to ask a potential therapist what their philosophy is when working with chronic illness. If you’re ready to start therapy get in touch or connect with a therapist in your area. I welcome any questions you have about how psychotherapy for chronic illness can help you experience relief and a renewed sense of feeling at home in your life.

Resources

Meghan O’Rourke: The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness