"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying I will try again tomorrow."

Mary Anne Radmacher

Psychological support for Chronic Illness

Chronic illness refers to long term health conditions that generally don't have a known medical 'cure.' They're often invisible, which means other people fail to see the suffering, resulting in insensitive, hurtful comments such as 'you look well,' or 'are you better yet?' and a lack in broader social support. It can also block access to health care; many people with chronic illness report experiences of medical gas lighting, which only adds to the trauma and illness burden.

Having suffered chronic illness myself, I am passionate about supporting people with the emotional fall out of suffering from health conditions for long periods. This can mean working with the associated guilt and shame, processing grief, frustration, isolation, and a loss of identity. It can mean calming the nervous system, and finding meaning in a life that may look very different from life before illness.

You don't have to go through this alone.

WORK WITH ME

Who do I help?

I support adults and teens with any chronic health condition, including but not limited to, Long Covid, ME/CFS, Chronic Lyme's, Auto-immune conditions, Migraine, IBS, fibromyalgia, tinnitus, chronic pain, and health issues resulting from burn-out.

My experience

On top of my lived experience, I have worked with people across the lifespan with physical health conditions and disabilities in an NHS setting for ten years. For the past few years, I have worked in Private Practice as part of a multi-disciplinary team specialising in helping people across the lifespan with Chronic Illness support.

Reasonable adjustments

I am passionate about making therapy accessible for those with Chronic Illnesses. This includes offering online therapy so you can engage from the comfort of your own home, offering a ten minute break in the middle of sessions, offering half sessions, and providing handouts at the end of sessions so as to reduce cognitive load. Sometimes, when a person is too ill to take a video call, I work indirectly with caregivers, for example partners or parents. I can also offer a combination of indirect and direct work if that works best.

Compassion Focused Therapy and Chronic Illness

It's nobody's fault that they're ill, and yet guilt and shame often creep into our experience of chronic illness, only adding to our distress. Compassion Focused Therapy helps ease this guilt and shame by building our compassionate minds and increasing our flow of self-to-self compassion. This helps us to replace the self critic with compassionate self correction, encouraging us to treat ourselves as we would our loved ones. It isn't just about kindness or self care, it's also about developing our inner strength and wisdom.

One of the models we may use from Compassion Focused Therapy is the three emotional systems model. This model is grounded in evolutionary psychology, and looks our three main emotional systems: the threat system; the drive system; and the soothing system. Often, people with chronic illness can benefit from re-balancing their emotional systems, which tends to look like increasing the soothing system, shrinking the threat system, and recalibrating the drive system so that we can find joy in activities that don't exacerbate our symptoms.

EMDR and Chronic Illness

EMDR is an evidence-based therapy that supports the brain's natural information processing system to move towards healing. It works particularly well for people suffering with chronic illness, because we often hold a lot of trauma. This could be from the physical symptoms themselves, the negative consequences of being ill such a loss of jobs and/or relationships, and/or the unjust and distressing treatment we've received, including medical gas lighting and humiliating remarks.

Sometimes traumas that existed before chronic illness can be triggered when we are ill. This could be due to a loss of our previous coping strategies such as exercise or socialising, or due to the fact we are experiencing similar emotions that link us back to our past traumas, such as powerlessness.

Reprocessing these traumas can lift some of the emotional burden associated with chronic illness, helping us to live happier and more fulfilled lives.

Integrative Therapy and Chronic Illness

Often, I will work integratively with someone who suffers with Chronic Illness. This means we may draw on Compassion Focused Therapy, EMDR and other therapeutic models, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Polyvagal theory, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT). This means you will receive individually tailored interventions to best suit your needs.

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