If you have any kind of chronic illness, you can feel desperate to get better.

It’s easy to buckle down and get really serious about figuring out what’s causing your health problems.

In my childhood, being task oriented and getting things done was my safe place. It was where I felt in control and like I was making a difference about my future.

But I was really harsh with myself. As a teenager, I demanded perfection and rushed to try every protocol I could.

What I didn’t see back then is that I had simply transferred the unhealthy coping mechanisms that I picked up in my childhood to my adult struggles, instead of finding more mature ways to function.

I wish I realized earlier that operating from this abrasive place only further contributed to my nervous system dysregulation, and therefore made my autoimmunity and mast cell activation worse. It was catastrophically detrimental to my health.

The solution I needed was a more gentle approach. I realized that I didn’t talk sternly to anyone else or expect of anyone else the standards that I expected of myself.

I’ve had to unlearn my old rigid ways of functioning and replace them with self compassionate approaches.

Self Compassion With Chronic Illness

Before I knew the phrase self compassion, I had mentors and counselors who challenged my thought patterns and observed how harsh I was being with myself.

They gave me nuggets of gentleness and kindness to myself.

It was a potent healing balm.

My inexorable ways felt less appealing.

For a few weeks that is. And then something stressful would happen and I’d be right back into fierce self-discipline.

I had been cut throat about my achievements and I would be just as intense about reclaiming my health.

I was tempted to be brutal about not being brutal with myself.

It was exhausting.

I struggled to find the balance between making improvements in my health but not burning myself out.

But here’s what I’ve learned. First, I think it’s essential to rescript the harmful words that I was saying to myself and respond compassionately. From there, I can make gentle changes with and for myself.

In the past year the script that has been the most helpful for me to launch from has been:

Of course you…

So here’s how I reframed some of my negative self talk.

Of course you struggled to clean and organize because there was too much clutter. You didn’t want to get rid of anything because you weren’t sure you could afford to replace it. Your medical bills were so high. But now you’re in a better place and can replace most things if you regret decluttering them.

Related Articles: How To Declutter With Chronic Illness

Instead of a gruff response like, “Why can’t you keep up with this?”

To make my self compassionate scripts easy to spot, I will put them bumped out below.

The primary areas I’ve adopted self compassion are:

Diets
Inner cues
My body
Limits
Medical regret

Let’s dive into each one more. Then, you’ll learn more about how I’ve implemented self compassion moving forward.

Self Compassion With Diets

Once you’ve ruled out the acute illnesses, the next steps suggested by practitioners are typically some type of elimination diet.

I had some food sensitivity testing done and combined that with a generic anti-inflammatory elimination diet. I dutifully stuck to it for six months.

But I had no improvements other than not having joint stiffness anymore.

Still, my practitioner advised that I should stick to the diet while I continue to rule out other potential factors.

I started to feel really hungry. What I didn’t know at the time is that elimination diets should be paired with bio individual nutrition testing to ensure that you’re not missing any of the common nutrients.

For a couple years, I got stuck in a cycle where I could stick to the diet for a couple weeks and then I would lose control on my cheat days.

I beat myself up for not being disciplined enough to stick with the diet long term. I thought it was a spiritual weakness. Looking back, I can see that I had over spiritualized my inability to follow strict diets.

My body had legitimate nutrient cravings. In hindsight I can see that it was actually my body trying to tell me I needed more diversity in my diet.

But my inner voice was an authoritarian parent chiding me for not being able to keep unrealistic expectations.

Now, I can look back at myself with compassion.

Of course you were having trouble sticking to such strict diet recommendations. You were eliminating a lot of foods without replacing them with more nourishing ones. You were taking out the bad but you weren’t replacing it with more good. Now you know how to feed your body and your soul with good things.

After a couple years of this vicious cycle, I started seeing a new practitioner who quickly identified that I had some major nutrient deficiencies. I wasn’t able to eat enough different foods. My haywire immune system was reacting to over 50 different foods at that point, yet she helped me find wholesome substitutes. She set me up on a much more sustainable food plan.

She taught me that if I was having a strong food craving, it was because my body was trying to tell me what it needed. Sometimes, I needed a particular food.

It was as simple as craving chocolate meant I needed more magnesium. Or craving Reese’s peanut butter cups meant I needed more protein.

Some of this she was able to identify by just listening to me and then we did more functional medicine blood panels to see what else I was low in.

When I have strong food cravings, I can gently ask myself what do I want? And then I can see what healthier alternative might fit better.

After I had supplemented and adjusted my diet, the food cravings reduced a lot. Nevertheless, I started to recognize when I was truly stress eating. You can learn more about how to stop stress eating in this post.

Similarly to having self compassion with different diets, I’ve had to learn to have self compassion with my other internal cues.

Self Compassion To My Inner Cues

In my first year of marriage, my husband caught me rage cleaning. But he wanted me to spend time with him after work. He had turned something on the TV and invited me to sit down.

“Come sit down with me. The chores can wait.” He said.

I replied, “ If I sit down now, I won’t be able to get up later to finish.”

He laughed at me and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t try to finish now.”

I was stunned by his answer.

He recognized my need to rest before I did. Yet, I was ambivalent and unrelenting towards what my body was telling me.

Ignoring my internal cues was grating down my immune system.

When I started to recognize this, I spiraled into negative self talk.

I’ve had to rescript this to say:

Of course you ignored your inner cues. You weren’t always allowed to heed them growing up. But now you can listen to them. What your body needs is good.

I’m slowly getting better at paying attention to when I need to sit down, take a break, or be done for the day.

Self Compassion Towards My Body

One of the most common ways my body tells me that I need to slow down is with pain.

Before, I only knew how to push through the pain and discomfort. I cut my head off from the rest of my body at times.

When doctor’s couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, I did years of physical therapy to try to strengthen some hidden injury. But it just put me in worse pain.

Looking back, the militant physical therapy I did was a form of violence against myself.

I will always remember the physical therapist who told me there was something deeper going on if the strength training wasn’t fixing my issues. He referred me back to an orthopedist.

I beat myself up that the physical therapist noticed this before I did.

Instead I’ve had to kindly say to myself:

Of course you didn’t realize there were deeper issues going on. You were only a teenager with no medical training. Following the doctor’s advice was the best you knew how to do. Now you’re listening to what your body tells you and advocating for it.

But I’ve also had to reframe how I view my body. At times, I felt like I was trapped inside my own enemy because my body couldn’t do what I wanted it to.

It’s been challenging to shift out of this platonic mentality where our head is cut off from the rest of the body.

When the pain gets bad, I’ve had to shift into a more self compassionate and thankful inner dialogue:

Of course you are in pain right now. Thank you for carrying me despite the pain. Thank you for telling me when I’m doing too much. We didn’t know before what was wrong. But now we have a better hypothesis that we’re trying.

When I start to get a pain surge, I’m quicker to sit down and take a break. I’m getting better about noticing my limits.

Self Compassion With My Limits

I was unyielding about my goal to get better. For a decade the pain was my worst symptom, but then I had increasing fatigue.

While I could push through any pain to the point of tears, I couldn’t push through the fatigue.

I began experiencing lightheadedness and heart palpitations.

The scariest symptom was debilitating brain fog. When I pushed my body too hard, I felt like I was losing my brain function.

Chronic fatigue syndrome was a fence I couldn’t bulldoze down.

My inner achieving tyrant could no longer rule.

It was really hard to pull back. But if I didn’t listen to my body today I would pay for it tomorrow… and even for days after

I would be stuck in bed. I felt a lot of resentment against my own body. I questioned why I couldn’t keep up.

Finally, after days of barely being able to make it through work and crashing when I got home, I had to reorient and get honest with myself.

Of course you’re fatigued. You have had a mystery illness for over a decade without answers and your body is struggling to keep up. But now you know your limits better so you can honor them.

And on the days that I did that and I still ended up stuck in bed, I had to say:

Of course you push too hard sometimes. Your desire is to do good things. And now you know one of the best things you can do is honor your boundaries. You can do better next time.

Self Compassion With Medical Regret

I’ve made a lot of mistakes on my health journey.

If I knew then what I know now I would have picked a different path. Multiple times.

And it can be really hard to be kind to yourself when you realize something in hindsight.

In the last five years, I’ve pieced together the most likely hypothesis of why my health crashed. You can read more about my journey of discovering mold poisoning was behind it here.

Over a decade ago, a practitioner asked me if there was any chance I had been exposed to mold. I will forever regret saying no and not pushing to do further testing.

When I started to piece together that mold was likely my biggest issue, I got all sorts of mad. I beat myself up for not pursuing that route earlier.

At the time, I wish I knew how to say to myself:

Of course you didn’t know that mold poisoning was the culprit. Not many knew how detrimental mold could be. You were only a layperson and not a doctor. But now that you know about mold, you are working to address it.

But sometimes I get stuck in a loop of anger about not being able to produce self compassion for myself.

Of Course You Struggle To Have Self Compassion

At times, I’ve caught my austere inner voice rebuking me for not having more self compassion.

I have to step back and say to myself:

Of course you’re struggling to have self compassion right now. This is really hard and this is not how things are supposed to be. But you’re getting better at making good decisions and you’ll do better going forward.

I’ve worked to appreciate the good things in my life. Instead of fierce discipline, I am fierce about insisting that I am kind to myself.

I’m learning that my greatest power comes from my softness.

But more than that, what enables me to have compassion on myself is that God has compassion on me.

In moments where I’m unable to produce self compassion, I pray and ask God to help me respond to myself how he responds to me–as a loving parent.

I remember that he had so much compassion for me that he sent his son Jesus to die for my sins. And he rose again from the dead. And now I have the power of the Holy Spirit inside of me to help me respond compassionately towards myself.

And God usually reminds me that I tend to put higher expectations on myself than what he puts on me. He asks me to rest and to take good care of myself.

So I can channel my determination to be vehement about gently embracing slower rhythms and gentleness.

Self Compassion Moving Forward

The first time I heard a health influencer talk about baby steps I thought they were absurd. (And now the most ironic thing ever is that I write for her here.)

I was so desperate to get better that I would try and force anything upon my body.

Now I see the wisdom in trying softer.

I want to share three ways that I embrace self compassion in my health journey to be gentler with myself.

One change at a time
Small changes
Microdoses

One Change At A Time

When I was desperate to get better, I would change everything my doctor told me to change immediately after an appointment.

Sometimes I would feel better but then I didn’t know what had actually helped me.

Other times, I would end up with debilitating reactions and I didn’t know what had made me worse.

It was a mistake to try to change too many variables at a time, not only because I didn’t know what was helping or hurting me, but also because it was usually too much for my body to handle.

Drastically changing your diet, environment, or habits isn’t very gentle.

I didn’t realize how jarring it was for my body until I heard a doctor recommend this.

So now, I will only change one thing at a time.

But beyond that, I make the single change much more slowly.

Small Changes Slowly

I once got a stress fracture as a teenager because I thought I could make a change faster than my doctor recommended.

You see, I had knee pain on and off while running. One doctor identified that my arches weren’t very high and my feet tilted inwards slightly.

I tried the shoe inserts from the grocery store but they didn’t help so the doctor sent me off to get prescription orthotics that were custom molded for my feet.

I was running cross country and track at the time in high school. After I got the orthotics back, my orthopedist warned me that I needed to go slow with integrating the orthotics in my shoes so that I didn’t get an injury.

As you might guess, I put the orthotics in my shoes and I could tell that they made a difference for me. So I decided that I would wear them all the time.

I did not begin with walking, and then just for the warm up, and then taking them out after practice as my doctor suggested.

Two weeks later I had severe hip pain. It turned out that when we corrected the tilt of my feet, it stretched out the outside of my legs and the tendon between my knee and my hip pulled a chunk of bone off from the tension.

Now, I’m much slower at making changes. And I tend to go even slower than a doctor recommends.

Too much of a good thing can quickly turn bad.

When I decided to start eating low oxalate because I learned that mold poisoning can lead to oxalate intolerance, I was warned to not cut oxalates out of my diet in cold turkey.

It felt easier to cut oxalates out of my diet in one fell swoop.

But I knew at this point that I had to be gentle with myself.

So the slow change was simply reducing my oxalates at breakfast for a week. And then the next week I reduced my oxalates at lunch. And then I reduced my oxalates in my afternoon snack. And then about a month later I reduced the oxalates in my dinner.

It was much less shocking to my body.

In the past when I had made changes to my diet, I’d end up with things like the keto flu because I moved too fast.

But now I can look back on myself and say:

Of course you made changes quickly. You were desperate to get better. Your desire to feel better was good. But now you know how to gently go slow.

In addition to making lifestyle and diet changes slower, I introduce new protocols in a more gradual and gentle manner.

Microdoses

I’ll always remember one of the first times I saw a functional medicine doctor and they gave me 10 different supplements to try. The doctor said, “you’re young and I think you can handle this. I usually go slower with my older patients though.”

At that time, I wasn’t being honest with myself about how bad my health was so I don’t think I had been fully transparent with the doctor about how bad I was feeling.

So I went home and tried all of the supplements that night.

And I felt awful.

When I came back, I told her what had happened and she told me she would give me a schedule of which supplements to start first and how to only add a new one every four to five days.

That continued to work for me untilI had more decline with my health. My digestive tract started shutting down. (For reasons I’m sure I’ll share in a future blog post.) I had to get IV nutrients once a week because my intestines weren’t able to absorb any foods or supplements.

We adjusted some of my protocol to topical options.

There was one new supplement a doctor wanted me to try and he told me to start with a pea sized drop and work up to quarter size dab.

So I put the pea size drop on my skin and within half an hour my head felt like it was going to explode. Then I started throwing up violently. My husband had left me home alone and I was barely able to text him to take me to the ER.

After a bunch of IV fluids and a migraine cocktail, they couldn’t find anything wrong with me other than the autoimmune diseases I already knew I had.

Soon after that, I was attending one of those virtual online summits and I heard a doctor talking about working with patients with hypersensitivities. She said that for her patients who have adverse reactions to medications and supplements, they start by introducing just the smell of it for a day or two. Sometimes a patient will get a headache just from the smell and that’s enough to know that there’s something in it they’re reacting to so they need a different formulation.

But if the smell goes okay then they give their patient a dusting of it. Like just taking two or three grains of sand. And then they slowly work up to the full dose.

So now, when I start a new medication or supplement, I begin by smelling it and usually I just need one day to do that before I’m able to take a dusting of it. Most of the time I’m able to get up to the full dose within one week. But right now I have one mold binder that I’m still taking at a half dose because anytime I try to increase it I end up with nausea and a migraine.

I wish I would have smelled that topical one and then started with just a speck of it.

The times where I’ve moved too fast, I have to respond compassionately to myself and say:

Of course you were eager to try this new medication. You believed that it was going to help you. But not everything good happens fast. Now you know how to move slower for next time.

While it’s rare that I am blatantly truculent towards myself, I’m still prone to setting standards that are too high.

When I notice I’m being uncharitable to myself, I can say:

Of course you’re struggling to have self compassion right now.

I’m really excited to share with you a free online summit. One of the doctors I’m working with helped plan it. What I love about her is she’s passionate about both my physical health and my mental health. I know you’ll glean both next steps for your health and self compassion.

Click here to sign up for free!

You’ll learn from 40+ experts on complex chronic illness!

Pastor SJ

Navigating Chronic Illness With Hacks + Hope