Episode 097 – Can you trust the process

Hello loves. Today I want to ponder on trusting the process, and ask you if you can. Honestly, for years my answer to that would be “what does that even mean?!”

I had a pretty turbulent childhood, with a narcissistic caregiver. In order to keep myself safe my process became about trying to predict everything that could go wrong, so I had a solution ready, and lived my childhood constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Whilst this meant that I learned qualities that made me an excellent executive assistant to some very demanding C-suite level people, it has not been easy in my personal life. Needing to know all the questions and all the answers can be exhausting. Not getting the answers can be very unnerving.

Recovery from an illness requires trusting the process. 

You will want to believe many things that are not true. That the small steps each day won’t add up to enough and won’t happen quickly enough. That eating crappy food and drinking won’t make a difference and you won’t feel worse. That laying in bed or on the sofa all day watching tv won’t make you feel any worse.

You will be wrong.

I get it. I know how wonderful it feels to wake up one morning and feel a little better, and then how frustrating it is the next day to wake up and feel like crap. Recovery from ME is very much like training for a marathon. A marathon training plan is one thing that I can trust the process of, because it’s there in black and white. I can tell you what training will look like today, and what training will look like during week 9, and I can tell you that if I am consistent enough with the plan, then I will get round those 26.2 miles.

But, my M.E. recovery, or learning to feel safe in my body. Not so black and white easy to write down.

We get so caught up in the payoff, that we forget that even life is a just a series of tiny decisions each and every day. You get to choose. Both my M.E. and marathon training require each and every day a decision to do the small things. To trust that what I do today, will have payoff in the future, even if I don’t feel it now. Even if I feel worse now than before I went out.

I know that if I don’t put movement into my day then I will have pins and needles, and leg spasms. I don’t have these when I train. I know that I will have fatigue whether I make movement a priority or not, but I also know that if I make movement a priority I not only eat better, but I sleep better, because movement fatigue trumps M.E. fatigue and actually manages to knock me out, when M.E. fatigue will have me staring at the ceiling all night.

It’s all about choosing your hard.

Choosing to drink more water when you think you’re not thirsty because in truth you probably are and your thirst receptors have gone AWOL.

Going to bed to be in bed and reading a book when you can’t sleep, instead of surfing social media or watching another episode of your current fave tv show.

The process I coach isn’t sexy. It isn’t an overnight change. That’s why it can be such a hard sell. I’m still seeing my counsellor once a week for the complex trauma stuff, and I’ve been using my coaching process to work through the daily stuff that comes up. When I first started seeing her back in Feb, she would tell me to trust the process. I was so sure that doing so was impossible. I asked her pretty much the same question I asked my consultant all those years ago in the M.E. clinic – how long is this going to take to be rid of it? I got the same damned answer – they couldn’t give me date. I wanted the pain and anger to be gone. I wanted to be able to feel safe to allow the joy out without living in fear the pain and sadness would follow. Of course they couldn’t give me a date. Joy lives in parallel with sadness. You can’t feel one without the other.

Nearly 5 months on I have moments where I am sure I haven’t made any progress at all, when that wave comes up and drags me under. And then I realise that those waves are happening less often and I’m not under for as long. That I can now move through and on from the sad and painful emotions, that they no longer sit there festering inside me, and I can breathe again. Looking back that is truly how it felt. Like I was holding my breath for the last ten or so years.

Your recovery and happiness requires you to show up in all the little ways each and every day. Even when you lose that loving feeling for it. Even when after a couple of weeks it starts to feel hard, you’re exhausted, you feel angry, you question what you’re doing. But to get to the next step you have to get through this one. It’s not a journey of a thousand days, or a journey of a lifetime. It is a journey of one day at a time.

Are you committed to your recovery and happiness even if you can’t see the results today? Even though you probably won’t see the progress you’re making.

Can you trust the process?

Well, that’s it for this week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Life in Align podcast. If you liked what you heard and want to hear or read more, head over to lifeinalign.com. Please also subscribe and share, so that we can get this out to others who are also wanting to take back the life a chronic illness stole from them.

And remember, you are worth it, and you get to choose.

Have a lovely day.