My Journey: 20 Years with Chronic Pain and Fatigue

Are you ready to move from longing for a more authentic life, to actually living one out loud? Despite consciously feeling a resounding yes, many of us find ourselves feeling oddly stuck, frustrated and unable to move forward even when putting our whole hearts into our goals and our healing.

For 20 years I longed to live a vibrant, expressive life in alignment with my values but I felt sabotaged by debilitating chronic physical and mental health challenges that had no clear cause. I seemed to have had a good life, so why did I feel overwhelmed, disconnected, and lost? Outwardly I had been a great student, a team leader, an artist, and a successful graphic designer. Friends saw me as someone who was easy-going, spiritual, grounded, and encouraging of self-love. Inwardly I felt fear and shame as I frequently collapsed into anxiety, depression, avoidance, and chronic pain and fatigue.

Like many people living with a chronic illness, I swung between periods of going all-in on various healing modalities and periods of giving up and finding whatever pleasure and relief I could through numbing out. Along the way I became certified as a yoga and meditation teacher, a sound healer, and a somatic integration coach as these modalities had helped me the most. I hoped that one day I would find a true cure for my chronic pain and fatigue, but in the meantime I was thrilled and honored to begin serving others on their healing journeys. I excitedly wrote outlines for classes and content that would weave together all that I’d learned over the years. I got laid off from my 9-5 right as I was feeling ready to finally step into the role of a full time practitioner and teacher, and I smiled at the divine timing of it all. 

Then I collapsed. 

I could barely get out of bed, let alone create offerings or hold space for others. At first I thought I just needed to rest from burnout, but it quickly became clear that this was something else. Despite all my resources and tools and my work with an experienced coach who was a trauma specialist, I spent over a year in a nervous system state of deep freeze. Freeze had long been my default state but normally I could be functional in my work at least, even if I often collapsed on the weekends. I had already felt like I was frequently pushing past my capacity just to keep up with both the necessities and the joys of life, and now I couldn’t keep up at all. 

I grieved, I raged, I despaired. I was frustrated with myself, my loved ones, and every person or modality I’d ever worked with. I tried to “trust the process” and trust the wisdom of my body, but I was filled with terror, doubt, and even self-hatred. How would I be able to work and take care of my basic survival, let alone courageously expand into the authentic life I longed for? How could I know the path forward when my best intentions to honor my needs so far had led to this total collapse? My coach urged me to give up my need to do things “right” and focus on rest and pleasure, but I feared that with chronic pain and fatigue the need for rest was a bottomless pit that could never be satisfied, and I couldn’t afford to rest forever. 

So I sat with the not-knowing and every other uncomfortable feeling. I muddled through the fog of my symptoms and felt like I was clawing through mud most days. I kept showing up for sessions with my coach, where bits and pieces of my inner workings started to come together. 

Despite everything I had learned about trauma, I was still surprised when I finally felt how I’d repressed mine. It wasn’t a lack of remembrance of the traumatic events, but rather a minimization – I had repressed my sensations, emotions, and how deeply those experiences had impacted me. 

A pivotal moment of clarity occurred during a ceremony with ayahuasca. I was scared to work with psychedelics, but I was desperate for answers. After a gentle beginning, I found myself surrounded in my mind’s eye by strange little beings moving and making sounds. They were off-putting but I did my best to approach the experience with curiosity to see what they might have to teach me. As the beings came closer their movements gradually picked up speed and their sounds built in intensity until the overstimulation became a crescendo that entirely blotted out my sense of self, even my awareness of my own breath or body. There was only an experience of overwhelm, like a raging hurricane, and all I could do was hold on. Overwhelm had long been the main experience I had in response to stress, and this obliteration of self felt like my worst nightmare. Eventually other emotions emerged within this storm: betrayal, abandonment, grief, anger. As I felt the full weight of these emotions a rush of memory and understanding arose within me: I could finally feel the impact of the traumatic events of my childhood. They were no longer just stories held at a distance, covered over with jokes and stoicism. They were real, and the pain had been unbearable to little me. 

Through sessions with my coach I was able to feel into the areas of my body where I experience chronic pain and see how they have been holding onto all those repressed childhood experiences for me, to protect me from their crushing weight. Relational pain, it turns out, is even harder to bear than physical pain. This protection enabled me to have a childhood that felt loving and supportive, so that I could have strong relationships with my parents and feel securely loved and stable as I entered adulthood. The wisdom of my body had delayed my awareness of this relational pain until I had the capacity to feel it, and a safe, healthy romantic partnership in which to practice new patterns and ways of relating. I could feel the path forward, and the hope and excitement of a rich purpose emerging from this pain. 

What has changed

This realization has fundamentally shifted everything I thought I knew about myself, especially since my trauma occurred at such a young age that I don’t remember how I was before it happened. Many of my characteristics that I considered to be innate might actually be survival adaptations. I had always thought of myself as someone mellow, easy-going and quiet. I had been proud of my ability to endure anything with patience and self-control. I was unfailingly kind. I strove to be the best at everything I did, to do great work with integrity but never seek attention. These qualities were rewarded by my family and by society, so I could feel good about myself and even superior to others. While these qualities had been essential when I was a small child and were still sometimes helpful, they were also often causing me to abandon myself, suppress my needs and emotions, and miss out on authentic relationships. 

If forced to choose between authenticity and belonging, young children will forego authenticity every time. Our survival depends entirely on belonging with our caregivers and our tribe, so anything that threatens this belonging literally feels like we could die. This self abandonment can lead to great suffering and yet it often feels easier to continue turning all this pain inward than to reckon with the truth of our dynamic with our caregivers. This isn’t to say that there must be rupture or blame – our caregivers were surely doing the best they could. I have found, however, that in order for me to stop turning all my pain inward towards myself, I needed to take my childhood off its pedestal and look at how it shaped me with searing honesty. 

This can be extremely challenging for recovering people pleasers like myself. I internalized the belief that no matter how I feel, I need to appear to be okay at all times in order to be loved. I learned that my role is to be easy for others, to never cause harm or even inconvenience. I can see now how this demand for perfection is a losing game that leads to disconnection and harm, while conflict and repair can actually bring us closer. Even now with a partner who celebrates me for sharing when I’m feeling challenging emotions, it can still feel nearly impossible to speak up. Perhaps the greatest value I’ve gained from this journey is how to give myself unending grace and to celebrate my “failures” as well as my wins. No one is keeping score, and every experience contains helpful information. It’s okay that unlearning these patterns is hard. It’s okay if it’s a lifelong process. The journey itself is beautiful and sacred.  

The greatest medicine for me in healing these patterns of fawn and freeze has been connecting with my original, primal nature. Beneath all the trauma, conditioning, patterns, beliefs, even personality traits, there is an unbreakable core of Self, sacred and safe within me. I had felt it sometimes in meditation, but it seemed like a faraway resource that I forgot about or couldn’t reach during times of stress. As I learned about chronic freeze and fawn responses, I learned that we actually have to pass through sympathetic activation (aka fight/flight) in order to get back to a healthy baseline of nervous system functioning. My conditioning had taught me that going into fight was always bad, but healthy fight is essential to waking up, having energy and focus, moving towards what we want and need, protecting ourselves, and even experiencing orgasm. Once I began to expand my capacity to feel the full expression of my emotions I started to be able to tap into sympathetic activation in a way that felt healthy and empowering. Suddenly I found my body desiring to get low and wide, to take up space, to feel powerful and instinctual. This part of me scoffed at the idea that I need to be easy and perfect so that others will love me and then maybe my needs will eventually be met as a reward. This part roared that I am worthy right now, simply by existing.

The journey continues

I am still working with these patterns and my chronic symptoms are still with me. It can take time to unwind trauma, especially when these patterns are so old and overwhelming. It takes incredible resilience and patience to work with chronic symptoms that may never fully resolve, and since some pain and fatigue is naturally part of the human experience I may always have to work with the threat my system has encoded around these sensations. The lightning bolt of clarity we can feel in a coaching session or a psychedelic journey offers us a hopeful light to guide us but the real work happens in everyday life, one step at a time.

In the past the parts of me that held my pain felt impenetrable, dark, and like perhaps they weren’t even a part of me. I feared I would be crushed by them, forced to live with these limitations forever. I was constantly searching for something external to alleviate my pain. Now I can actually have a dialogue with these parts. I can see how they’ve been so strong and loved me so much that they were willing to hold onto all that suffering. They’re not sure yet if they can let go. They don’t fully trust that it will be okay, and I understand their hesitation. Building trust together will take time. After a lifetime of silence and confusion, however, I’m thrilled to be in conversation with them. I know that a healthy way forward together is possible. 

I’m just starting to turn a corner in my healing where I can feel an intensity of life force energy rising like I’ve never experienced before. It’s unfamiliar and sometimes wildly uncomfortable to feel so much sympathetic activation, but after a lifetime of chronic fatigue it’s also wonderfully exciting. 

What has surprised me about this journey is how, as I’m beginning to experience this shift out of freeze, my very identity feels at risk. Who will I be without my habituated patterns and qualities? Suddenly life is yawning wide open, full of possibilities. This is exactly what I’ve been longing for, and yet now that it’s here it feels too big, too scary, and perhaps too good to be true. There’s an odd sense that if I open up the narrow box of who I’ve been so far, I may cease to exist.

So I connect to that unbreakable, primal core of Self. I feel my center of gravity low to the Earth and move with the grounded, easeful power of a big cat, feeling the goodness and safety of this way of being. I guard the still-tender growth of my emerging self, and share it first with those who I know will celebrate me in this vulnerable, shifting state. To be known and loved in the messy middle is an incredible gift, but one to be shared thoughtfully. I make space to express without filtering or judging, as I open to perhaps being more complex than I’ve allowed myself to be so far. I celebrate the hell out of every step. I hold little me with love and let her know that she is no longer responsible for our survival, and she is slowly learning to trust me and play. I call on my ancestors so that I don’t feel alone, and I feel their encouragement to keep going, for all of us. Above all I return to that unbreakable, primal core of Self, and revel in the fact that I am still here, and now.

Reflection prompts

Are there any experiences or circumstances in your life that you have glossed over with statements like “That’s just the way things were,” “It could’ve been worse,” or “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” Notice if reflecting on these experiences or circumstances brings up any emotions or sensations (including numbness or distance). 

Were there any experiences in your life where you felt you had to call upon great strength and willpower in order to survive and/or be loved/belong? In doing so, did you have to abandon parts of yourself or minimize your emotions or needs? Is there any care that your system is desiring around these experiences?