217 - Three Common Recovery Traps (and How to Avoid Them)

I share three common recovery traps and how we can find our way out of them without blame. Today's episode focuses on pacing, nervous system safety, and emotional processing so your body can stabilise and move forwards. 

• Pushing too hard on a better day and triggering the boom and bust cycle 
• Banking energy for healing by spending some, enjoying some, and saving some 
• Stepping off the symptom-fixing merry-go-round and reducing pressure 
• Creating safety through kindness, gentleness, and small consistent cues 
• Recognising the emotional load of long COVID, ME/CFS, and health challenges 
• Finding a safe place to feel emotions without judgement 

So do let me know how you get on, if these resonate with you, and if you've noticed any other common recovery traps that you might be getting waylaid by. 

Links to relevant practises (free tracks)

• Finding Emotional Safety: https://insig.ht/A7bEwwAXF3b
• Meeting your body kindly: https://insig.ht/Jlnf2P0w32b 
• STOP: From overwhelm to ease: https://insig.ht/1UCyrM2w32b

Transcript

Why Recovery Pitfalls Happen

Jackie Baxter 0:00

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Long Covid Podcast. Today I want to talk about three really common mistakes that are often made in recovery and how we can avoid or overcome them. I also want to preface this by saying that I call these mistakes, but it's not coming from a place of blame. It's not your fault. Recovery is a process and it's hard. We fall into a lot of traps. We get things wrong and we learn from them. We don't always learn what we think we're learning from them at the time, and they're certainly not usually comfortable lessons, but they do usually turn out to be really important. One of my favourite quotes from Recovery was this quote by Maya Angelou: Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. And I think that kind of says all it needs to. Each pitfall we start to become aware of, acknowledge, and then work to overcome helps us on that journey of healing. So first we have to understand what a pitfall might be. Then we need awareness. So starting to become aware of how this might be showing up in your recovery. Honestly acknowledge if it is, and then notice when you are starting to fall into that trap. And then we overcome. So when you've recognized that this is starting to happen, you've noticed it, take a pause, take a breath, and ask yourself what your body truly needs in that moment. And then we proceed as best as you can. So are three common pitfalls. The first one is pushing too hard on a better day. So I think everybody has done this. What happens here is that maybe we have some time where we feel slightly better. It might be an hour, a day, a week. We're so excited that we feel a little bit better that we try to catch up on life. Catch up on all the things that we couldn't do before, whether it's chores, work and childcare, or it might be other activities like movement, binge watching TV or socializing. And the reason this happens is that the nervous system has come to a place of a little bit more stability, which is why you're feeling slightly better. Which means symptoms dip, hope rises, we feel a little better, and we have

Better Days And Overdoing It

Jackie Baxter 3:03

the desire, as I said, to catch up on life, which is a completely understandable desire. And because of this feeling of making up for lost time, we often stop listening to the body. We push through, overstressing the body. The body then shuts down, experiencing that crash and feeling like it's going backwards. It's not. It's the system protecting itself, but it feels especially cruel, especially having felt a little bit better. So, how do we avoid this? I think understanding that this is a trap that you may be likely to fall into is a great starting point. So if you've experienced it before, like I think many people have, then you'll know that you might be susceptible to this one. If we have more knowledge of the nervous system and belief in recovery, then it also makes it easier not to get sucked into the catching up on life trap. One of my favourite analogies here is the idea of banking energy for healing, which I've probably mentioned before, you might have heard me talk about it. And it goes like this. We prioritise what we have to, things like bills and rent. We spend some on things that give us joy, and we save some for the future. Energy is the same. We don't want to spend it all. So we use some for what we have to, might be washing, cooking. We spend some on things that bring us joy, might be an episode of TV or sitting in the garden. And we save some for healing. So we're putting it into our savings account. And if you have that belief that recovery is possible, then you're probably going to be more willing to save for the future rather than spending it all today. So that belief is important. So if you have a better day, maybe you could spend it enjoying feeling better rather than getting sucked into doing all of the things. Do things that nourish you. Do things that make you feel joy. Don't forget to continue to do the things that made you feel better in the first place. That maintenance, playing the long game. So enjoy it. But try not to spend it all. This allows the system to stabilize rather than swinging wildly between this boom and bust. And it starts to teach the body that it's safe. So trying to let go of that need to catch up. Reminding yourself that you're enough wherever you currently are, that you're on your own journey at your own pace, and that's okay. It's important to go at a rate that feels safe for your body. Healing isn't a race or a competition. Number two, trying to fix symptoms instead of creating safety. So what can happen here is that desperately chasing diagnoses, treatments, protocols, hacks, quick fixes on the merry-go-round of medical appointments. Or it might be trying so hard to fix, control, and change things that you heap a ton of pressure on yourself, which can cause the body to feel even less safe. So it could look slightly different for different people. Now don't get me wrong, being medically checked out is super important. And there are medications and treatments that can be useful. But it's knowing where that balance is, when to say enough, and when to start

From Fixing Symptoms To Safety

Jackie Baxter 7:21

integrating. Nobody I have heard of has recovered just through traditional medical intervention. For many people it's an element, but let's not get sucked into relying completely on what we know only goes so far. This constant chasing or trying to control or fix adds to the activation of the nervous system. The urgency creates more stress, more symptoms, more frustration, and less safety. There's also this cultural belief that recovery equals effort, which is wrong. Maybe you have even been told by someone that you need to try harder. However, often the harder we try, the worse it gets, because the nervous system is feeling that pressure is danger. Things like timelines can contribute to this as well. I need to be better by a certain time. So a useful reframe here could be your body isn't asking for harder work, it's asking for safety. But what does safety mean? In this world of stress, overstimulation, a culture that expects and even glorifies those who push through, and need to achieve and be successful, a world where we see only what other people want us to see on Instagram, and therefore we start to compare our imperfect lives with their instafilter. In a world where we are expected to be more, let us dare to do less. Safety is rarely found in more effort. It's found in more kindness, more gentleness, more compassion, more vulnerability, more small, consistent cues of safety than huge overwhelming experiences. And let's face it, with a health challenge, small and consistent sounds much more accessible. Sometimes that safety is allowing ourselves to just be. So it's not trying to change or fix, just allowing ourselves to be in this moment. What would it feel like to accept yourself exactly as you are with no judgment? Feeling safe despite whatever else is going on is a hugely important step. But it can be really, really challenging. And it often requires someone else, someone to help, someone to feel safe with, someone to help guide you, someone to hold your hand along the process. And finding the right person for that is also important. So if we are regularly giving our nervous system these cues of safety, our body will start to feel safer. If the body feels safer, then the nervous system will start to function. It also means that any other interventions, medical or otherwise, are likely to be more successful because the body is in a better place to receive them. So safety is our most important need in order to not only survive but also to start to thrive. Number three, ignoring the emotional load of recovery. So recovery from long COVID, MECFS, or any health challenge is emotionally challenging as well as physically challenging. Often some really heavy emotions can come up during illness. Things like grief, loss, fear, and uncertainty were things that I felt a lot of. And whilst the physical symptoms of illness are hugely challenging, the emotional aspect is often overlooked. There's often the mistaken belief that talking about emotions means that someone is trying to say it's all in your head. And that isn't true at all. Emotions are physical processes that can be felt in the body, and that means our nervous system is listening. I think we

Emotional Load And Nervous System

Jackie Baxter 11:54

also are often told that we shouldn't show emotions. Men might be told that crying means they're showing weakness and that they need to man up. Women are told to stop being so hysterical or over-emotional. Most people, I think, are uncomfortable around emotions, both their own and those of other people. However, if we don't feel emotions, they can get stuck in our body, causing discomfort, stress, and activation. And when they do come out, they often get released in a really overwhelming way that can make the body feel even less safe. So validating and processing emotions is a hugely important part of being a healthy human as well as in recovery. Suppressing emotions tells us that it's not okay to feel that, that you're not safe. So it's very invalidating. It's okay to feel however you feel. If you're frustrated, it's okay to shake things or to shout grr. Finding a safe place to feel emotions is so important. It might be curling up in bed, it might be with your favourite soundtrack, or it might be with someone you trust. So where or with whom do you feel safe enough to be unapologetically yourself? And if you can't think of anywhere, how might you go about building that emotional safety? So feeling emotions isn't weakness, it's strength, and it's important. So how many of these common recovery traps do you find yourself falling into? I fell into all of them on my recovery journey, and I fell into them multiple times. I was a classic boom and buster. I tried far too hard to fix things, and I hated showing emotions. But it did get easier with practice. And they're all things that have served me well both throughout recovery and also beyond recovery. So if I can do it, so can you. So do let me know how you get on, if these resonate with you, and if you've noticed any other common recovery traps that you might be getting waylaid by. I've dropped a few links to practices that you might find useful in the show

Putting It All Into Practice

Jackie Baxter 14:48

notes. Please feel free to use them if they're helpful. And I will be back next week, and I'll see you then.