“I Need to Start Listening to What my Body Is Telling Me.”: Does Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Help People with CFS?-Bridie O'Dowd July 2020

From Twitter
https://twitter.com/user/status/1281167264910368769

 

Seems like a contradiction

 

I can imagine being on this course and being told to listen to my body. That would have been helpful when I was less severe and struggling to be normal and look after my kids. It would have been good to be given permission to tell my mother I could not help her in the garden because I had to avoid "boom or burst"

Good to be told I did not have to be perfectionist (mother again!) and acceptance of my illness as making things difficult rather than everyone feeling like me and managing fine.

I would have avoided the psychologisation of my disease and just took the good things out especially in the days before I understood the controversy as I doubt they make it explicit to patients and I am slow to see beyond the surface because of brain fog.

I also sympathise with the participants that felt free to talk about their problems and not feel bad. I like going to my local MS therapy centre because everyone is disabled and you can say things that you can't say to the able bodied as you just want to talk not shock people or get sympathy.

Yet you could get all this good stuff out of it while their theories are completely wrong as they do not understand what is happening and make no effort, everything is just a confirmation, no thought goes into it.

 

Mindfulness course available at Bristol CFS/ME clinic

https://www.nbt.nhs.uk/our-services...onic-fatigue-syndromeme-service/mindfulness-3

Copied to this thread: North Bristol NHS Trust: ME/CFS clinic

 

Spot on. I used to go away with groups of ME patients and it was so freeing to be able to spend time with other people who didn't turn a hair when you fell over, walked into walls, suddenly had to lie down on the floor or your brain seized. Other people who were struggling in exactly the same way & you could laugh about the state of you together. It was quite liberating.

 

I'm not sure whether this was open access at the time but it is now.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42087-020-00123-9