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You'd do anything to be free of your health anxiety
Welcome to the 'thing' that will change your life.
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Many treatments for health anxiety focus on benefits to the health systems and those around you from treating your health anxiety. Nice! Not!
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This coaching is for YOU. It is designed to free YOU from the tyranny of every little symptom causing so much dread that it literally makes you sick.
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It's to get YOU your life back. To trust yourself and your health team.
Who am I to offer any advice here?
True, I've never suffered from this.
I've looked after plenty of people who do, sometimes for themselves and sometimes on behalf of loved ones (usually children). It's distressing how much stress this causes them and how much time they spend looking for answers and reassurance.
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Accessing healthcare has become more difficult in the UK, adding stress.
In the US, repeated visits and tests cost time and money.
That's before the time, energy, and stress it will cost you (and your nearest and dearest).
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There's a lot I can do in the clinic room. Time, focus, attention, and genuine listening often go further than fancy tests. Starting on the testing journey quite often causes more stress. It also leads to a feeling of abandonment (and even more loss of trust) when the tests come back negative.
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You've likely experienced friends, family and healthcare staff trying to convince your conscious mind rationally that everything is fine. You've probably tried to convince yourself.
Unfortunately. we can 'Con' our conscious minds, but there's no conning your unconscious mind.
So, we must deal directly with our unconscious. We need to feel safe, to trust advice and trust our bodies. Imagine how different your life would be from today if you could do that? Feel safe, trust your body and trust advice.
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We must uncover our own resources (they're there already and often easier to find than we think).
Some patients have symptoms that are labelled 'medically unexplained'. We used to call them psychosomatic and, before that, functional and, in the distant past, hysterical. Crikey, it beggars belief that even happened.​
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Healthcare professionals and therapists continue to view (and treat) bodily and psychological issues as separate. They're not.
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They are woven together like a batter mixture in a food processor. There is no possible separation. None.
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We know that 80% of the vagus nerve fibres run from the gut to the brain, and 20% run from the brain to the gut. This is part of the gut-brain axis. Of course, bowel problems will affect our daily mental health, and equally, psychological issues like stress will, of course, affect our bowels.
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So, it makes sense that experiencing a symptom that causes worry will drive other symptoms (often in the gut), which in turn causes added worry, which drives more symptoms. It's a vicious circle of doom that is almost impossible to step out of.
If you could will your way out of it, you'd have done that in a flash.
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Some therapists, psychiatrists, and doctors have 'got' this link.
Look to Gabor Mate, Peter Levine, and Bessel Van der Kolk.
Their works include The Body Keeps Score, The Body Says No, and Freedom from Pain. The body and brain are one system. Choosing to look at and treat them separately limits the chance of therapeutic success and frankly makes little sense.
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Worse, doctors and therapists rarely 'share' patients. Doctors have embraced psychological support within teams looking after patients with long-term conditions like diabetes or, cystic fibrosis, or kidney disease.
There's still often a medicine/psychological separation, though.
What we've been much slower to appreciate is how effective medicine and psychological approaches are together in almost all situations. The professionals are often in separate buildings and don't know each other, and passing between each leads to a lack of trust from patients.
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So, the solutions must come from those who seamlessly use medicine and therapy and can pivot between them when needed.
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How will the coaching programme help you? Read on...
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What results should I expect?
Let's imagine you carry on as you are.
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When you look in the mirror, you see worry deeply etched in the lines on your face, your slightly off-colour skin, and your stressed posture.
You spend hours researching what could be going on inside you and don't feel you are in control of or trust your body. If you feel you can't trust your body, you either feel trapped in it or in some cases, feel a distance from it. Both of these are coping mechanisms that help you continue functioning. They aren't a choice as such; they're a necessity.
Some of you will spend lots of time accessing healthcare or holding in your worries while avoiding healthcare.
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It's a phenomenal cost.
Society looks only at costs to 'the system', not the costs to those suffering.
The biggest cost, though, is the lost opportunities to live your authentic life—the things you could be doing and enjoying if health worries weren't monopolising your time and headspace.
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Let me tell you a quick story...
The great Billy Connolly (a familiar figure to British audiences, a Glaswegian with family-friendly physical and observational comedy. He is amazingly talented) was at Buckingham Palace to receive his knighthood from Prince William. Just as he stood in the wings waiting for his turn, a footman asked him how it felt today since he had 'come from nothing' (Billy grew up in poverty in Glasgow). Billy paused momentarily and said, "I didn't come from nothing. I came from something'.
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Health anxiety is the same. It doesn't just pop up. It's driven by something.
Sometimes, that is health anxiety in a parent or close family member.
Sometimes, it's from an illness we experienced or observed in someone close (often if it's sudden or devastating).
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It makes sense if we've seen that we find it hard to feel secure and trust our own bodies.
Working with our unconscious minds to process these experiences sets us free.
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This coaching offers individual sessions to find and reprocess these traumatic experiences in one go. I use a technique called BLAST®, which is very fast and gentle. Imagine if, in around 15 minutes you have found the nub of your suffering and treated it. This is like unlocking the huge door that blocked you living your authentic life - the one where you're in charge and decide what you want to devote your time and energy to.
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We often don't recognise our resources when we feel disempowered or like we're being dismissed.
Your doggedness to find answers. Your resources to access healthcare and navigate the system.
You recognise what makes you feel safe.
Your ability to continue functioning while this happens internally (though at an enormous cost).
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You will have many other internal resources that are unique to you.
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My job in coaching is to help reveal them, and we can do this in formal sessions or group exercises.
Doing this work alone rarely works as we aren't usually honest enough with ourselves.
Saying something out loud to someone else is the secret sauce that reveals what we always knew deep down and often never recognised.
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We'll work together so you're more in tune with your body so you feel grounded and safe.
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Not only will you get that time and energy back (and only you know just how much time and energy that is), but you'll also get quality time with friends and family. You can do more and be present and enjoy it.
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You'll be able to look in the mirror and see a more frseh-faced version of you (the real you). Deep furrows in your brow will smooth out. Tension in your jaw and neck