The next part of this is learning to cope with a new normal. You're getting better, but you've lived so long in this state of surviving and illness, you might need help emotionally, mentally, and sometimes in your identity, to redirect.
The Seven Stages of Grief
As part of this adjustment, there might need to be grieving. And so just to go through, I'm going to work with the model that talks about the seven stages of grieving, and those are – yeah, I've looked it up – shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and then finally acceptance.
And always with these psychological models, the concept is that they might not be linear. They might not be in that order. You might also not pass through them and then never see them again. You might come in and out of certain phases.
Shock
Now, shock is probably not something that you'd have to deal with if it's a chronic illness. If it's something that's a quick turnaround, but you are still actually dealing with how you became ill or how your quality of life was affected by the condition that you got, there may still actually – you might be still dealing with the shock, right?
But more often than not, my clients – they've been dealing with it. By the time they get to a point where they want to – unless you're sort of already in the world of naturopathy – most of my clients come to me after everything else has failed. So their friends and family, not necessarily, but for the initial person within that group, it's "everything else has failed and I just need to come and work with someone like me."
So that shock might not necessarily be something we have to deal with. But I give it to you as part of these stages, because if you're ever looking at this for yourself or looking at this for a loved one, you may actually see signs that they're still dealing with the shock of this. And if that's the case, and that is a big part of their presenting – when they present or when they sort of walk around in their world, I guess, is another way of saying that – there are certain remedies specific to shock that I would be working with.
So Ignatia is a homoeopathic remedy that we might give. Arnica – actually one of the most well-known homoeopathic remedies out there – would be one that I might consider, especially if there's a physical component. You know, they were banged up in a car accident or something like that. And even if the car accident was a while ago and there's no bruising any more or deep tissue damage any more, the imprint of it being a shock from the injuries might present as an Arnica profile.
The other one that comes to mind is Aconite. So this is a remedy we call it "the deer in the headlights." So you're sort of walking around in a daze, you're sort of shocked. It's there within how you approach your life.
Denial
So, you know, these are the different phases you might have to go through. The next one is denial. I don't often see that, because people are having to – well, actually, you know what, no, I take that back. Denial, as in denial that they've got better, I still sometimes have people come through.
And this is where I love the way that I was taught to take cases, because I always really get deep into where you are right now. And this is from the first session. I actually spend two hours with my clients as an initial consultation. And I mean, it's supposed to be about a 50-50 of "let's take the case, let's really delve into how you're feeling, what's going on, all the bits and pieces of your health," and then the other half is supposed to be the bodywork – except if you're an online client, and then obviously it's a 90-minute session. But honestly, I often – I run out of time for the bodywork, or for an in-depth bodywork session, and really just sort of focus on "how are you, what's going on?"
But one of the things that I really take note of is the presenting condition. I quantify it as best I can. So a scale of 1 to 10 is usually how I do it. And this is where I'm asking you, "Your pain, scale of 1 to 10, where are we at? Your discomfort? Your energy levels?"
So pain is obviously a scale that you go up with – the worse, the higher the number, the worse the pain. But energy is one where I go down. So the lower the number, the worse – the more they're lacking in energy. I hope that makes sense.
So, you know, someone with energy at about 7 or 8, which is pretty good, I'm not so worried about their energy. But if they walk in and I've got a 3, and they're like, "I'm always on a thread and I wake up with a 3 out of 10," then that's a problem, right?
The other thing I would do is quantify in terms of times of the day or associated factors. So aggravating factors might be the way that you look at that. So we might identify that everything gets worse for a woman just before her period, or you might be worse in the morning and better at night, or vice versa. You might be worse at the end of the day. And these are actually really useful for pinning down the type of imbalance we're dealing with from a TCM perspective. And I won't be going into that now, but this is where this can be really useful.
Dealing with Denial
Dealing with the denial side of getting better – in that I've had people come in and go, "Yeah, I'm still not sleeping well." But if we actually go back through the numbers from the first time I saw them or the last time I saw them, and they're like, "Yeah, you know, I presented actually having five nights a week of really broken sleep, waking up, eating, and then falling asleep on the couch and then being exhausted for the day, and their energy levels were 3 out of 10."
And then we go back through and they're actually like, "Okay, now how many nights a week are you having a bad night?"
"Oh, it's only two."
"Okay, that's an improvement."
"And when that happens, instead of me waking up four times in the night, I'm now waking up twice a night."
"Okay, there's an improvement."
"And I'm not getting up to eat. Or maybe if I do, it's once every two weeks now. Otherwise, I just sort of lie there for 10 minutes and then I go back to sleep."
"All right, this is excellent. Okay, and then what are your energy levels like?"
"Do you know what? I'm now sitting on a 6 out of 10 when I wake up."
So this is where – they still have work to do, we're still correcting the sleep imbalance, but they can start to recognise, because I have the data there – I have where they walked in and where they are now – that they are improving.
So that is where it can be really useful, and that is where you might see signs of denial in that they're actually getting better and we want to bring people out of that. We want them to not be focused on that, because we want them to be where they are now and acknowledging that things are working. And then they feel the hope and the optimism, and then they can start to really own the new normal that they're walking into.