Healing from Chronic Fatigue: The Amazing Impact of Self-Compassion

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ~Dalai Lama

In my mid-thirties, my active and adventuresome life as a broadcast journalist collapsed. It began with a trauma, followed by flu-like symptoms that stuck around for thirteen years. Almost overnight, I lost the pep to walk around the block, much less file reports for the evening news.

A battery of doctors diagnosed me with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), among other diagnoses. They said I’d have to live this way since there was no reliable cure. I became one of the medical mysteries I used to cover.

Needless to say, I was terrified and grief-stricken. To add insult to illness, I beat myself up for ‘failing’ to get well. I should be able to master my new vocation of healing, reasoned my Type A personality.

I used every ounce of energy I had to research my own health story. Intravenous vitamins, antiviral medications, sage-burning healers—I tried them all. I eliminated the foods I enjoyed and washed my elimination diet down with mounds of herbs.

Sadly, I was also feeding myself bitter pills: self-pressure and self-criticism. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t make my body well, save a career I loved, or actualize the family I dearly wanted.

There were enormous reasons for grief. But I didn’t have the support in and around me to feel this maelstrom of emotions. My mind swooped in to distract me.

I blamed myself mercilessly, even though my symptoms started after I was sexually assaulted by a man who walked away free. There’s something unhealthy about a society that rarely punishes rape, even though an American is sexually assaulted every sixty-eight seconds, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network.

We also know that people who experienced adverse childhood experiences have higher rates of chronic illness as adults. There’s mounting evidence that adult stressors and trauma can also topple our health. This is what happened to me, although it took years to make this connection.

No matter whether we’ve experienced big ‘T’ trauma, little ‘t’ trauma, or the unavoidable insults of being human, we need self-compassion. This quality was once illusive to me. But after years of illness, I started softening.

It was too painful to endure the pressure of trying to be a perfect patient. The hard-driving approach I adopted in my journalism career didn’t work when I could barely cook a meal.

Exasperated by the medical maze, my yoga mat and meditation cushion became my medicine. I’d stretch like a cat in my backyard patch of grass. Trees, birds, and poetry became my companions.

Eckhart Tolle’s voice was a melody to my nervous system. I steeped myself in his words each day. Instead of lamenting all the things I couldn’t do, I began to actually enjoy the imperfect present moment.

You could say I accidentally fell into self-compassion. It’s not that I gave up on healing, but I began treating myself kindly for my very real suffering. I resonated with Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Kindness, in which she writes:

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.”

I awakened with sorrow and spent many insomniac nights mired in it. Much as I wish joy had become my teacher, suffering got the job.

Soon, I started noticing kindness in and around me. My parents would drop by for a movie. We’d curl up on the couch, ditch my anti-candida diet with a bowl of popcorn, and sink into the relief of other people’s stories.

Meanwhile, my state disability ended, and I was petrified about how I’d support myself as a single woman without a job. One day, a flier came in the mail saying, “Kindness is like a boomerang that comes back to you. We’re dedicated to financially supporting members of the media in a life crisis.”

That was me! I’d never heard of this non-profit and don’t know how I got on their mailing list. I applied, got financial aid, and managed to save my house from the clutches of foreclosure!

In the face of crisis, life’s generosities abounded. A friend listened to my heartbreak. My mom brought homemade chicken soup. One yoga teacher came by with superfood treats.

Since I paused my pursuit of a cure, I decided to use my spoon-sized energy for an online writing class. Here, I found a community of kindred spirits. A fellow writer told me she recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome through a type of mind-body healing.

This approach was brought forward by John Sarno, Howard Schubiner, and other physicians who realized the role of unresolved emotions in perpetuating chronic symptoms. Miraculously, her story gave me a sudden boost of energy and catapulted my recovery!

I stepped into a new paradigm and realized I could overcome my seemingly endless flu-like symptoms. Rather than attacking viruses, I learned to soothe my brain and nervous system.

No wonder I was hypervigilant. I’d first experienced a massive trauma, then suffered the stress of living with chronic symptoms I felt powerless to overcome. I’d subsequently lost my ability to support myself financially and function in the world during the prime of my life.

My dear father also passed away during these years, as did three other close family members. My brain was on overload and became stuck in a hypervigilant state—exacerbated by fears that I was ill for life.

In a training I took a year later, Dr. Schubiner described fibromyalgia as PTSD for the body. I finally felt seen and understood. This was the polar opposite of how I felt with most of the fifty practitioners I saw over my CFS saga.

While allopathic medicine is miraculous in fighting infections and saving lives, it often neglects the role of emotional stress and trauma on our physical health. Physician and author Gabor Maté writes, “All of the diagnoses that you deal with—depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma.”

I needed to explore my storehouse of trauma, which I did through meditation, writing, and somatic therapy. I also shifted my beliefs about my condition and moved slowly back into activities. It took months of dedicated practice to retrain my brain so that I could safely inch out of my bubble.

I brought mindfulness to personality traits like people-pleasing, pressure, and perfectionism since they can fuel chronic symptoms. I once heard a physician named John Stracks say, “When I think of why people develop pain, self-criticism is at the top of the list.”

I wanted tools to soften my harsh inner dialogue, so I dove into Kristin Neff’s work. The research psychologist says self-compassion fills us with good-feeling hormones like oxytocin, while self-criticism fuels stress hormones like cortisol. This alone causes a cascade of physical symptoms.

When our subconscious brain senses danger—even if it’s an internal, psychological one such as “There’s something wrong with me”—it activates our nervous system. In flight or fight, we might feel anxious or aggressive. In freeze, we can feel immobile or dead.

Neff describes three elements of self-compassion: mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness. Here’s the gist of each one as I understand them.

Mindfulness: We acknowledge and witness our physical or emotional pain as a felt experience in our body. We might say something like, “It’s hard to feel so sad and exhausted.”

Humanity: We remember that suffering is part of being human. Although our circumstances are unique, we’re not alone in this universal experience.

Self-Kindness: We treat ourselves as we would with a dear friend, offering ourselves the supportive words we yearn to hear. When we’re struggling, we ask with sincerity: What do I need right now?

With self-compassion as my companion, I started speaking to myself tenderly. An indescribable relief would wash over me. Instead of feeling abandoned by life, I felt seen and witnessed by the only one who knew what I needed: myself.

This dovetails beautifully with mind-body healing. A big part of my recovery was tracking sensations in my body with open curiosity. Fatigue felt heavy. Pain was burny. Brain fog felt spacey.

To the extent I could, I stopped fighting or fleeing from my feelings and started holding them with curiosity. Often, restlessness and rumination reared up. When I stuck with it, sometimes my system settled and my symptoms shifted into emotions.

Other times, my body spoke to me. Please don’t push so hard. Don’t say yes when you mean no. Tell me I’m okay just how I am. I need to do something fun.

As I tended to my hurts in this new way, the physical symptoms began subsiding. This took patience and persistence. Many months later, I was back in the land of the living. Not only that, I was experiencing life in a more authentic and embodied way than I had before the CFS.

This isn’t woo-woo mumbo-jumbo. Neuroscience shows that our brain creates pain, fatigue, anxiety, and other stress-related symptoms. It does so based on a perception of danger, whether that’s a wayward car, an angry spouse, or harsh inner dialogue.

“Certain behaviors can bring us to a state of high alert without our even realizing it,” writes Alan Gordon in The Way Out. “There are three habits I see again and again in my patients that trigger fear and aggravate neuroplastic pain: worrying, putting pressure on yourself, and self-criticism.”

When our nervous system shifts into a threat state, it communicates through symptoms. Sensations from dizziness to dullness are encouraging rest and inactivity. With ongoing stress, our brain can become sensitized, firing memos to our body in rapid succession.

Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion corroborates this. “Pain is often caused by tension and resistance, so when we soften a little bit as opposed to a harsh reactive stance, it tends to reduce the amount of pain we physically experience,” Neff says in The Healthy.

Recently, I felt tension flare when speaking with a curt customer service agent who couldn’t help with a large payment I was supposed to receive. It was, apparently, stuck in limbo. My stress level rose, and I felt a knot in my throat—surely full of all the things I wanted to say to her!

After two hours, my money was still missing in action. My frustration soared as I’d frittered away precious time I’d set aside to write my blog, conveniently on self-compassion. (The irony is not lost on this writer.)

Instead of trying to fix it further or rush back to work, as I would have done before, I acknowledged that I was angry and scared. I reiterated how impossible the modern age is sometimes. And I said to the trembling part of me, “I am sorry you’re dealing with this stress. What do you want and need right now?”

It turns out that I needed to growl (literally!). I needed to walk (briskly). And I needed to practice somatic meditation. I did all three and felt a wave of calm energy. The oxytocin potion, perhaps?

I was ready to return to work with vigor and fresh material for my blog, conveniently enough. That jives with studies showing that self-compassionate people are less anxious and depressed than self-critical people.

If self-compassion feels like a foreign concept to you, you’re simply a modern Homo sapien. For a long while, it was like a distant planet to me. With intention, we can cast our gaze towards self-kindness and move steadily into its orbit.

The next time you feel hurt, scared, or symptomatic, you might pause and ask yourself: How am I feeling right now? What words or deeds would feel supportive to me? You may be surprised by what you find in the medicine chest of your very own heart.