Living with a chronic illness can often result in feeling like a burden to your loved ones. Whether that be because you’re unable to help out with the housework, feel that you need to ask for help too frequently, or that you’re unable to give those you care about enough love and attention.
Personally, it is this mental aspect of my health that has caused me the most grief and has stopped me from fully accepting myself as I am. I’ve spent many hours in therapy over the past years trying to dissect and “fix” this issue; and while I’ve been repeatedly told that I shouldn’t feel bad about not being able to keep up with my healthy peers, it doesn’t stop the nagging guilt that just simply my existence is a burden to others.
Logically, I know this is not the case. If the roles were reversed I know I’d be doing all I could to help out my friends and family, that I wouldn’t hold their ill health against them, and that my only concern would be their health and happiness. But strangely that logic does not extend to myself.
While I’m not expecting this post to change your life and suddenly remove that guilt you may have, I’m hoping the knowledge that it’s a common feeling among the chronically ill and these few tips I’m about to share, may help lessen that feeling.
So here’s how we can start to redefine the word burden by accepting and managing our chronic illnesses with self-compassion.
What is Self-Compassion?
Self-compassion is the practice of treating ourselves with kindness, understanding, and acceptance. It involves acknowledging our pain and suffering, and responding to it with care and compassion, rather than self-criticism or judgment. It’s recognising that we are not alone in our struggles and that there are many others going through similar challenges.
Living with a chronic illness can be a constant battle. We may experience physical pain, emotional distress, and social isolation. In such situations, self-compassion can sometimes be the only way to cope through it.
How to Practice Self-Compassion
As we all know, just telling someone to not feel a certain way isn’t going to suddenly change their mental viewpoint, the same goes for self-compassion. It is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced for it to start to making a difference.
- Mindful Awareness: Take a moment to become aware of your thoughts and emotions without judging them.
- Mindfulness helps to develop a non-judgmental attitude towards yourself. By becoming more aware of your thoughts, you are more likely to notice when you are speaking negatively about yourself, giving you the opportunity to rephrase and reframe your thought process.
- A great tool to help with this is the mobile app “Headspace” (please note this is an app which requires a paid subscription to use, if you have any suggestions for a free alternative then please comment down below). One particular technique I learnt through Headspace that I think is particularly useful here is that called ‘Noting’, which you can find out more about here.
- Self-Talk: Use kind and compassionate language when speaking to yourself.
- Whenever you start feeling negative about your actions (or lack of) try verbalising out loud the compassionate and kind version of your thoughts, imagine you are speaking to a friend who’s going through a similar experience.
- Seek Support: Connect with others who understand what you are going through, such as support groups or online forums.
- A sense of community can not only provide a resource of help and support, but it can also reinforce the point above. By regularly immersing yourself in a community going through similar struggles to you, it can become more apparent the compassion with which you talk to them and as such the compassion with which you should use towards yourself.
Living with a chronic illness is a challenging experience, but by releasing the guilt and negative feelings towards ourselves, it can make accepting our limitations and asking for help easier.