McCall McPherson discusses why people with chronic illness stay stuck even after their bodies improve: they keep an illness identity that triggers fear and hypervigilance. Breaking free means consciously dropping that identity and relearning to trust your body again.
If someone is— they're in their journey, they have gone through the work, they are on medications that are working for their body, their labs are in an optimal range, what does the next step of this work look like?
I think the big thing is when you've been chronically ill for a long time, you form an identity about your capacity, and this identity underpins everything that you're doing. So even if you are optimizing in all the other areas, if you still ultimately have this deep-seated belief that you are more vulnerable than someone else in an unexpected situation, perhaps you are then more fearful, meaning your nervous system is a little bit more hypervigilant. There's so much we can't control. And so there are people living with constant fear subconsciously. Something's gonna happen out of my control and I'm in a relapse when everything else is good. It's like, why is this happening? So at a very like fundamental level, it's, are you willing to accept and step out of that identity? Can you let that go? It's a trauma response. So that's at the core of all of this, and the beliefs that surround that impact your nervous system in a big way. Because if you're operating from fear or shame or anything like that, your nervous system, which is so primitive, is just hearing survival.
And I think it's such a fascinating thing, allowing yourself to prove to yourself that you can trust yourself, right? And then slowly but surely, you're like, I'm strong, I'm resilient.
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