My long covid recovery recap: the timeline and tools

A quick review of the timeline of my recovery and the tools I used to make it happen.

The new website is still plodding along, but sooooooo much slower than I was hoping. That’s kind of how recovery can go too—unless you’re one of the lucky people who manages to recover in a matter of weeks. But that wasn’t me. My recovery took a while. So today, I thought I’d give everyone a recap of how my recovery progressed.

My Recovery Process

Starting in July 2020, I was sick for a year and a half. Although I tried everything to get better, the only things that helped were somatic meditations, which I talked about in last week’s post, and Claritin.

Then, in December 2021, I discovered JournalSpeak, a process created by Nicole Sachs. At that time, I was basically bedridden and only able to eat about 5 foods. Although the rest of my recovery was slow, JournalSpeak did help me make some pretty quick progress with my GI issues, and within the first couple of weeks, I was eating all foods again.

During that time and throughout the rest of my recovery (and even now!), I read any and all books I could find about mindbody healing, the nervous system, neuroplasticity, emotions, childhood development, attachment theory, and anything else that was related to the issues I was having and how to recover. I also began binging Nicole’s podcast, The Cure for Chronic Pain, especially the episodes where Nicole interviews people who have recovered.

Binging podcasts may not sound like much, but it was critical to recovery. Listening to other people who had recovered with these techniques was a major component of rewiring my nervous system to believe that I could also recover. Having my initial success and learning about how other people recovered also provided motivation for me to keep going with “the work.”

But I was quickly overwhelmed by the flood of emotions that kept trying to move through my body, and I didn’t know what to do with them.

I had to find a therapist to learn how to feel my emotions, and I specifically looked for someone who specialized in somatic therapy because I needed to feel my emotions, not talk about them. Through my new therapist, I also learned about a genetic trait known as Sensory Processing Sensitivity, or the highly sensitive person. That helped provide a framework for understanding why I reacted so much more strongly than “normal” people did to daily life events.

For about six months, I did JournalSpeak, I learned to process my emotions, and I did the somatic, calming meditations. I still had lots of flare ups, but I was getting better. I also ignored all advice to learn about and practice self compassion.

A couple of months into those first six months, I broke down and learned about Inner Child work, which I had previously thought was a bunch of New-Agey woowoo. It turns out, Inner Child work is real, it’s incredibly powerful, and it’s pretty critical for recovery.

During the spring and summer of 2022, I learned about and practiced Alan Gordon’s work with somatic tracking to retrain your brain to feel safe with — and eventually get rid of — symptoms. This was helpful to me mainly for feeling safe with symptoms and learning to accept them without them activating my nervous system even more. It was occasionally helpful for my “lesser” symptoms, but it was never helpful for the symptoms that left me bedridden. Interestingly, I used somatic tracking for seasonal allergies, and those went away and haven’t come back.

At that time, I was still ignoring the advice from experts to look up Kristin Neff and learn about self-compassion.

I kept on keeping on for quite a few months, slowly improving and doing more and more, but I was still having flare ups and found myself bedridden somewhat regularly with migraines. I started to notice that I had extreme rage that was trying to get out of me, and I couldn’t deal with it or contain it. There are a lot of tips for feeling and processing anger, and I tried many of those, but they weren’t sufficient for the rage boiling inside of me. So I bought a punching bag, and I started fully raging out on the punching bag. That helped tremendously. The emotions had just built up too much. When I started to be aware of how much and how extreme the rage was, it began to make sense that my body and nervous system had gotten overwhelmed. There may be better ways to process intense rage, but nothing else ever worked for me.

I continued to ignore advice about self-compassion.

At some point, late in 2022, I ended up seeing a couples somatic therapist. This was also super critical because almost all, if not all, of our repressed emotions have to do with relationships. So even if my husband wasn’t the source of the original upsetting emotion that I repressed, my interactions with him triggered those repressed emotions. By doing couples therapy, I was able to become much more aware of what was happening in my day-to-day interactions and how those interactions related to and activated repressed stuff. This isn’t something that’s available to a lot of people, so it’s not something I recommend on my site, and I think there are other ways to get to the relational stuff, but if couples somatic therapy is an option for you, I do recommend giving it a try.

I continued to ignore advice about self-compassion.

By the end of 2022, I was working pretty regularly, doing some exercise, and traveling for work. I was starting to learn how to access and address repressed stuff that was coming up during day-to-day life, which basically involved doing the stuff I mentioned above but in real time, as I was getting triggered.

I continued to ignore advice about self-compassion.

Finally, finally, finally, in February of 2023, I broke down and listened to Kristen Neff’s book, Self Compassion. That was a huge game changer, and I wish I had started it earlier. If you don’t already practice self-compassion, it’s an act of brain retraining in itself, and it takes practice and time to build up the skills. I had to do everything above to get better, but I do wonder if I could have gotten better faster if hadn’t resisted self-compassion so strongly. My nervous system was sooooooo much happier once I learned how to be kind to it. Sometimes, what we resist turns out to be something we desperately needed.

By late spring of 2023, I was living relatively normally, I was physically active, I helped launch a nonprofit, and I was traveling to other countries for work. But I still had fatigue flare-ups, occasional migraines, skin issues, minor anxiety, other random symptoms, and I could feel inside of me that there were some emotional things I still had to address. I took a course offered by Dr. Howard Schubiner, who is a tremendous resource in this space, and through his course, I learned about Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, which is also known as Parts work.

IFS is basically Inner Child work on steroids. It helped me make my final breakthroughs, and it’s another one that I wish I had learned about much sooner in my recovery. Among other things, by learning to distinguish our parts from our core self, we can recognize that when we’re having big emotional issues, the negative and scary voices aren’t the “real” us, which makes it easier to process and support the difficult parts. (If you’re not familiar with Parts work, this may not make a lot of sense, but that’s a topic for another day.) The combination of self compassion and Parts work is beyond powerful.

Today

For anyone familiar with the three nervous system states of polyvagal theory, I’m currently bouncing between Sympathetic (fight/flight) and Ventral Vagal (calm) (if you’re not familiar with these states, that will also be a topic another day).

I still have a fairly regular JournalSpeak process, mainly when I’m in the Sympathetic state and trying to process anger. I also routinely turn to any or all of the techniques above to help me process different life events. But I’m fairly symptom free. Little symptoms are still popping up, but at most, they register as minor irritations (e.g. adult acne), and not something that slow me down. Sometimes it takes me a little while to figure out what triggered me and why, but I’m much better at catching and addressing issues in real time.

I have made some life shifts because my previous life is what made me sick. The biggest is that I’m looking into a career shift because it turns out, worrying about global catastrophic risks every day, as I had been doing, is not good for one’s mental health.

I’m better at setting boundaries and putting my emotional needs first. Instead of repressing my emotions, I now allow myself to feel them, and I do my best to express them in socially acceptable ways. If I can’t be socially acceptable, I express them when I’m alone. I don’t push myself anymore because I know I have a natural drive, and if my body is resisting doing something, it’s because it needs to rest and process. I have a semi-regular sitting meditation practice, and I still practice the relaxing somatic meditations quite often. I’m back into the physical activities I loved before I got sick (running, yoga, hiking, climbing). I’m not yet back to the same fitness level I was at before I got sick, but only because it takes time to build that up.

Although I did pay for therapy (and I recommend anyone who can afford it to find a somatic and/or IFS therapist), I did not pay for programs. Everything I did, I found because other people had generously shared their information for free, or I checked out books from the library. The recovery process is often call “the work” because it’s legitimately difficult work to rewire our brains and nervous systems and process all the old emotional stuff. I’m organizing what I can with this newsletter and on the new website in my own effort to help people recover without the unnecessary effort and research I had to put into learning about all of this “work.”

What worked for me may not work for everyone, but I recommend at least working through these tools. You should also give them time and not do them all at once. I think there was some value in the fact that it often took me months before I learned about another new tool. I also want to emphasize that as I worked through each of these, I still used the other tools I’d previously practiced. I simply added more and more options to my tool box. I figured out which techniques to use for different issues by trial and error.

I’m not linking much in this post because I’ll be writing about each of these tools and techniques in the future, and I want to get back to working on the website now.