But if illness can be a story, so perhaps can the cure.
There is a bunch of interrelated therapies, all fairly recent, that share an interest in narrative. They are pain reprocessing, somatic tracking, polyvagal theory and others. The underlying idea is that in some people – and I stress some people – chronic illness might look like this: a very ancient and primitive part of the brain and nervous system believes it has detected danger, possibly a tiger or something like that, and so it produces pain or a whole range of symptoms in an effort to get the sufferer to close down and protect herself. The nervous system does this very effectively and it can carry on doing it for decades. It is really very inventive. I feel that mine ought to be eligible for some sort of prize.
It comes to this. A story you have on some level believed – that the world is fraught with danger – can be countered by a different story. Yes, the world is fraught with danger, but not everywhere, and not always, not here in this place and not now in this moment. You are safe.
So this is my narrative now, the story of how I got ill – and perhaps, if I pay careful attention to it, I will be able to retrace my steps through the labyrinth of my own body and return to safety. {read}