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My Healing, Curing, and Reversing Fibromyalgia Philosophy and FAQ

September 26, 2009 by Lisa


I do believe fibromyalgia can be healed, cured or reversed in almost everyone.  I am not a doctor, nor do I have any recent medical training. I did have fibromyalgia and now I don’t and I spent 5-6 years of my life devoted to healing Fibromyalgia in my own body.  I read books, I tried alternative therapies, I talked to many people, and I experimented with my body. 

Based on all of that, this is everything I believe about how fibromyalgia can be cured.

Fibromyalgia is a condition that comes on gradually and will go away gradually.   I think that one barrier to healing fibromyalgia is that people look for the procedure, pill, or process that will make every symptom of fibromyalgia disappear in the shortest amount of time possible.  Then, when most or all symptoms don’t go away they decide to believe those who say fibromyalgia is not cureable, and they give up.  Or, they switch to another healing modality without giving the first time to work, and then nothing gets a chance to work.

When I started stretching and self-trigger point massage in 2003, I stretched and worked on myself for hours a day with very little relief.  These days I stretch comparatively very little and never have pain or fatigue.  I think it went something like this:

  • 2003: (when I started treatments) 100% fibromyalgia, I couldn’t sit or stand or drive without pain.  I couldn’t hold my baby or put my hair up.  I was tired a lot and very sensitive to smells and sounds and stressors.
  • 2004: 80% fibromyalgia, I definitely felt better but still had a lot of pain in all my muscles.
  • 2005: 60% fibromyalgia, I knew I was on a definite healing path and could imagine a time when I would be free of fibro.  I still couldn’t sit on a computer for long and I still had much neck and back pain.
  • 2006:  40% fibromyalgia, I was doing really, really well.  I was feeling quite good most of the time, but was susceptible to pain if I overdid anything.
  • 2007: 20% fibromyalgia, or mostly healed.  At this point I started talking about myself as someone who was recovering from fibromyalgia.  I still did a lot of stretching because I felt the urge to stretch a lot and I knew first-hand how wonderful it was for my body.
  • 2008 and 2009: during this time I am healed.  I am healthy.  I try to do yoga for an hour, 5 days a week, and I do a legs-up-the-wall stretch for about about 10 minutes before bed each night - and that’s it.  I do nothing else.  I am a normal person with a great awareness of any stress or strain in my body or mind.  If something does hurt I know exactly what to do thanks to my many years of self-treatment.

(note – it does not have to take 5 years to recover from fibro.  I did not know many things at the beginning that I know now.  My book explains everything I now know.  I think if I had been as knowledgeable in the beginning of my quest, I could have felt mostly healed within one to two years.)

Fibromyalgia ‘buildup’ in the body is cumulative, meaning the longer you have the condition, the more it hurts or has the potential for hurting.  Anything that works to ‘drain’ the condition and the symptoms is cumulative too, meaning the more and longer you do it, the more it works.

In my opinion, Fibromyalgia is caused by many things, chief among them being stress, the living of life, stress chemical buildup, and the lack of a counteracting process like relaxing hobbies, yoga, deliberate relaxation, or anything that puts the body in a relaxed state as much as the rest of life puts the body in a stressed state.

Fibromyalgia is cured mainly by putting the body into a relaxed state and allowing it to heal itself.   This takes a lot more than just stretching for an hour a day.  This takes changing of beliefs, thoughts, actions, and habits that make you feel stress so that you can spend much of each day in a relaxed state.

The main path to sleeping better in Fibromyalgia is learning to shut off your mind.  Even pain control takes a back seat to learning to shut off your mind, because in my experience, I have learned that if I can allow pain to be without my mind chattering about it, it changes, smooths out, relaxes, or disappears.

Medication is normally going to only mask symptoms for a time, not actually heal anything (with one excpetion).  The one exception is guaifenesin.  I had wonderful success with it.  I was never offered anything else so I don’t have firsthand experience with anything else, but I will say that if you have to take a medicine forever in order to stay symptom-free or symptom-reduced, then the cause must surely still lurk in your body.

Fibromyalgia Diets Can Be Useful under certain circumstances. For many people, (It did for me) fibromyalgia can coincide with a carbohydrate intolerance, and in many cases, the carbohydrate intolerance can create many of the same symptoms as the fibromyalgia, like muscle pain and fatigue.  I currently try to eat moderate to low carbohydrates, although I am at a place where carbohydrates don’t bother me too much anymore.   It’s definitely something to talk about with a doctor, especially for people who eat a lot of carbohydrates.

Alternative therapies, like massage and acupuncture and yoga, are very valuable for fibromyalgia.  Some of my greatest gains came as a direct result of massage; self trigger-point massage; gentle, supported yoga; and meditation.

Everything at once is never a good idea: Try one or two things and stick with it for weeks and months and see where your body goes with it.  Give it some time to work.

Learning to listen to your body is key: not only listening for stress and strain but listening for interest and inuition and feelings about something.  If you keep thinking about a kind of healing modality and have an interest in it, that is your body saying “This will work for us!”

Becoming extremely sensitive to negative emotion was another key for me: For me, I discovered that anytime I was feeling negative emotion like fear, anger (especially anger and resentment), frustration, or worry, I was setting myself up for immediate and future pain and fatigue. 

These days I am always aware of how I feel, and if I feel bad in any way I stop and I figure out what thoughts I am thinking to create the bad feelings and I figure out a way to make it better.  I mostly will just allow the bad feeling to come to me fully – experience it directly, and then I say “I want to feel good” and then I do my best to focus on what I want, take any action that feels good to me, and trust that everything will work out for me (so I can stop thinking about it).

Healing Fibromyalgia is not like a college degree – once you’ve got it, it’s yours forever.  Once you create gains, certain lifestyle modifications must be in place for the rest of your life in order to keep them.  I feel great these days, but if I ever went back to thinking and behaving like I did before 2003, I would start the descent back into the hole that is fibromyalgia.

These lifestyle modifications may be hard to imagine now, but if you create them deliberately and slowly in your life, you will love them and keeping them up will be effortless.   I’m talking about things like deliberately being happy, stretching often, sleeping well, and paying attention to what you eat and how you feel.

Filed under: Listening to your Body, Reversing Fibromyalgia, Stress, Wellness




Have you seen my book yet? I reversed Fibromyalgia in my own body. I think anyone can do it, no matter how long they've had Fibro or how severe their pain, fatigue, fibrofog, or tiredness. Click here to Start Your Journey Back to Wellness!

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