The difference between healing and curing a condition such as ME / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

People often ask me if I can “cure” a specific condition or illness, or what the difference is between “healing” and “curing.”

I remember when I was first ill with chronic fatigue syndrome / ME, I wanted a “cure.” And by that, I understood that I wanted the whole “nasty” incident of illness to go away and for my life to be exactly the same as it was before I became ill. And I suppose that is still what I understand by “cure” – the symptoms going away, and life returning to “normal.”And I suppose it is similar to what we read about in the press when researchers are looking for a “cure” in the “battle” against some kind of cancer.

This is not at all my experience of my healing journey with chronic fatigue syndrome / ME – and it is not what I see with a lot of my clients and friends either.

For me, part of my journey with healing from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / ME was looking at myself and taking responsibility for some of the unhealthy patternings I had created which were keeping me stuck in illness.

Some of these were patterns which started in childhood. For example, being criticised a lot as a child led to me living my life in such a way that I would gain the approval of people I perceived as being in a position of authority. Living like this for other people means denying the deeper wishes and longings of the heart, and can be very damaging over time. Energy healing and EFT, particularly connected with childhood events (see my post on inner child healings) can be very helpful in releasing the desire to please other people, and beginning to live an authentic life – at whatever age we are!

Another pattern I had to look at was the pattern of eating to give myself love. I was often given food as a reward for having succeeded at something – and I internalised this, and used food as a substitute for other more healthy mechanisms for reaching out for the love I needed. I believe from my own experience and that with clients that when we eat when we are in an unbalanced emotional state, we literally “eat” those emotions with the food we eat at that time. And this is part of the reason why when we go on a limited diet in a detox, we literally refeel those emotions that we didn’t want to feel at the time. Of course, feeling them is very healing, as it releases the energy that was tied up in keeping the emotions held in – and leads to us being more healthy and more energetic.

These are just a couple of examples, but they are typical of the type of issues people need to look at on a healing journey.

And, coming back to the difference between healing and curing, it seems obvious to me that if people need to look at these kind of issues from the past, they will be changed in the process – often quite dramatically. It’s now 9 years since I was first diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / ME, and my life is almost unimaginably different from then! In a way, I suppose this is unsurprising as the things I had been doing in my life before that time had led to me becoming ill – so it makes sense that I would have to change them. On the other hand, I think that when people are first ill, they just desperately want their lives to be how they were before they became ill.

So, part of what I call the healing journey is coming to terms with the fact that often some things in our lives have to change at quite a fundamental level, and this requires taking responsibility for some habits we have built up.

Now, I feel my life is more fulfilling and full of joy than ever before – and I wouldn’t dream of wanting to go “back” to where I was before I became ill. And, although I would never say I am pleased to have had ME / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I can say I feel grateful to CFS / ME for giving me the opportunity to look at so much in my life, heal it and now live more authentically and with more freedom than I ever used to.