When we think of chronic illness or injury, we think of the physical suffering involved – the pain, nausea, dizziness, cognitive dysfunction, fatigue, and all the other symptoms and physical limitations we experience. But illness and injury also creates an enormous amount of mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering and distress. This is a secondary level of suffering on top of the physical.

To name just a few of the emotional challenges – we feel grief at not being able to do what we want to do, anger about our physical suffering, resentment that this is happening to us, and sadness that we are letting our children and partners down. We experience anxiety thinking about the future, wondering if we’ll get better, and worrying about what happens if we don’t get better. We agonize over applications for disability pensions and the frequent craziness of that process. We feel overwhelmed at the enormity of it all. We spend days, weeks, and months going around in circles trying to figure out how and why this happened to us. We feel that we must somehow be bad and that God abandoned us.

What this means is that we have a double whammy of suffering. We have the physical suffering and then all this emotional, mental, and spiritual stuff on top of it.

The world often doesn’t seem to make sense anymore and every life issue we never dealt with typically comes flaring up at the same time. Ways of thinking about ourselves and being in the world suddenly don’t work very well. We have to think about who we are if we can’t do what we did before. We identify with our roles in life – the work we do, being a wife, husband, and sibling. We take pride in our hobbies and volunteer work. But then what happens when we are completely bedridden for months, what happens when we can’t do our old activities? What happens if we never will be able to do them again?

Then physical and emotional suffering interact, and when we feel physically worse we often feel emotionally worse, and when we feel emotionally worse we often feel physically worse.

Often we are limited in what we can do about our physical suffering, but we can work with our emotional, mental, and spiritual suffering.

In my next few blog posts I’m going to write a lot more about secondary suffering and how to work with it so it doesn’t overwhelm you and the process of working with it leads to increased contentment, despite the physical challenges.

So before heading to my next blog post – some things to think about….

You start with where you are…. And try to develop a willingness to:

• Work with your thoughts and emotions
• Admit you may be believing in things that aren’t true/helpful
• Let go of mental /emotional habits and patterns
• Feel joy and love in the midst of difficulty
• Be firm in perseverance to work with thoughts and emotions and be gentle with yourself at the same time