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Reverse therapy - a new treatment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia
Janice Sutton, a freelance journalist who worked with BBC Radio for 10 years before moving to Australia, reports on Reverse Therapy - the radical new approach to Bodymind healing that is coming to Australia in November 2005.
Sharon Matthews came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) in 1997. For eight years she struggled with the common symptoms of muscle pain, headaches, exhaustion, dizziness, irritable bowel and ‘brain fog’ (poor memory and concentration). A woman in her twenties, she was soon forced to give up her job in a bank and, by degrees became entirely reliant on her boyfriend to do the simplest things. She herself became housebound, fearing to walk even a hundred yards for fear she might collapse in the street. Told that there was no cure for her condition, Sharon’s life looked bleak indeed. But in the Summer of 2003 she began her first consultation in Reverse Therapy. By the following Spring she was entirely symptom-free. A few months after that she was back at work in a new job and living a full and active life.
Reverse Therapy is a groundbreaking new therapy pioneered by Dr John Eaton. Although Reverse Therapy can be used to treat a wide variety of symptomatic conditions, it has been mainly used for the treatment of CFS, producing nothing short of spectacular results in the UK so far.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (M.E), Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome (PVFS) or Chronic Fatigue & Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS) is a relatively common, complex & genuine physical condition that can cause profound and often prolonged illness and disability in people of all ages. Although the illness is officially recognised by the World Health Organisation, The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the UK Government and, in Australia by The Royal Australasian College of Physicians - who three years ago produced Clinical Practice Guidelines for the management of the condition - CFS/ME still remains a controversial and baffling illness. Unfortunately, the ongoing controversy has only served to fuel the widespread ignorance, misconception, scepticism, prejudice and even hostility that exists within the medical profession and wider community about the illness.
“For a CF person to be listened to, understood and believed is a rare experience for them”
(CFS sufferer).
A recent UK Government report into CFS/ME suggests that the broader impact of the condition, even in its milder form, can be extensive with quality of life often diminishing more severely than for any other chronic illness. Disability is said to be on a par with Multiple Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis. Action for M.E. (UK) says that the condition not only imposes a substantial personal, social & financial burden on sufferers and their families, but the lives of those who are severely affected - or those with longstanding illness - are also often profoundly compromised. In fact, it seems that all too often the immobility and isolation experienced by many sufferers can lead to isolation and ‘invisibility’ - an experience that often goes hand in hand with the gradual - and often insidious - erosion of self esteem and confidence as relationships crumble & finances buckle under the constant strain of trying to cope with prolonged unemployment and disability without the support they need. Indeed, the emotional fall out for people with CFS/ME can be severe with many people with CFS/ME experiencing an array of complex emotions: from confusion, fear and uncertainty - particularly pre-diagnosis - to feelings of denial, anger, abandonment, invalidation, victimisation, guilt, shame, hopelessness and grief as sufferers struggle to accept the loss of their old life.
“All in the mind’ attributions are not only wrong and unfair, they only serve to compound sufferers’ confusion and misery. All too often their illnesses are dismissed out of hand, or if taken seriously, they are told there is nothing to be done for them”……. “ But Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a genuine physical condition and the symptoms are very painful and very real. Sadly most sufferers get little or no support and many have to battle to get even their most basic needs met”, says Dr Eaton
Three years ago the RACP conservatively estimated that between 200-700 cases per 100,000 people in the UK, USA & Australia have CFS/ME. Today, numbers are said to have reached almost epidemic proportions, with more than 1 million people in the UK alone said to have CFS/ME. There is still no specific diagnostic test for the illness, with positive diagnosis relying on the presence and pattern of certain characteristic symptoms and by ruling out other medical conditions such as anaemia, coeliac disease, chronic infection, malignancy, immunodeficiency, thyroid disease, sleep or mood disorders to name a few.
Reverse therapy regards CFS as a multi-system disorder - affecting the Immune system, Endocrine system, Central nervous system, Sympathetic nervous system, and the muscles, gut and circulation. Australian, US and UK Chronic Fatigue Associations estimate that the prevalence of the disorder may be as high as 200 per 100,000 people. This could mean that there as many as 40,000 cases in Australia, many of whom remain undiagnosed. From the Reverse therapy point of view CFS is a serious physical illness created by the central nervous system and is not a psychological problem, Symptoms are created automatically by reflex Neuro-chemical reactions that lead to disorders in the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis. Sufferers are not conscious of these complex Neuro-chemical changes and – unless they enter Reverse Therapy – are unable to control them. The key to working with CFS, and similar non-specific illnesses, lies in realising that the symptoms are produced by the body in order to warn, guide and protect the individual from harm. In that sense the body is exercising an intelligence of it’s own, which John, and many other researchers call ‘Bodymind’,
John first became interested in the relationship between Bodymind intelligence in 1996 when his wife, Yvonne was diagnosed with a rare and debilitating auto-immune condition called Sarcoidosis. At first he noticed that his wife’s symptoms often rose or fell according to her emotional state, indicating that some symptoms may be a type of ‘distress signal’ designed to alert his wife for a need to re-establish her emotional health. He then came to believe that certain symptoms might also contain an implicit ‘message’ that - if acted upon - could reverse the body’s need to create the symptoms.
Finally, his investigations led him to the realisation that the body has an intelligence all of its own and that this intelligence was centred in the limbic system – the so-called ‘Emotional brain’. Essentially, he believes that all physical symptoms have a meaning and purpose and that healing can come about as soon as we uncover the deeper meaning of the messages the symptoms are trying to convey to us.
Bodymind’s main purpose is to promote health. It does this by monitoring the efficiency of the different systems under its control, maintaining a balance between external demands and internal resources, and using emotions and symptoms as feed-back to warn the person when he or she is under threat. Bodymind also actively seeks the maximum of pleasure, satisfaction and personal fulfilment – and symptoms can arise when these are lacking, such as often happens, paradoxically, in states of illness – Bodymind sends further symptoms to warn us not to give up activities that can get us back on the road to recovery!
Another realisation that led forward to Reverse therapy was the finding that some types of illness – those that John calls in his book ‘non-specific illnesses’, which include CFS, Fibromyalgia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, certain Auto-Immune conditions as well as some Skin disorders, Circulatory problems and Pain conditions – are linked to the state of ‘dis-ease’.
Dis-ease arises when we are profoundly out of sync with our own deepest needs, when Headmind and Bodymind are in conflict, we have lost the balance between external pressures and personal needs and, as a result, have lost touch with who we really are. This state of dis-ease, which is picked up by Bodymind’s sensitive, shielding, mechanisms, triggers the need for Bodymind to ‘up the ante’, using symptoms as a more urgent warning signal that corrective action is more and more urgently required. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome fits the picture of a disorder in which symptoms are created through glandular dysfunction, but which points to the action of Bodymind working through powerful mechanisms in the Emotional brain.
In fact it is the Hypothalamus – the ‘master controller’ of the glandular system, which sits just underneath the Emotional brain that is key to understanding the development of CFS. The job of the Hypothalamus is to translate the perceptions of the Emotional brain into hormonal messages working mainly through the Pituitary and Adrenal glands. When the Bodymind feels that we are under threat in some way – and also that we are failing to heed it’s warning signals, it triggers the Hypothalamus to put the organism on ‘red alert’ and to use symptoms as a last resort to warn us that we are in jeopardy. At that point Bodymind pauses to check whether we are taking corrective action to restore emotional balance to our daily schedule. But if unhealthy situations continue – whether at work, in relationships or in the home, then the Hypothalamus becomes persistently over-active, leading to a breakdown in the organism’s delicate feedback control over the different body systems. At this point the symptoms may become chronic and Bodymind stores away a cellular memory in the Emotional brain about the problem, so that each time similar situations come up the cellular memory activates the Hypothalamus again.
“The longer we ignore those signals the louder & more pronounced & chronic the symptoms become”, says Dr Eaton. “ When the client overcomes the environmental trigger however, Bodymind picks up the message that there is no longer a problem and dissolves the relevant cellular memory and the symptoms associated with it. Symptoms can then disappear pontaneously”.
Reverse Therapy works by taking the side of Bodymind (rather than Head intelligence) and finding out what it is that the body is trying to ‘say’ through the symptoms. Although it is a talking cure Reverse therapy is not a psychotherapy but a Bodymind healing process. Most forms of Psychotherapy focus on getting rid of symptoms but Reverse Therapy doesn’t do that. It works with symptoms rather than against them. Reverse Therapists don’t focus on dreams or work with childhood memories and - most importantly - they don’t try to change peoples’ thoughts about the past. Nor do Reverse therapists work with beliefs or other cognitions. Still more radically, Reverse therapists do not actually agree that there is such a thing as ‘The Unconscious Mind’. Instead they argue that most of the unconscious processes that produce emotions and symptoms are the work of Bodymind.
At the heart of Reverse therapy lie three core processes that complement each other. The first is to investigate the history of the symptoms, focusing particularly on what was going on in the client’s life when symptoms first appeared, and also on more recent situations in which symptoms were re-triggered. As this investigation unfolds, clients are taught how to attune to Bodymind communication using simple body-focusing techniques – what Reverse therapists call ‘going into your Body’ rather than ‘staying in your Head’. In this way, clients develop intuitions about the emotions that Bodymind is encouraging them to express. And that, in turn, leads to the discovery of the ‘symptom message’ – the specific, corrective actions Bodymind is calling for in order to abolish the state of ‘dis-ease’ and restore emotional balance to the client’s life.
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