As the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, NICE are finally moving away from Graded Exercise Therapy and CBT for ‘unhelpful beliefs' for ME/CFS, I am delighted to share this first Sense-Ability Case Study by my client Penelope Faith*.

Penelope is a qualified lawyer and mediator. She has suffered from ME/CFS for many years and is also autistic. Her history of complex traumas impacted on her limited ‘energy envelope’. Understanding the value of pacing and self-care, Penelope actively sought out hypnotherapy to help her manage her symptoms and resolve her traumas.

I am grateful to Penelope for taking the time to explain how Sense-Ability Solution Focused Hypnotherapy and Rewind Trauma Therapy helped her to resolve deeply held traumas. This is her frank and honest account of her journey back to healthy pacing and self-care.

My ME/CFS story

My ME/CFS story will perhaps feel most familiar to people with long-term onset.

After developing sensitivity to chemicals and learning, I lacked the ability to sustain aerobic activity. I completed my primary schooling and advanced education, moved up in my profession (mediator, lawyer). I found ways to contribute to society while having to police my environment and battle varying levels of fatigue and other mysterious symptoms.

I had a spirit that yearned to fly high; and a body that kept me grounded. I learned to push through my symptoms because I saw no other choice but to push through. And then, came the virus that knocked me over the edge and into full disability. It’s been 20 years since that virus ended my life as I knew it - difficult as it was.

“I chose Sense-Ability Hypnotherapy & Coaching because Jane’s interests, skills, understanding of trauma, and approaches matched what I was looking for. I could tell by Jane’s description of her services that she respects her clients’ self-knowledge and innate abilities.”

— Penelope Faith

Where ME/CFS meets Trauma - A Case Study

The Cell Danger Response

There are seemingly few treatments of value, and I want to live something resembling the life I once knew. Like many of us with ME/CFS, I’ve tried to make sense of what’s going on in my own body, kept up with research, and held my own personal trials in an effort to get better.

The best explanation of ME/CFS that I’ve seen to date - one that makes sense of my journey - is Naviaux’s Cell Danger Response. “The cell danger response (CDR) is a universal response to environmental threat or injury.” I believe it's a combination of that evolutionary response with genetic variation and the variety, amount, and timing of various pathogens that we encounter throughout life that likely sets the course for the different illness subsets that we see within the ME/CFS community.

My story starts not long after I turned seven, a year that brought an unusual series of physiological events: a physical accident that led to a massive, untreated infection, an infection of unknown origins, chemical exposures, a life-threatening virus, and a major operation (as a result of the accident that happened 12 months earlier). All before my immune system reached full maturation.

At the end of that year, I experienced what may have been glandular fever. Doctors told my mother there was nothing wrong and directed her to send me to school. To her credit, my mother kept me home and let me recover. But from then on, something had changed.

Until I left home for college, I had recurring bouts of illness that would keep me out of school for weeks at a time.

The role of environmental stressors

Living on my own, I realised that environmental exposures (e.g. cigarette smoke - the offending exposure in my childhood home – VOCs**, and a severe cat allergy) resulted in a full-body immune response, making me extremely ill with flu-like symptoms and often a sinus and bronchial infection, while bringing on the most profound, debilitating fatigue.

I learned that by controlling my environment, I could live a relatively illness-free existence (i.e. still symptomatic, but appearing well and able to work).

By age 30, because I had seen how my environment could upend my sickly, yet functional homeostasis and throw me into severe illness, I’d half convinced myself that my body had paired some things in my year seven environment with one of the most emotionally traumatic experiences of my lifetime - something I no longer believe.

I believe those exposures were part of the year of dangers that my body experienced to bring about the cell danger response and knock me out of a healthier homeostasis to a sickly one.

Trauma - an ongoing physiological left threat stressor

Aged 30, armed with that link between environment and illness, and the belief that, if I could just tell my body it was safe I might feel better physically, I consulted a hypnotherapist.

I figured if I could resolve the trauma I’ve experienced, reduce one of my body’s stressors, or address one of the perceived threats, my body would have an easier time of it. Turns out, a lifetime of disassociating during traumatic events had left me traumatised by disassociation. Achieving a trance-like state was too threatening for me to engage in hypnotherapy.

In the short time that this therapist and I worked together, I learned skills to manage disassociation which assisted me with restoring a timeline of life events. Trauma had blown apart time: I experienced my past as part of my present.

“Every recording acts as a tune up, making me less likely to listen to the self-talk that tries to talk me out of doing what I know I want to be doing to improve my quality of life. ”

— Penelope Faith

I set aside the idea that hypnotherapy would help, and got on with my life and other strategies to heal trauma.

Throughout the years, I did my trauma work, e.g. RET, visualisations, talking therapy, dreamwork, art therapy, EMDR (a bust for me), somatic therapy, forgiveness work, etc. I worked with various professionals - some better than others - and made great progress mentally and emotionally. While I’d learned to love myself and learned to live with, adapt to, and calm down various CPTSD symptoms, what eventually drove me to try hypnotherapy again was a massive CPTSD trigger and response.

Although I’d had numerous triggers throughout life, I’d only ever had one massive trigger/response before (landing me in a bad way for a couple of years), and after all the work I’d done, the second one came as a complete surprise.

It was as if I’d been playing a game of Jenga…

The Last Straw

What surprised me most is that this massive trigger/response felt like a life-time of psychological work had been upended. It was as if I’d been playing a game of Jenga and removed a crucial block of wood and all the pieces scattered to the floor at my feet. It made no sense to me that some of my deepest, oldest wounds were dominating my life, affecting me in a way they hadn’t affected me since my teens.

Worse, I lost ground on my ability to stay organized - essential to pacing when you live alone with ME/CFS - and to keep up with healthy life choices e.g. a varied diet, good sleep hygiene (as best as I might do given my body’s current state of ME/CFS symptoms) and engaging in activities to reduce stress, etc.

Seeking out Hypnotherapy

Not long ago, I read that when someone grows up in a chaotic, abusive environment the kinds of messaging they receive are akin to being hypnotised. I was reminded that hypnotism was an avenue I’d once wanted to explore to relieve unnecessary stress from my life.

After searching around, I stumbled onto Jane Pendry’s Sense-Ability Hypnotherapy & Coaching website and concluded that her interests, skills, understanding of trauma, and approaches matched what I was looking for. I could tell by Jane’s description of her services that she respects her clients’ self-knowledge and innate abilities.

Jane’s necessary assessments, including the Impact of Assessments Scale(IES) which subjectively gave a score of the impact of the trauma today against which to measure future progress. The IES showed most of my traumatic events to be fairly well resolved, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still taking a toll on my body.

Autistic people are thought to be particularly gifted at disassociation. That disassociation, while protecting me from trauma as it occurred, and making intellectual and psychological approaches most beneficial, also likely contributed to a reading that implied greater resolution than was actually the case. In reality, I knew, that all it would take to upend things would be the wrong trigger that pierced through the defences my psyche had established in childhood, and make near ruin of the psychological work I’d done since.

The most recent massive trigger/response was proof enough to me that more work was needed. Once I approached Jane, we established what it was I wanted to achieve.

The Sense-Ability Approach

With Jane, I established what I was looking to achieve initially. I wanted:

help with re-establishing healthy habits so that I could pace better
help with ‘integrating parts’ for an anxiety/procrastination cycle that added unnecessary stress to my life

After a few weeks and months of therapy, tackling very different issues, changing embedded habits, improving sleep, and pacing, Jane then continued to coach me through Rewind Trauma Therapy sessions, interspersed with more hypnotherapy, to resolve various deep-rooted life traumas.

The work is Solution Focused, and, in my view, most people would likely benefit in short order. I can’t say enough about how well Jane’s personally adapted hypnotherapy sessions and tapes have helped me with pacing and re-establishing healthy life habits.

Even in this time of Covid, being reminded to make choices that are good for my body has helped me remove myself from social media and turn off the news because my body doesn’t need the added stress. If I start to fall behind in the healthy habits I want to make stick, I pop on a recording, and get back on track. Every recording acts as a tune up, making me less likely to listen to the self-talk that tries to talk me out of doing what I know I want to be doing to improve my quality of life.

Rewind Trauma Therapy

Care is taken both before, with assessment, and during Rewind sessions, with various techniques employed, to ensure the person experiencing the session is not re-traumatised.

When I was a mediator, it was not my role to understand the details of a divorcing couple’s emotional history together. My role was to help clients - people invested in conflict resolution - find a satisfactory resolution to the conflict by following a process known to resolve conflict (i.e. to help them move from point A to point B).

“Fortunately for me, Rewind Trauma Therapy has been the most effective trauma treatment I’ve experienced to date. The shifts I’ve experienced following Rewind have been nothing short of magical. ”

— Penelope Faith

The role of a Solution Focused therapist is similar: the person experiencing this sort of therapy is guided through a process that’s not dependent on the therapist having detailed knowledge (or any knowledge) of the trauma. It’s up to the client to decide what and how much they wish to share. This is but one part of the process that helps to ensure that people are not re-traumatised.

The Solution Focused approach also ensures the client retains personal agency and control, something that has often been a challenge for anyone who has experienced trauma, not to mention anyone who is autistic or suffering from a chronic illness.

Unfortunately for me, I experienced a lot of trauma in my early life. I’ve had, perhaps, more work to do than most. Fortunately for me, Rewind Trauma Therapy has been the most effective trauma treatment I’ve experienced to date. The shifts I’ve experienced following Rewind have been nothing short of magical.

Individual Responses to Rewind

Each Rewind is like picking from a chocolate box: you don’t know what you’re getting until you take a bite. This is not to say the sessions are as easy as pie (or smooth as chocolate) or hard like hardtack. It’s just important to know that one’s response to individual Rewind sessions may be different. Which, from my layperson’s perspective, reflects the differing levels of integration and/or resolution one might have experienced for different traumas. In a way, the process invited me to allow my psyche to do what it needed to do to process traumas.

For example, during each Rewind session, I noticed that my eyes moved in the same way eyes move during the REM stage of sleep - the rapid eye movement stage when we dream. Following the first session, as I lay down to sleep and before I entered fully into a hypnogogic state (that trance-like state right before sleep), unpleasant, dream-like images appeared in my mind’s eye. Feelings I’d not associated with the trauma arose all while my eyes moved about as if I was dreaming. That frightened me a bit because, thankfully, I’d never been one to have images of my traumas before sleep. I was afraid I was unleashing something I couldn’t fit back into the closet where it’d been stashed.

I wrote to Jane the next day and was assured that what I experienced was what my psyche needed to do to process and integrate what it hadn’t been able to process and integrate at the time of the trauma.

After the next Rewind session, I had a few bad dreams. The funny thing is that I can't remember any of the images or dreams. It's like I had them, told Jane about them, and released them. In the past, those sorts of trauma-related dreams would have stuck with me, haunted me. Sort of like echoes of a trauma trying to tell me there was work to do. And now? They’re just gone.

During a couple of sessions, tears were spilt.

When you have lived with the sadness and horror of trauma your whole life, you can’t imagine that there would be any perspective you haven’t seen or feelings you haven’t felt. For many of us, we’re sick of the life-time impact and we just want it done and over with. We may not want to ever again feel any feelings related to the trauma. There might be feelings that we still need to feel in order to integrate the trauma, freeing our bodies to move on. The sadness I felt was lighter, deeper, more real, and more gentle than sadness that had come before it. All I can really say about this sadness is that it felt like a full stop at the end of a sentence.

“These traumas now feel like they exist in my past. When my mind lights upon them, I am delivered to a memory of safety. ”

— Penelope Faith

That full stop at the end of the sentence also reflects my current feelings about the traumas. I have no interest in recounting them. I have no desire to try to remember the narrative I once reported to various therapists in an effort to bring resolution and integration to my traumatised bits and pieces. These traumas now feel like they exist in my past. When my mind lights upon them, I am delivered to a memory of safety.

Changing Perspectives

Speaking of different perspectives, while insights are not necessarily a popular area of focus with trauma therapy of any sort, I’ve had a number of insights following Rewinds. As an autistic person who has used logic and intellect to navigate life, I find insights about a particular trauma, combined with self-knowledge, helpful in delivering me to a healthier mindset when triggered. One of the things I noticed about the insights I gained following Rewind sessions, is that the insights about the trauma, other people's behaviour, and my reactions, came to me out of a place of calm. So, despite there not being much talk about the traumas, my psyche supplied me with something I found particularly useful.

In one Rewind, my mind's eye view of the event was partially blocked. Jane asked me to zoom out and view the trauma from a distance - a bird’s eye view or a distanced view. Distancing is one technique employed help prevent retraumatisation.

We normally remember a traumatic experience through our own eyes and so viewing the event differently doesn’t come naturally.

Afterwards, it was as if my psyche processed the event and said, "You've never seen it from this angle; does this help bring you some closure?" When trying to recall this particular event, I couldn’t clearly see an encounter between my brother and a bully. This was a ‘sandwich event’ between when I last felt truly safe in the world and the trauma that would change my brother’s and my life forever. From the bird’s eye perspective, I could see that my brother was trying to physically protect me from the bully by putting his body between me and him, literally blocking my view of the interaction.

“With my brother long gone from this world, it was actually good to be reminded that he’d once been someone who’d step in to prevent me from being harmed. It was like being given a long-delayed Christmas gift. ”

— Penelope Faith

With my brother long gone from this world, it was actually good to be reminded that he’d once been someone who’d step in to prevent me from being harmed. It was like being given a long-delayed Christmas gift. To some, it might seem odd to have included the sandwich event when the focus of the Rewind was an enormous trauma not the episode with the bully, but my psyche had long paired the two together and I trusted that had been for a reason. I think I found that reason.

Another insight that fell into my lap out of a Rewind session about that life-changing trauma is that I was not the cause of the trauma. I’d not realised that I’d internalised fault. I was carrying the burden of being the cause of the trauma that changed the course of my brother’s life when I wasn’t the cause. I was just the proximate cause. I might never have realised that I harboured self-blame had it not been for that session.

Processing individual traumas

We processed individual traumas, using Solution Focused Hypnotherapy to help re-stabilise between Rewind sessions. The Rewinds were as follows:

We started Rewind therapy with a series of traumatic events that I knew most contributed to the recent destruction of my sleep habits.
We moved onto the trauma that was adding additional stress to my life when it came to managing my finances.
We tackled the earliest traumatic experiences that clustered together in my memory (from year 3 of my life). These traumas that had been triggered three years ago, resulting in that recent massive CPTSD episode. Traumas I’d never been able to cry about let alone grieve and integrate.
Then, we tackled the trauma I mentioned above - the one that changed my brother’s and my life forever- a trauma I’d done extensive work with using many different strategies.

Within days of the final Rewind, my energy levels were nearly at a place I’d only experienced one other time before since disability (a period that lasted 1.5 years). A place where, though not well enough to work even part-time, I could imagine having some sort of life outside my home once a week. It’s like my psyche was able to lay down a stress it had been carrying for over 60 years and my body thanked me for it.

Because of Covid, I’ve spent that extra energy re-establishing the organisation that fell to the wayside after the massive trigger, making healthier meals, and getting my home set up for greater pacing success.

“Within days of the final Rewind, my energy levels were nearly at a place I’d only experienced one other time before since disability ...”

— Penelope Faith

Home Stretch

We’re on the home stretch when it comes to hypnotherapy and traumas to Rewind, but it’s good to know that Jane’s there for me should anything else arise or I need a tune up.

Hypnotherapy and Rewind therapy are not going to cure my ME/CFS, but what they have done is help relieve some of the ongoing stress my body experiences, and by removing some of the sense of threat, they have helped restore the quality of life measures that I worked so hard to put in place over the years.

With Jane’s help, Rewind Trauma Therapy and Solution Focused Hypnotherapy have me looking forward to life again.

Response - Jane Pendry at Sense-Ability

… helping sufferers get you back to smelling the flowers

Penelope’s account is very rewarding for me to read of course. However, the important thing to remember about Solution Focused therapies is that the client is doing the work.

All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Professional accredited hypnotherapists work with clients’ model of the world, beliefs and values. The trance-like state that it is induced through guided meditation is gentle and natural – something like the trance you might experience while driving on a motorway (if you remember the days) or watching an absorbing film.

An important premise of Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is the Solution Focused conversation, where the client works with Best Hopes, and looks for incremental improvements day by day, and week by week. For conditions like chronic pain or ME/CFS, the improvements may be slow and steady, but sustaining. As the client remains firmly in control, it’s an ideal therapy to support with the pacing process.

Rewind Trauma Therapy is one of the most effective modern treatments for trauma. I trained with Dr Muss of the International Association for Rewind Trauma Therapy. Dr Muss is now undertaking clinical trials at Cardiff University and the results are indicating that the therapy is effective in more than 80% of cases. I have found there is always a degree of improvement, if not a radical transformation, and in many cases, clients report ‘miracles’.

How does Rewind Trauma Therapy work?

The truth is, no-one actually knows for sure. The most compelling theory is that Rewind works by moving the traumatic memory from the fight, flight, fright part of the brain to the narrative memory so overwhelming emotions aren’t triggered and the client is no longer hijacked.

Not all ME/CFS sufferers have experienced trauma of course. Penelope’s point is that trauma exacerbates the negative symptoms of ME/CFS and makes pacing challenging. Where pacing requires acceptance, careful planning, good routines and habits, Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can be a very effective support mechanism too, helping the client accept their condition, resolve any negative feelings, reduce chronic pain, improve sleep and help the client identify healthier routines and habits that help them operate within their ‘energy envelope’.

My own experience of ME/CFS

I suffer from ME/CFS myself. I have done since I was quite young but I was in denial (along with the entire medical profession to be fair). But that’s another story. I know that for me, and so many others, the long awaited change in the NICE guidelines and the scrutiny of the PACE research as detailed by ME Action is a turning point in helping sufferers to accept their condition and to manage it so much better.

I know it isn’t possible to promise a cure. No-one can do that. There will be good days and bad days; remissions and relapses. There will be days of struggle and fleeting moments of joy or peace.

What we do know is that pacing and reducing anxiety are key to having some sort of quality of life. That life might not be a bowl of cherries but we can help certainly help sufferers get back to smelling the flowers, managing their energy and appreciating the small things.

Sense-Ability for ME/CFS

Rewind Trauma Therapy and Solution Focused Hypnotherapy are ideal for ME/CFS sufferers as the client retains control and works at their pace.

Sense-Ability therapies are now almost exclusively available online across the U.K. and Europe, meaning clients can work with me without travelling from the safety of their homes. Where cost is an issue, I can work with small groups or pairs of friends to reduce the cost and can reduce cost for those that are long term unemployed.

If you have any questions, or would like to explore the possibility of therapy, don’t hesitate to contact me:

Jane Pendry
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy & Coaching
jane@sense-ability.co.uk
07843 813 883
www.sense-ability.co.uk