I had a great job and a full life. Then work got pretty stressful dealing with some rather tricky people, the guy I was seeing and I split up and I had surgery. I thought I was managing well. I was keeping super fit, trying to balance out the very long hours I was working, and I also tried hard to maintain a social life. Then suddenly one morning I felt terrible, just really, really tired. No matter how much I slept, I couldn’t shift the exhaustion and couldn’t work. The specialists I was referred to couldn’t help. The occupational health consultant at work said that I needed to make sure my fatigue cleared up within three months, because after that it would be considered chronic fatigue syndrome which he said is very hard to recover from.

I came to realise that it wasn’t suddenly one morning that I felt terrible, it had been building for months, even years. I had not been dealing with my emotions about the work situation. I was always a people pleaser. I had ridiculously high expectations of myself. I ignored my body and just pushed through when I felt tired. I started to remember occasions over the year before I ‘got ill’ which were signs of where I would end up.

Why did this book work when so many other things didn’t? The key for me was that it explained that my symptoms were not dangerous. It also explained that my body had been protecting me from overwork and avoiding my emotions but got stuck in protection mode even though all the things that were dangerous had been removed. I learned not to be fearful of my symptoms and actually managed to make friends with them. When the fear was gone my symptoms didn’t need to protect me anymore.

I already had some elements needed for recovery. I always believed that I could recover (save for a few dark moments) and avoided people or groups who said recovery wasn’t possible. I had been working on my emotions and the parts of my personality which caused me to get ill with my counsellor and through regular journalling – although getting balance in my life is still a work in progress!

Throughout the first months of my recovery I would have ‘firsts’, those things that I hadn’t done for years which I was now able to do again. At the start they were things like going out with friends for more than an hour and later it included spending three days at the Edinburgh Fringe with a friend. It took me a long while to work out what was ‘normal’ tiredness and what could be a relapse (it was all normal tiredness, but that was also a message for me to catch up on sleep or just do less!) I decided that I wanted to share the things I had learned in order to recover with others who are going through the same things as me. I applied to do an MSc in Psychology, became a coach, a meditation instructor and a breathwork instructor and I trained to be a Freedom from Chronic Pain practitioner – learning directly from Howard Schubiner how to support people to recover using what I had learned from his book. I have been to conferences to learn about the most recent research in the field and met with academics and clinicians with similar views. I interviewed women who had recovered from ME/CFS outside formal clinical settings for the research for my MSc dissertation and I feed the themes I found in their recoveries into the work that I now do.