• Dear Grace Q & A: How Do I Explain That My Chronic Illness & Life Aren’t a Tragedy?

    “What is a simple way of explaining the concept of living well with chronic illness to other people? People without chronic illness seem to find it difficult to understand that I don’t view my life as an awful tragedy…and it takes a long time explaining why I don’t feel that way.” Let’s begin by considering your audience. It helps to meet people where they are because its easier for them and our results will likely be more successful too.  Consider the potential mindset of the person you are wanting to understand this. It’s harder to make ourselves clear to someone if we are focused only on what we want to…

  • Diagnosis: A New View

    It is the moment which changes your life. Sometimes it feels like it is the moment which ends it. The life you knew is gone, you are AD – After Diagnosis, your own new millennium. Diagnosis can feel like your carefully planned and treasured life burning up around you. That you can see things changing, feel them shifting, but are helpless to stop it. Diagnosis feels like a fire moving through our lives, consuming all we hold dear, burning our very selves, our image, who we are, and leaving us with little but pain and ash – where there used to be hopes, plans and a maybe not perfect, but…

  • Book Review: In Your Own Hands: New Hope for People with Chronic Medical Conditions by Dr. Larry Berkelhammer

    Dr Larry Berkelhammer first appeared on GraceQuantock.com in a Trail Blazer Interview (here). A psychotherapist, author and researcher, Dr. Berkelhammer believes millions of people who live with chronic medical conditions can manage their pain through various mind-training techniques. As a sought-after teacher on pain management, and with 19 years in private practice treating patients, Dr. Berkelhammer’s interview resonated with the GraceQuantock.com community. Now, his book, In Your Own Hands: New Hope for People with Chronic Medical Conditions (Empowered Patient Coalition Press, Jan. 2014, 978-0991243709) has arrived, and it’s one that connects just as deeply. Dr. Larry Berkelhammer lives with seven chronic illnesses himself and has made it his mission to help others…

  • Living Well With Fatigue

    Do you consistently have enough energy? No? You aren’t alone. And while this isn’t a bulleted, 10-point-quick-fix article full of ginseng and grandiose promises, it is one neatly packed with valuable concepts to add some pep to your step. These thoughtful approaches have helped me live well, with fatigue and chronic illness for over 10 years, while earning a degree and building two thriving businesses. Living with illness that features symptomatic fatigue often leaves me too exhausted to sit up or turn over in bed. That same exhaustion may also have me regard basic tasks with a humdrum eye, “I don’t feel up to doing that right now…maybe I’ll try later…

  • Claiming Compassion…For Yourself

    “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” ~Susan Sontag Be compassionate to your healing body, and your loving soul. To do so, to accept it, is the very essence of being human. And by allowing self- compassion, you free yourself from the inevitable exhaustion of straining to escape it. Pain ebbs and flows. Struggles arise and fall. They needn’t be set upon like they are…