"You'd get better if you just...." is bullying and we don't deserve it.

People with ME, Long Covid, and other chronic diseases are bombarded with messages that our illness can be treated 'holistically,' using a 'mind-body' approach. We just need to 'calm our nervous systems'. We need to 'reprogram our nervous systems'.

The treatment you're supposed to do, the one magic trick that will 'cure' you, keeps changing. Yoga. Breathwork. Mindfulness. No, a different kind of mindfulness. Massage. Positive thinking. No, a different kind of positive thinking.

It's exhausting. But more than that, it belittles us. It dismisses us. The people who insist on saying "You'd get better if you just did this one particular type of therapy," see themselves as compassionate, but they are bullies.

The truth is we all try so incredibly hard. We've all tried a million different meditation techniques and supplement protocols. We all do everything we can to 'calm our nervous systems'. If that stuff worked, we'd all be cured.

As chronically ill people, every day we endure a reality that most people can't even imagine, and don't want to imagine. "You'd get better if you just..." is their way of refusing to accept our reality. The person speaking is too cowardly to face the enormity of our illness, of what we have to endure in our lives, so they try to make it smaller. They try to make us smaller.

"You'd get better if you just...." is aggressive. It's bullying. The person speaking doesn't see themself as a spiteful bully, but that is what they are. Underneath the barely-concealed contempt, is fear.

We don't deserve any of it.

(As a little post-script, I want to 'confess' that I actually lean really hard into all the mind-body stuff. I do mindfulness exercises several times throughout the day, I do breathwork, I do a tiny bit of very gentle yoga, I do self-massage. Living with chronic illness is a daily struggle and that stuff helps a lot with my emotions. But it hasn't cured any of my chronic illnesses. It infuriates me that the people who tell me to do mindfulness are actually talking about the basic 101 version of mindfulness, when I'm already doing that shit at PhD level.)