Breaking Free From the 'Sick Person' Role in Life With Chronic Illness

 I just made a resolution. I am going to spend as much time developing my strengths as I spend getting support for my symptoms.

How did I arrive at that decision? Well, last week, I participated in some wonderful support groups. I shared my fears, and I got compassion and empathy. Yet strangely I felt worse afterward. Now I was scratching my head and wondering why, because I had gotten very good help. The problem, I realized, was with my personal history and what I chose to share. I was using my allotted time in these groups to talk about my worst issues. But I left no time for anything else. I wasn’t sharing any achievements or happy moments. For someone else, that might not matter, but for me it wasn’t right. I realized I was repeating a childhood pattern that no longer worked.

Since my early teens I had a job, and that job was to be sick. OK, I’m oversimplifying here for dramatic effect. My Lyme and co-infections are very real. My illness as a teen was also real. But being sick was also a way for me to diminish my strengths in relation to my mother. As a perceptive child, I sensed that my mother’s life lacked dignity and purpose. While I didn’t create my symptoms, I must have noticed that our relationship felt more balanced after I started to have an eating disorder. Mom could put off the things she wasn’t good at (loving and forgiving herself) and focus on her new purpose (getting me fixed). She had found a way she could express her genuine, motherly affection. Being taken care of for my issues got me the best version of my mother’s love that she could give. Mom had her role and I had mine, and that was the best we could do at the time.

As I grew up, sharing difficulties continued to be a pathway to love for me. I gravitated towards friends who had a driving need to tell me their problems and wanted to hear about mine. If a friendship didn’t feel deep enough, I would try to create more intimacy by revealing some vulnerable thing from my past. That wasn’t always a smart thing to do, especially after I got sick with Lyme disease.

At that point, I was attracting friends who needed to be beside a sick person in order to feel strong. They weren’t mean people; most were well intentioned. We both thought we were doing the right thing; I was asking for help, and they were helping me. But meanwhile, I was getting entrenched in the sick role, like someone had pinned a sign on my back. When these friends had problems, I wanted to help them, but they wouldn’t let me. They weren’t able to give up their “helper” role. They dismissed my offers. Over time, I began to feel useless; I began to doubt I had anything to offer.

How could I get out of this physical weakness, I wondered, when I was never allowed to feel my own power?  The more inner work I did, the more I realized I couldn’t continue playing the sick person anymore. I began to insist on being myself, instead of playing a role. A lot of people couldn’t adapt. But some brave friends stuck with me. These folks were willing to stretch beyond their comfort zone. They revealed more of themselves and allowed my strength to support them. Our friendships blossomed into a rich co-creation. We keep on, growing stronger, together.

Do you feel like the people around you ignore your strengths?

Do you have people close to you who respect and value what you have to offer?

And what about the vow I made to myself? Well, the truth is that as much work as I’ve done already, there are deeper layers where my pattern still comes out. But, at this point, the pattern is easier to shift. For instance, with the support groups, I’m going to give our relationships more time and show them the full picture of who I am.

And what about those strengths and talents I mentioned? You notice I have left this until the end. But here goes, I will share some of them: I’m very loving. (I often feel like a giant cow full of love, and I’m never milked enough.) I’m patient and gentle. I enjoy being intellectual and thinking and writing about thinking. I’m an outsider/artist type of person. I see the world from a unique point of view. And I am pretty vocal about the things I see that don’t make sense to me.

For anyone living with a chronic illness, there are a heck of a lot of things that don’t make sense. Just when you need the most strength to heal your illness, you are bombarded with things that make you feel weak and worthless. Sometimes they pile up and threaten to crush you flat. But sometimes, the effort of getting yourself free can bring out more strength inside than you ever knew you had.