Secrets Behind Chronic Illness And How To Finally Heal
Published in the Huffington Post
Living With Chronic Illness: A Patient’s View
Robert Groleau is an energy healer, speaker, and author of the book, “How To Beat Chronic Lyme.” He also has traveled all over the world with renowned spiritual enthusiasts on his path to reconnect to the energies of ancient, sacred sites. But online at his Web site, How To Beat Chronic Lyme, He adds a third role: the patient with a chronic illness, and the secrets to healing and achieving a full recovery.
People go around in circles year after year with chronic illness treatments that go nowhere. I did this myself for 10 years with Chronic Lyme Disease, and only when I realized I was stuck did I consider something that I’d been resisting for years—emotional healing.
I had to be dragged to it kicking and screaming, but it made the breakthrough I needed. Once the underlying emotional issues started getting resolved, the medical treatments started having more effect.
Within five years I had achieved a full recovery from a serious illness that I’d had for forty years. So emotional healing is the great secret to healing chronic illness, and also the most despised subject in chronic illness. People get angry at the mere mention of it as if it were an insult, yet we all have emotional issues.
Few want to open that can of worms, and even if they do, they don’t know how. Plus it’s a whole new project to start after years spent treating illness with medication. When I contemplated writing a book about my healing journey, I was told that nobody wants to read books on emotional healing. They were right, but what do you do if you have this profound truth to share? Ignore it, so you can sell more books? So I wrote the book “How To Beat Chronic Lyme ‐ Through Physical, Emotional & Spiritual Healing.” My path was through Lyme Disease but emotional healing is valid for any chronic illness.
And to be honest, healthy people could benefit from it as well. Science is discovering more and more that emotional issues are the underlying cause of health problems, and more doctors are discussing this. My education on emotional healing began with the famous book “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller, where she discusses how parents, even with the best of intentions; unconsciously pass on their emotional issues to their children.
The majority of issues are formed within the first few years of life, and they create patterns that stay with us throughout our entire lives. Another of her books, “The Body Never Lies”, explains how emotional issues eventually lead to chronic illness. Alice Miller’s work is well‐documented with many case studies. I liked the books but wondered if there was any scientific evidence to back them up.
In the 1990s, the Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) Study on 17,000 people was the largest study ever done on the effects of ACE’s (childhood trauma). It demonstrated that ACE’s are quite common and not just the result of severe abuse. Almost everybody has these issues, and chronic illness patients have more of them.
And the more ACE’s a person has had, the more likely they are to have significant health problems throughout their lives. So I was convinced and decided to begin emotional work on myself. Well, how do you work on your emotional issues? I had done psychotherapy when I was in my 20’s, but it didn’t help, and it was expensive. This time around I started working with an intuitive energy healer.
This was helpful because most of my wounds occurred at such a young age that I couldn’t remember them well. Also, it’s important to shift all the unfelt emotional energy stuck in the body. This may be why talk therapy does not always help—talk may not get to the energy of the issue. Over time I tried many other methods. In my book, I document sixteen methods that I used. Some are costly, some are not. You’ll also find some require practitioners and some don’t.
Different ones work better for different people. You can work on a wide swath of all your issues, or you can try to pinpoint the specific emotional causes underlying a certain health problem. In the book, I describe the whole process of how we form emotional issues and repeating patterns, how they affect our health, how to recognize your issues, how to heal them and what results you can expect from the process.
I started emotional healing in order to resolve my health issues, but I have found this work so beneficial to my life that I continue it even after completely recovering my health. It is a daily practice that I do on my own, and it costs nothing. The bottom line is that if your emotional issues are serious enough, medical treatment alone will not heal you. You have to get to the root cause which is at the emotional level.
If you ’ve gotten to the point where you’re so exhausted after years of treatment, believe that recovery is impossible, and don’t want to start anything new, I’d like to offer a different perspective on illness. We tend to treat illness as a nuisance, some unfortunate random occurrence that has befallen us, and we go to the doctor to dispatch this nuisance as fast as possible with little effort. But perhaps this process is not random at all.
Maybe there is more order to this universe and more purpose to our lives than we think. Our life experiences are for our learning, and chronic illness is a big life lesson. You can’t get away with just going to the doctor on this one. You’ve spent a lifetime building up emotional issues that have finally taken their toll. It’s not impossible to resolve this. You just haven’t been learning the right lessons up until now. If you can look at the illness process this way, and be willing to learn the lessons your body is trying to teach you, the doors to healing will open for you. Coincidences will start to happen. Recommendations for the right practitioner at the right time will come out of nowhere.
These are signs you are on the right track, but you’ll have to be patient and stick with the process. This is a more spiritual way of looking at illness, but one that is no less true in my experience. I find science and spirituality to be just two different ways of looking at the same thing. And what about all that effort you envision putting in on this new emotional healing project? It only takes a little bit of work every day, and if you start feeling better physically and emotionally you won’t mind the effort.
About Robert Groleau:
Robert Groleau (www.robertgroleau.com) has a BS in Civil Engineering and an MS in Structural Engineering, which he has used in his career as a structural engineer and consultant, specializing in bridge design, inspection, and software development. Robert also does energy healing work in Austin, Texas—he uses a modality that clears the buildup of emotional energy, though he has studied many healing modalities. He likes to do volunteer energy healing work with veterans suffering from the chronic effects of PTSD. Robert enjoys traveling, especially to sacred sites around the world, and many of his trips feed his interest in ancient spiritual traditions. He enjoys spending time on the lake during the hot Texan summers.
