From adversity to advocacy: my journey to chronic illness coaching
So you’ve heard about chronic illness coaching, but you’re not sure what it is, whether you want or need it, or how it will actually help you.
One thing you’ve likely realised as you’re here, is that living with chronic illness changes you and you want help, guidance and support with navigating your way through that.
I’ve written another post on exactly how chronic illness coaching will help you here, but I thought I’d kick this all off with some background on how and why I became a Chronic Illness Coach.
My journey through self-employment
I’ve been self-employed in one way or another since 2011. Transitioning from traditional employment to self-employment wasn’t something I did as a result of living with chronic illness, although I know that’s a path many are forced to take.
Unfortunately, the traditional employed world just isn’t designed to support folk living with chronic illness and had I not already been self-employed, I know I would’ve had to make the decision to leave traditional employment sooner or later.
I became certified as an Integrative Health Coach back in 2016 and in 2017 I launched my gut-health-centric fermented food and drink business, Fermented by LAB.
I loved that business; it was my baby and my first real shot at being a ‘proper business owner’ after freelancing. But the way I built it was, in hindsight, everything I didn’t need; it certainly wasn’t Chronic Illness Informed! It eventually resulted in complete burnout, my chronic illness being in a constant high-grade flare, and me having to close the business.
More on that in a bit.
Me running a fermentation workshop before I became a Chronic Illness Coach
The wellness industry and feeling like a fraud…
A year or two after launching Fermented by LAB, the conversation around health and wellness, for me, was starting to feel extremely reductive and simplistic.
It’s the way it goes with the wellness industry; with each ‘new’ health breakthrough that comes along, comes a new wave of ‘cure all’ chat, magic pills and silver bullets. Back then I, of course, was fuelling that by talking mostly about gut health and how it “was the root of all health conditions”.
In my defence, no only did the science at the time back that statement up, I’d also experienced it for myself.
Paying attention to my gut health and introducing ferments had lead to a massive advance in my healing journey, and looking after gut health with fermented foods was something I wanted to make easily available to others.
But over time it became clear with experience and advancing science that what we put into our bodies was only one part of the gut health puzzle.
We’re always learning, right?
All the stress and physical output that came with running that business meant I started to really struggle with my chronic illness again, and honestly, I felt ashamed and embarrassed about it.
I completely resisted what was happening with my body. I failed to even admit that I was living with a ‘chronic’ illness and was in a continuous state of waiting for the day where it would all go away.
I avoided talking about it, avoided acknowledging it and was living with a load of conflicting thoughts going on in my head.
I didn’t know how to hold both truths; that fermented foods had really helped me AND I had since started to struggle with my health despite doing ‘all the right things’.
I neither knew how to, nor wanted to, communicate with my customers and community what was going on with me, whilst still marketing and selling my product.
I felt like a massive fraud.
At the beginning of 2020, for ALL those reasons, I closed Fermented by LAB.
(and a couple of months later, the world changed forever!)
What that taught me…
Before I did anything else, I had no choice but to give myself the time I needed to heal and recover.
Over a period of months spent in bed, more months spent on the sofa and eventually venturing out into the open world, I changed so much about my life and the way I saw myself as a human living with chronic illness.
From establishing boundaries and re-evaluating the way I spent my days, to healing the relationship I had with myself, my chronic illness and my body, and processing trauma I’d been holding in my body for decades.
My chronic illness and that healing period became the vehicle of change for everything and unbeknownst to me at the time, that process was something I would later develop into Your Chronic Illness Ally.
Seeing the need for Chronic Illness Coaching…
There is SO MUCH out there that will help you ‘fix yourself’ or ‘heal your chronic illness’. And let’s not beat around the bush, that all exists to allow you to operate from a place of not-enoughness; priming you as a participant in the capitalist, patriarchal society we live within.
But what I couldn’t find - and to be honest, what I didn’t even know I needed - was something, someone - to help me live and THRIVE with chronic illness.
Something and someone to help me understand just how much chronic illness had changed me, and to help me see that it wasn’t all about lack and loss.
Something and someone to help me process and work through how living with chronic illness under the ‘rules’ of the status quo had upturned my life, beaten me down and lead to some real self-hatred.
Which, by the way, doesn’t have to be true. I’ll cover that in part 2, coming next week.
I wondered what my life would’ve been like had I been able to read about living in partnership with my chronic illness, and the benefits of doing so.
I wondered how things would’ve been different if I’d had someone helping me navigate how to listen to and interpret the language of my chronic illness.
Someone teaching me how to understand to the cues of my body. How to view my chronic illness as the valuable source of information - and powerful voice - it really is.
Without being able to find anyone already doing that AND having a deep feeling that it was my calling, the entrepreneur in me was like, I’ll do it! I’ll be that person who helps others learn how to live and thrive with chronic illness.
Something I later called Chronic Illness Coaching.
From day 1 of calling myself a Chronic Illness Coach, my message and philosophy has been the antidote to the BS rhetoric that says ‘your life would be so much better without chronic illness’, ‘you are not enough as you are’, ‘something in you is broken and needs fixing for you to be a worthy human’.
It helps you see and believe that your body is responding in exactly the way it’s designed to.
Because it is. Your chronic illness itself is not a dis-ease. It’s a sign that there’s dis-ease being held within your body and life.
What sets me apart from other Chronic Illness Coaches
Of course, there are other Chronic Illness Coaches out there and few have the same beliefs and philosophy as me. There are also a lot of Chronic Illness Coaches whose aim is to ‘heal you of your chronic illness’ so that before you allow yourself to get on with living your life.
But that’s not me.
With me as your Chronic Illness Coach, let’s figure out how you can live and thrive with your chronic illness in whatever state it’s in, at any given time.
Let’s unravel, unlearn, unpack all that has ‘happened’ to you since you’ve been living with chronic illness in the way you thought you had to. The way you view - and behave towards - yourself. The way you’ve learned to ‘survive’. The way your nervous system has adapted to live in a constant state of fight or flight…
That concludes Part 1 of the story! Read part 2 here.
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I’m Alana, Chronic Illness Coach, Writer and Podcaster
After 10 years of trying to fix, fight and ‘cure’ my chronic illness, I decided to chuck away the rule book and instead embrace my chronic illness as my guide, ally and superpower… and I’ve never been happier or healthier!
