ME/CFS Recovery

You've probably been ill longer than anyone around you understands.

Many of my ME/CFS clients have histories measured in decades, not months. They've seen more practitioners than they can list. They've been told the tests are normal, that it's deconditioning, that it's anxiety, that they should learn to manage it. Some were put through graded exercise therapy and came out worse — and were then blamed for coming out worse.

If that's you, nothing about your story rules you out. I've worked with people who were ill for more than thirty years. However long you've been ill, it doesn't decide how long you'll stay ill.

Why nothing has held

You know the cycle by heart. A good stretch, a little more activity, then the crash — days or weeks lost to it. So you cut back, stabilise, edge forward again, and the cycle repeats. Boom and bust, for years.

The way I see it, that cycle isn't your body failing you. It's your body protecting you — enforcing the limits of a nervous system that has been overworked for years, often since long before the diagnosis. Not broken. Overworked. And every crash teaches it that activity is dangerous, which is why willpower has never fixed this and never will.

The protocols you've tried mostly worked on the symptoms. The reason nothing held is that the system underneath was never given what it needed to stand down: safety, order, and evidence — built slowly enough for a body that has excellent reasons not to trust quick fixes.

What we do instead

We work one to one, weekly, following one map — The Four Phases: Stabilise, Build Capacity, Align, Expand. You can read the whole method on the Working With Me page, but the ME/CFS-specific points are worth stating here:

We start where you actually are. I work with people at every severity, including from bed, by phone if a screen is too much. The steps we take are sized to your reality — sometimes minutes, sometimes smaller than that. The biggest difference is between zero and one, and one is always within reach.

Nothing is ever pushed through. If you've been harmed by graded exercise therapy, hear this clearly: expansion in my work happens only on a foundation of nervous-system safety, only at your body's pace, and a setback always pauses the plan — it never gets overridden. Your body sets the pace, not a schedule.

Crashes are worked through, not punished. A crash during recovery isn't failure — it's information, and it's so predictable it has its own entry in my playbook. When it happens, we trace it, learn from it, and adjust. Getting better looks messy. The work is built for that.

And we go deeper than pacing. Pacing stabilises; it doesn't recover anyone. Lasting recovery, in my experience, lives in the harder material underneath — the over-functioning, the carrying everyone, the person you had to be for decades before your body called time. We only go there when you're ready and at your pace, but it's usually where the answer is.