Hope +Wellness Blog

little snippets of advice for everyday challenges many people share

Parenting with Chronic Pain
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Parenting with Chronic Pain

Parenting can already feel like driving somewhere new without a map–when you add in managing chronic pain on top of that, it can be hard to find resources that speak to your experience. There are a lot of limitations that come with experiencing chronic pain that just aren’t factored in with typical parenting advice. This can make parenting–where your whole world is about your child, and you already feel a little removed from your “adult” social circles–feel even more isolating.

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How Can My Therapist Help with My Chronic Pain?
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How Can My Therapist Help with My Chronic Pain?

Suffering from chronic pain, or having a chronic illness with severe physical symptoms might not seem like the kind of thing you can go to a therapist for, but a therapist can be a key element of your chronic pain management.

While your illness or pain may be physically located in your body, that doesn’t mean it’s entirely separate from your mental health. In fact, mental and physical health are incredibly linked. So, when your mental health suffers, your physical health often suffers, and vice versa.

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What Does it Mean to Engage in Self Care When You’re Chronically Ill?
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What Does it Mean to Engage in Self Care When You’re Chronically Ill?

While self soothing often focuses on things that make you feel good in the moment, self care is more about the long term maintenance of your wellbeing. It can mean using up a lot of energy, both physical and mental, which is something chronically ill people don’t usually have in excess.  So how can you realistically engage in self care when you’re also managing a chronic illness?

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Understanding Grief and Chronic Illness
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Understanding Grief and Chronic Illness

Thousands of people in the US are newly dealing with chronic illness as a result of Long-COVID. It’s more important than ever to understand the reality of living as a chronically ill person, what that can look like, and how to cope with the emotions that come with diagnosis.

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How to Be There for A Friend with Chronic Pain
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How to Be There for A Friend with Chronic Pain

If you don’t experience chronic pain, it can be hard to understand just how much it can impact someone’s life. While for most people, pain is unusual, a sign that something needs to be tended to immediately, for folks who manage chronic pain, it is a constant state. If you’re looking for ways to support a loved one with chronic pain, here are 6 ways to be there for them.

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How to Cope With Losing Relationships as a Result of Your Chronic Illness

How to Cope With Losing Relationships as a Result of Your Chronic Illness

Many people don’t understand what it’s like to be seriously ill. People often also don’t know what to do when someone is sick. If you’ve ever dealt with a loss in your life you might be familiar with this. Some people don’t know what to say or do, so instead of saying the ‘wrong’ thing, they disappear until the crisis is over. It’s not a nice thing to do, certainly, but it is a human reaction to discomfort. Unfortunately, for folks living with chronic illness, this experience is all too familiar. With chronic illness however, there is no end in sight, and because of that some relationships just don’t survive.

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5 Ways Chronic Illness can Affect Your Mental Health
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5 Ways Chronic Illness can Affect Your Mental Health

Many of us take our physical health for granted until we are forced to do otherwise. For the six out of every ten adults in the US who live with a chronic illness, however, the fantasy of living in perfect health is one that’s hard to reach. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), chronic illness is defined as “conditions that last 1 year or more and require ongoing medical attention or limit activities of daily living or both.”

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