Which Recovery Pattern Are You In?

Everyday, I meet people with MECFS who all seem to share a universal frustration around the process of recovery. They've been working on it for a long, LONG time (sometimes months or even years) and they feel they've done EVERYTHING to get better, yet still feel completely stuck.

Then they see people recovering and the message that is often internalized within them is that they're not "trying hard enough" to get well. That a lack of recovery is a flaw of their own moral character. But this could not be further from the truth, and today we're gonna talk about it. 

It's true that recovery is a non-linear process; there is a lot of back and forth, a lot of interplay between what I call "the 4 pillars", and the process of getting well resembles more of a spiral staircase than it does a straight line. 

But through my own recovery and years of working with others — I learned another very important fact about this messy process. Something I never hear ANYBODY talk about it in any of the recovery stories out there. 

You are not going to make any progress in recovery, if you don't know how to identify where you are in the process first. This is the step that is needed before everything else. 

Before you try to implement tools.
Before you decide to be a guinea pig for new protocols, treatments and pills. 
Before you engage a treatment plan, and spends tens of thousands of dollars. 

FIRST - you must understand the pattern of crashes and activity you find yourself in. This is the starting point, because recovery happens no amount of implementing protocols can make up for a person who doesn't know if they're pushing too hard, not actually expanding enough, or expanding and contracting in a way that promotes recovery. 

So while most people approach ME/CFS recovery by searching for the right solution, the right treatment, the right pacing strategy, nervous system tool, or supplement stack, what they are missing is the PATTERN that they're system is currently operating in.

Without that, even the best tools can be misapplied. 

Throughout my recovery and my work with others, I now see three distinct recovery patterns which all have a time in place in our journey.

People may move through them sequentially, or loop back and forth between them.

Pattern One: Stuck & Stable

This pattern is not well understood because it often doesn’t look dramatic. In fact, it can even look like success ( at first ). Perhaps you've been able to reduce PEM so much that you hardly ever wobble. You have become so skilled at pacing that symptoms are predictable and you have a really good sense of where your limits are. Your life, as a result, exists around systems you've put in place to manage energy and avoid crashes. Life feels small - but contained, and most importantly, safe. 

Make no mistake - this skillset matters. Stopping yourself from pushing and crashing is a tool that is NEEDED in recovery. The challenge here is simply that this is only a starting place if you want to get well.

Write this down: Stability is not the same as recovery.

When you are Stuck and Stable, the nervous system has learned safety through restriction, repetition and sameness. It has not yet learned how to tolerate change, stimulation or expansions, and those are the skills of resilience that let us actually expand and eventually live normally again. 

And so, when life inevitably pushes outside the container — stress, illness, travel, even something positive — the system may respond with a disproportionate crash, because expansion hasn’t been gently learned yet, but the capacity for stimuli has. 

Think about it like this: if you were going to the gym and injured your legs, so to protect your body, you stopped moving altogether. Your legs would heal, but ultimately when you stood up, they'd be weaker from the lack of activity. 

This is how it works in the nervous system, too. If you pull back too much, and then expose yourself to stimulation and activity suddenly, you may find you crash easier and faster than you did before. Then you're left thinking that rest ultimately doesn't work or help, and more confused than ever about what to do. 

Pattern Two: The Boom or Bust Cycle 

This is the pattern most people recognize immediately. It is the one that also most people identify with, and the one that is easiest to see. It's one in which you live opposite to the Stuck & Stable pattern. 

You come out of a crash and you feel a little better.
You have more energy.
So you try to live again. 

You do whatever you can, doing your best to take breaks, or pushing through because things need to get done. Maybe you feel good while you're working or being active, or maybe you don't. Either way, you live beyond your capacity and the body cannot keep up. You're in the boom. 

Then you crash. And we all know what happens next. 

Your capacity drops. You symptoms intensify. Your fear increases. Your baseline goes down. There you stay, while you wait for it to pass. You're now in the Bust.

And eventually when you recover enough to try again to get up and do things, the cycle repeats itself, because you have no clear limits, no real tools to pace, and no real stability as your baseline. 

Over time, many people notice that when this pattern is repeated over and over again, the boom gets smaller, the bust gets worse, and overall capacity shrinks. 

The Boom or Bust pattern is simply a misunderstanding of how to make MECFS work FOR YOU, instead of against you. It’s what happens when a system isn’t stabilized enough to handle the load we ask of it on the other side of a crash— and it doesn’t yet know how to expand safely, either. 

Pattern Three: Expanding & Contracting

Finally, we arrive at the pattern where the magic happens. This is the pattern recovery actually lives inside; what I call the "Expansion/Contraction Cycle." And it can be challenging at first to really conceptually be understood, because from the outside looking in, it resembles the Boom or Bust cycle. 

In both patterns people outside our community see us doing activities and afterwards having symptoms. In both cycles there is PEM after activity. But that is where the overlap ends.

Because in The Expansion/Contraction cycle, a baseline is established as the center by which everything else extends from...I call the edge of this baseline "The Soft Fence." Activity is increased gently, often up against a soft edge of capacity.

Mild wobbles may happen — but they’re supported, not feared. The intensity of the wobble helps us to understand whether these expansions are within our level of capacity to integrate or beyond them. We lean on our tools from being "Stuck and Stable" to pace properly between expansions to stabilize again. 

As a result:

Contractions become shorter and less intense.
Expansions become wider and more available.
And our baseline slowly grows.

Why pattern recognition matters

If you don’t know which pattern you’re in, it’s very hard to choose the right support and tools to begin to get well again. Whether you have fear around activity and are doing too little, or whether you are being a bit too confident and doing too much, all of this can make the process of recovery very, very challenging. 

Because someone who’s stuck and stable doesn’t need more restriction.They need to take steps forward and do more. And someone in boom–bust doesn’t need more pushing. They need to pull back and do less.  

Meanwhile, someone expanding and contracting needs to remember both of these patterns so they can continue to make gains without falling into old habits. 

Sample, where do you feel you are in recovery? Stuck and Stable? Boom or Bust? Or the Expansion/Contraction cycle? If you aren't sure, I've created this downloadable PDF that you can read to learn a bit more about the process and how to identify yourself currently inside it. 

Pattern recognition around pacing is one of the tools I teach in The Edison Effect. You are welcome to join us any time via the self study plan, or in a group coaching cohort offered 4x per year.