A health concern can change how you live and who you are.
Some people come to health therapy after a new diagnosis.
Others come after years of living with an illness that doesn’t go away.
Some are still waiting for answers, or worry constantly about their health.
Maybe you feel:
- dismissed
- exhausted
- frightened
- invisible
Living with a body you can’t predict can keep your nervous system braced for what’s next.
Health therapy gives you support for what medicine alone can’t reach.
What is Health Therapy?
Health therapy helps you cope with illness, adjust to changes in your body and life, and care for your well-being.
It starts from the idea that your mental and physical health are one connected system.
Health therapy also looks at grief, fear and the stress of living with uncertainty.
It can help with chronic illness, a new diagnosis, health anxiety, disability or recovery after a crisis.
It can also support caregivers and families of people living with health concerns.
The work is about living well alongside your health, whatever it brings.
How Health Therapy Helps
Therapy gives you a place to talk about your illness as a person, not a patient.
It can help whether your health changed suddenly or slowly over time.
In health therapy you can learn to:
- grieve what has changed
- listen to your body
- manage worry about your health
- meet your body’s needs
- speak up in medical appointments
Therapy can’t cure an illness, but it can help you live with it on your own terms.
Adjusting takes time, because health concerns can keep changing what your body and mind can do.
Life can still hold meaning, even when your health is uncertain.
What is a Health Therapist?
A health therapist is a registered therapist who helps people with health concerns, illness or disability and the changes they bring.
Some therapists train in health psychology, focusing on how mind and body affect each other.
Some train in medical social work, psychosocial oncology or palliative and end-of-life care.
Some work in hospitals, rehabilitation programs or medical centers, and focus on specific conditions, like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, long COVID or stroke.
Some live with a chronic illness themselves and bring that understanding to their work.
What matters most is that the therapist is a good fit for you, whatever approach they use.
Some Approaches for Health Therapy
Compassion-Focused
It helps you meet your body with kindness, especially when it doesn’t do what you want.
Holistic
It looks at your whole life, including rest, relationships and meaning, as part of your care.
Online
It lets you attend therapy from home, when energy, pain or appointments are already a lot.
Somatic
It helps you reconnect with your body, especially after illness or medical procedures.
What to Expect in Health Therapy
Health therapy often starts with hearing your story.
Your therapist might ask how your concerns began, and how they affect your body or influence your daily life.
Early sessions often explore what you’ve lost, what you’re afraid of and what still matters to you.
You might talk about your experiences within the medical system.
Some therapists suggest small experiments between sessions, like pacing activities or tracking energy.
If you’ve felt dismissed by past health care, that’s worth talking about.
Health therapy can be short-term after a diagnosis, or longer when illness is ongoing.
Illness has been blamed on the mind.
For centuries, symptoms doctors couldn’t explain were often called hysteria, especially in women.
The word comes from the Greek word for uterus. Many real illnesses were dismissed as nerves or imagination.
In the 1950s, psychiatrist Franz Alexander linked seven illnesses, including asthma, ulcers and arthritis, to hidden emotional conflicts. People were told their buried emotions were making them sick.
In 1955, hundreds of staff at the Royal Free Hospital in London fell ill with fatigue, pain and weakness. In 1970, two psychiatrists called it mass hysteria. Many now see it as an early recorded outbreak of myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME.
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In 1977, psychiatrist George Engel argued that medicine needed to look at the whole person. He called it the biopsychosocial model, linking body, mind and social world.
In 1982, Australian doctors Barry Marshall and Robin Warren identified bacteria they believed caused most stomach ulcers, not stress. Few believed them. In 1984, Marshall drank the bacteria himself to prove it. In 2005, they won the Nobel Prize.
In 2008, Brian Sinclair, an Indigenous man, died in a Winnipeg emergency room after waiting 34 hours. Staff assumed he was drunk or homeless. An inquest found his death was preventable.
Twelve years later, Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamekw woman, livestreamed hospital staff insulting her as she lay dying in a Quebec hospital. A coroner found that racism contributed to her death.
In 2020, people with lasting symptoms after COVID-19 found each other online. Archaeologist Elisa Perego, one of them, named it long COVID. Patients named the illness before medicine did.
For decades, people with ME were told to slowly increase their exercise, as if fear were keeping them sick. Patients said it made them worse. In 2021, the United Kingdom’s national health guidelines finally agreed, and stopped recommending it.
But people with illness are still often not believed.
People with chronic health concerns are often told their tests are normal and sent home without answers.
Women, Indigenous people and people of color are more likely to have their pain and symptoms dismissed.
Medical procedures, hospital stays and frightening diagnoses can leave lasting trauma that often goes unrecognized.
And living with illness can mean grieving the person you used to be, but that grief is rarely named.
Trauma-sensitive health therapy works inside those gaps. It believes your symptoms are real. It makes room for medical trauma and the fear it can leave behind. It names dismissal and racism in health care. And it treats you as the expert on your own body.
Trauma-sensitive therapy starts by believing you.
Trauma-Sensitive Health Therapy
What if your body doesn’t feel like a safe place to be?
Illness, medical procedures, pain or past trauma can make your body feel unpredictable and hard to trust.
Trauma-sensitive therapists understand that past trauma and present illness can affect each other.
5 phrases you might hear in Trauma-Sensitive Health Therapy:
- We can take breaks whenever you need.
- What is your body telling you right now?
- Your feelings make sense.
- What do you need for next time?
- Your body might feel on guard.
Trauma-sensitive health therapy invites you to trust your body.
Principles of Trauma-Sensitive Health Therapy
Symptoms are real
Your experience of your body matters, with or without a diagnosis. You don’t have to prove your pain to be taken seriously.
Pacing matters
Energy can be limited and unpredictable with illness. Sessions can adapt to how you’re feeling, in length, location and pace.
Your body, your say
Medical care and illness can leave you feeling like your body isn’t yours. You choose what to share and what feels okay to explore.
Whole person
You are more than your illness. In trauma-sensitive therapy, all of you is part of your care, not only your symptoms.
Questions You Can Ask a Health Therapist
A consultation is a good time to ask questions. Trust how you feel after the conversation as much as the answers themselves.
Have you worked with my condition?
What if I don’t have a diagnosis?
What if I can’t make it to a session?
Can we talk about medical trauma?
Will you work with my health care team?
Can my family come too?
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