Has anyone ever told you to ‘just think positive’? That’s toxic positivity talking, and it invalidates another person’s emotions and their lived reality.
Especially if they live with a chronic illness.
Teisha Rose was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at age 22 and has been living with chronic illness for decades.
Podcast hosts, Louise & Andy have been discussing the concept of reframing our experiences to help get through difficult situations in recent episodes of Reframe of Mind, but no amount of reframing will cure Teisha’s MS.
So how does a change in perspective play a part when dealing with chronic illness?
And how do you look after your mental health when you live with an illness like MS?
Teisha’s diagnosis at 22 sent her life in a completely different direction than she had planned.
Initially, her life became dominated by her illness, as she was experiencing aggressive relapses and a medical roundabout of hospital stays and rehabilitation. Teisha became frustrated by how her life had changed. She feared for her future and knew something had to change.
Now, Teisha believes that even when life is interrupted by an illness, you can still enjoy now and look forward to your future with excitement.
So, how did she change from being fearful about her future to being excited about it?
Decades on, and still living with MS, Teisha is an accomplished author (Lives Interrupted), coach, and creator of Hurdle2Hope – a framework that represents the stages she has navigated through since her first life changing diagnosis – and she now teaches others how to apply that knowledge to their own hurdles to improve their mental health.
Louise & Andy recorded the initial interview with Teisha in late 2021. Since the recording, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and is currently applying the Hurdle2Hope framework that she wrote in response to her journey with Multiple Sclerosis, to her ongoing journey with breast cancer. They recorded a second interview with her March 2022, 6 weeks after her diagnosis, about her new hurdle, breast cancer, and her mental health journey in the face of that second life changing diagnosis, that is a part of her current everyday reality. Both interviews are in this episode.
Teisha Rose is an extraordinary human.
Episode Transcript available at ReframeOfMind.com.au
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Reframe Of Mind is an Australian podcast series where we explore mental health topics with commentary from scientific and psychological researchers and practitioners, with people whose lived experience supports the research, and applying their learnings to our own lived experience.
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