Challenging wellness culture’s stigma towards chronic illness

Wellness culture teaches us that being sick means we are not taking well enough care of ourselves. This thought perpetuates stigma about chronic illness and it causes internalised shame.

I remember, a long time ago, I noticed a judgmental thought come up internally when I saw a young man with multiple sclerosis (MS) on TV. The thought was: “If he just ate less white bread he would be much better.” I was deeply engrained in wellness culture at that point and it had brainwashed my way of thinking. 

Not long after, I attended a conference and a friend of mine, a yoga instructor, saw a woman in a wheelchair and said: “I could get her out of her wheelchair, if I only got her eating more plants.” 

Something about what she said felt incredibly jarring, but I couldn’t explain it at the time, because my thinking was similar to hers. I was in the early phases of chronic illness and hearing this message from someone else, I felt blamed. I was already eating so many plants and super foods and everything ‘healthy’. I was constantly nauseous, and I was getting sicker. I was constantly blaming myself for not getting better, I didn’t need other people blaming me too. 

Photo by Anja Bauermann on Unsplash

My friend simply assumed that the woman’s disability was her own fault, because of her (poor) diet, which my friend had no clue about — the woman could have been eating nothing but plants for all we knew. She saw her disability and assumed poor health, assumed that there was something this woman wasn’t doing to make her better, assumed that she alone could fix her, assumed that a simple diet change was what it would take for her to get cured.

I had plenty of other people in my yoga network (I was a yoga instructor and coach at one time) point out to me that healing my inner child and core wounds, learning spiritual lessons and all kinds of other psycho-spiritual stuff (that is great in and of itself) would help me get better and even rid myself entirely of my illness. So I went to healers, hypnotists and all kinds of stuff to heal my insides. I still became sicker.

A few years later when I became severely ill and bedbound, I started feeling a lot of shame for having had these judgmental thoughts — that physical healing was a matter of eating the right diet and healing your wounds, and if you were still sick, there was something yet to be done. I had had them about myself, lurking in my subconscious, and the self-blame was getting harder to ignore. 

See, I never understood why I wasn’t getting better. My diet was ‘perfect’, I was taking all the right supplements, and taking care of my body like I was taught by western wellness culture. I was healing my inner child, my core wounds, learning my spiritual lessons, but nothing in my illness changed. I felt shame for not being better. 

All the messages I received from wellness culture was that I was doing something wrong because I was still ill — my body and subconscious was apparently still signaling to me that I had to change something, and that I was responsible for my illness.

I didn’t realise at the time how incredibly ableist wellness culture can be. 

Western wellness culture focuses overtly on the individual’s responsibility to heal their disease, and too often, the individual is also responsible for their disease. 

Deepak Chopra, in his book Perfect Health says: “People who consider themselves “too busy to get sick” are known to have above-average health, while those who worry excessively about disease fall prey to it more often.” As if illness were a weakness of mind or character flaw.

I remember my fellow yoga instructors and healers discussing their clients: If someone was still ill after they had been treated by them, it was because they were resisting getting better — there was something in their subconscious that simply wouldn’t allow them to get better.

There’s another way that wellness culture is deeply ableist: there is a preoccupation with what the ideal body looks like and what it can do and the ideal body is definitely not fat or disabled or ill. Illness or disability is a sign, in western wellness culture, that something is out of alignment with the natural, divine state. Chronic illness and disability becomes a stigma — a sign of something that is wrong and needs fixing.

As a chronically ill, disabled person, I quickly felt ostracised from my spiritual yoga community. I felt very little compassion come my way and I felt dirty and wrong and like a failure. 

It wasn’t until I finally understood the innate ableism of western wellness culture that I could finally unlearn these ideas. I could step onto a path of true inner healing, whereby I wasn’t the perpetrator of my own illness, nor was I solely responsible for it going away. A huge burden of self-blame had been lifted from my shoulders. 

But the self-blame present in wellness culture had stalled my grief process, because I wasn’t allowed to see myself as a victim. With this thought-form I alone was the creator of my circumstance. And it caused loneliness as I felt I had to hide my own vulnerability, because negativity was almost a sin in the yoga world.

I’m sorry to say, I finally realised how ableist parts of the yoga/New Age/wellness world really can be. And how discriminating this world can be towards people with chronic illness and disabilities. I can only say that I hope there is more reflection about ableism today then there was back when I was a part of this world.