Neuroplasticity for Chronic Fatigue Recovery: Going Deeper
Could working with emotions, traits, and trauma aid long Covid and ME/CFS recovery?
Posted July 10, 2025 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
This post is Part 2 of a series.
In my previous post , I shared some thoughts on how we can use the brain’s plasticity to aid recovery from myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and long Covid . We explored how developing a robust understanding of your symptoms can enable you to respond to them from a place of safety and coherence, rather than fear and confusion. In turn, this can serve as a strong foundation on which to gradually move back into the world.
For many people, these steps are sufficient to promote an improvement in symptoms. However, for others, it can also be valuable to do deeper psychological work to promote greater psychobiological regulation.
It may well feel strange to be exploring psychological approaches to recovery from a physical illness. I completely understand how doing so might feel in danger of reinforcing the fallacy that these physical symptoms are somehow “all in the mind.” This is emphatically not the case.
As Monty Lyman writes in The Immune Mind :
“There should be absolutely no shame or stigma in using the power of the brain to relieve the symptoms of long covid. We already know that the state of our mind and nervous system can powerfully influence the immune system and contribute to a hyperactive defence system. A well-targeted psychological therapy with a clued-up, understanding clinician is, ultimately, a powerful biological treatment.”
Working with a knowledgeable and compassionate clinician can be extremely valuable. However, it is also entirely possible to do meaningful work on your own steam, or perhaps alongside someone else who is also navigating recovery from ME/CFS or long Covid. With that said, let’s explore three ways we can go deeper to harness the malleability of the brain and wider nervous system to support recovery from ME/CFS and long Covid.
1. Change your relationship with your emotions
Most of us know intuitively that bottling up our feelings is unlikely to be conducive to either physical or mental health. Science bears this wisdom out: Research indicates that emotional suppression is associated with increased inflammation and a higher risk of earlier death .
Meanwhile, experimental research has found that study participants with ME/CFS were more likely to suppress emotions than participants without the condition. Not only this, but when participants with ME/CFS did suppress their emotions, this led to greater activation of the autonomic nervous system. This, in turn, led to more fatigue.
Research on emotion -focused interventions for ME/CFS and long Covid is in its infancy. However, one study testing an intervention for long Covid, which included an emotional expression component, led to dramatic symptom improvements.
Dr. Howard Schubiner and psychologist Mark Lumley have developed Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET)—an integrative psychotherapy that supports clients with the “emotional processing of unresolved trauma and conflict.” Randomised controlled trials of EAET have demonstrated symptom reduction in people diagnosed with chronic pain and fibromyalgia , a condition which overlaps heavily with ME/CFS and long Covid.
2. Get to know the parts of you that disconnect you from your needs
As discussed in a previous post , long Covid and ME/CFS have been associated with certain personality traits, such as self-sacrifice, a relentless drive to achieve, and a fear of letting others down. These traits overlap in the sense that they each tend to disconnect us from our authentic needs.
For people who identify with such traits and are interested in exploring them, there are a number of psychotherapies that can help us to better understand the parts of ourselves that may have inadvertently contributed to states of chronic stress , and in turn, vulnerability to illness.
One increasingly popular model is Internal Family Systems (IFS). Patterns such as perfectionism and people-pleasing are understood in IFS as the extreme roles taken on by parts of our psyche. These parts are doing their best to prevent the re-triggering of “exiled" painful emotional experiences. As such, IFS brings compassion to these protective parts; in the words of its founder, Richard Schwartz, there are no bad parts.
While the value of IFS for people living with ME/CFS and long Covid has yet to be explored in research, one study found that group IFS therapy led to improvements in pain and physical function among people living with rheumatoid arthritis.
There are numerous other psychotherapies that can help us to disidentify from extreme survival strategies or emotional learnings that may no longer serve us, including the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) and Coherence Therapy.
3. Heal underlying psychological wounds
Related to both emotional processing and parts work, it can be powerful for some people living with long Covid and ME/CFS to process overwhelming or traumatic life events. As psychologist Arielle Schwartz has written, “[H]istorical events contribute to imbalances in the autonomic nervous system that underlie many chronic illness and pain conditions.”
Similarly, Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score that:
“After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their lives. These attempts to maintain control over unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and…autoimmune diseases. This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage in the entire organism, body, mind and brain.”
Psychotherapies that attend to both the psychological and physiological dimensions of trauma include Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), and somatic therapies, of which there are many variants.
In my view, the findings shared here offer some good reasons to explore how working to safely connect to your emotions, traits, and traumas may aid recovery from ME/CFS and long Covid. Doing so needn’t mean that we are imagining that these aspects of our psychology are the sole cause for these complex, multifactorial conditions. As Monty Lyman writes:
"The only harm in seeking targeted, expert-led psychological support is that it might receive the ill-judgement of those on one side of the West's mind-body divide."
I look forward to exploring the approaches introduced here in more depth in future posts.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.