My brain started reading the itch as burning
Jenny is in remission after years of it. Mind-body work never removed the sensations — it turned the volume down enough to live with, and changing her bedding helped too.
Jenny ·
- Living with it
- More than 5 years
- Main trigger
- Anything touching her skin, worst in bed
- What helped
- Mind-body work and being deliberate about bedding
I'm fortunately in remission now, but when I wasn't, the thing that gave me relief was mind-body work.
It didn't take the sensations away. It toned them down and made them more tolerable, which at the time was everything.
The strangest part of my experience was that my brain started mistaking the itching for burning. That took a while to accept. My provider told me the two sensations can sometimes overlap in the brain — that helped enormously, because until then I'd assumed something new and worse was happening to me.
I was also very proactive about the type of bedding I used, so my skin was as relaxed as possible overnight. Fabric choice sounds trivial until you're lying in it for eight hours.
Remission is possible. I didn't believe that when I was in the thick of it.