Emotional Support, Spirituality and Diabetes 

Emotional and Social Support

Social support is also critical to being able to conquer your diabetes and defeat it. Social support is an aspect of diabetes management that most diabetes programs fail to address.

There are many places where you can obtain emotional and social support:

• Your family members and friends
• Your community, e.g. a local support group
• Your church, e.g. pastor, church leader, church member
• Your inner spirit (spirituality)
• A member of your healthcare team, i.e. dietitian, health coach
• Training class, workshop, webinar, teleseminar
  
• Internet, e.g. online support group
• Educational materials, e.g. diabetes book, DVD

Diabetic Support Groups

There are several types of support groups to meet individual needs. Support groups may be led by a professional, such as a nurse, social worker, diabetes educator, psychologist or by other patients. These groups usually focus on providing key information and sharing their personal experiences, successes and failures, but they also provide hope and emotional support, so that members realize that they are not alone in their battle with diabetes.

Because support groups can vary in approach, size and how often they meet, patients should find a group that they are comfortable with and that meets their individual needs.

Sharing your feelings and experiences with a group that’s struggling with the same disease you have can be very empowering and relaxing. A support group can make living with diabetes or any disease a lot easier in the short term. The basic goal of a support group is to give you a way to share and learn about your disease. A group also helps you to feel understood, and can give you new ideas to help cope with problems. It can also help you feel good about yourself because you’ll be helping others in the group.

Note: If you would like to set up and run a diabetic support group, read this web page.

Social Effects of Being Diabetic

How to Maximize Your Support System

• Surround yourself with positive people that strengthen your hope.
• Join a local diabetic support group to learn how to help yourself and to help others. Join a diabetic support forum if you have a computer.
• Educate yourself about the science – this will prevent you from being misled by well-intentioned people in the support group or forum.
• Learn from others in the support group by being observant. This may sound a little crude, but you should observe what sick people do and do the opposite, that is don’t do what sick people do.
• If you are married or have a significant other, share your diabetes management with them. Most diabetics have better glucose control, a better sex life and a better relationship when they openly communicate and share their diabetes management with their spouse or partner. For example, if your partner knows that you tend to get down or moody when you have a high or low glucose reading, then, they will realize that it wasn’t something that they did and, as a result, they may be able to help to lift your spirits.
• Speak out and let other family members know that you’re diabetic. Don’t be embarrassed to share what is happening to you. For whatever reason, diseases like diabetes are not shared among family members. It’s kept quiet, which only increases the probability that someone else in the family will become diabetic, primarily because of the silence and the poor eating habits being passed down to each new generation.
• Design your own support team of family members, relatives, church members, friends, and others.
• Be wary of those who may become jealous once you start to feel and look healthy. Reach out to help them but if they don’t want to be helped, don’t allow them to drag you down. You must let them go until they are ready.
• Join a community or church group of some kind to help others in your local community. Become a community advocate. This will take your mind off the disease and bring hope to others.
• If necessary, consider some form of counseling. Many diabetics become depressed when they are initially diagnosed or after fighting the disease unsuccessfully for several years. Some diabetics feel so bad they cannot sleep or eat. In these cases, therapy or counseling may help. Some people are afraid to admit they need help. They believe that others will think they are crazy if they talk to a professional about their problems. But it’s smart to get help when you need it, especially if you have the symptoms of depression, e.g. poor sleep, changes in appetite, crying, sad thoughts, self-pity.

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Body, Mind & Spirit

Man is a trinity that is comprised of the Body (Physical), the Mind (Mental), and the Spirit (Spiritual). The Body, Mind and Spirit work in harmony to make you the best that you can be in this life. If one of these three elements is “sick” or out of balance with the other two, then, your entire being will be sick.

Unfortunately, most of traditional medicine focuses on the Body by addressing and suppressing the symptoms and never fixing the underlying root cause of the unhealthy cells. Traditional medicine tends to overlook the importance of the Mind and the Spirit and its role in healing the Body. Man also tends to focus on the Body by taking drugs to relieve pain or by feeding his food cravings to satisfy hormonal hunger – both of which may be driven by emotions such as depression.

Consequently, there are psychological and psychosocial factors that may exert substantial influence on the biochemical control in diabetic patients. These factors have been shown to increase the risks of poor glycemic control, “brittle diabetes”, and diabetic ketoacidosis. Depression has been identified as one negative influence of poor glycemic control among pediatric and adolescent patients. And, depression has been observed to affect family members of patients with Type 2 diabetes and influence family dynamics toward the condition.

As with any disease, after several years of fighting the good fight, you can become physically drained because your physical body has continued to weaken despite everything that you’ve done to fight the disease.

Consequently, you also become emotionally and spiritually drained; and, as a result, you lose hope and “give in” to the fact that the best you can do is to live with the disease – that you’ve done everything possible to fight the disease. This can be very disconcerting and difficult to overcome emotionally. Also, despite the support from your family and friends, you feel very alone and afraid at times.

There are horror movies that can scare you, but I can truly tell you that there is nothing, absolutely nothing scarier than knowing that your doctor cannot help you and your time is limited. Only a strong belief in a power that is greater than yourself can give you the hope, the confidence and courage to fight for your life instead of giving in to the inevitable life of kidney failure/dialysis, amputation, and blindness.

Once you accept the fact that we live in a spiritual universe and that we are all spiritual beings, you will find yourself equipped with an instrument through which you can exert influence over your body and your blood glucose control. But, how do you go about tapping into your inner spirit and belief system? The following section will give you some ideas to get started. Anything and everything is possible if you have faith and you take responsibility of your health problems and follow up with the necessary actions; and, resist the negative influences that will discourage you from making yourself a healthier person.

How does food help or prevent us from getting to this inner spirit? There is no universal agreement about the relationship of food to the human body, mind or spirit. However, I believe that we can agree that “dead” food definitely harms the Body. And, since food can make us happy or console us when we’re sad, we can make the case that food also harms the Mind and the Spirit. Food is an ever-present reminder that there is more to life than just filling stomachs. Our minds and spirits crave for more meaning.

Now, we can conclude that the inverse of those statements is true -- that the Body, Mind and Spirit affect the food we select to eat. If you have a positive mental attitude and truly believe that food can help you improve your health, then, it will because you will acquire the knowledge to make better food choices. The following section provides some guidelines that will help you to build and use your Mind and Spirit to improve the health of your Body.

So, how did we get here with all these convenience and fast foods and such poor health?

When it comes to food, the irony is that just at the time nutritional scientists were identifying vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that support life, technologists were perfecting the refining processes to separate the nutrients from the food or to reconstitute them in synthetic forms. Refined white flour, “enriched” cereal, homogenized milk, bottled juices, soda, high fructose corn syrup, margarine (partially hydrogenated oil), and fast foods are examples that are devastating our health today.

All of this was motivated by profit for the seller and convenience for the buyer, as the age of boxed mixes and prepackaged foods brought new freedom in the kitchen and profits to food packaging industries and grocery stores. Unfortunately, that new freedom has come at a high price, which many people are ignoring, hoping that, maybe medical science will develop a magic pill in the near future.

Medical science is very successful in handling trauma and emergency treatment, but not with their treatment of degenerative diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Their treatment protocol for these diseases is drug therapy to suppress the symptoms instead of fixing the underlying root cause and get rid of the disease. If the drug therapy doesn’t work or it stops working, the only other option is surgery.

Unfortunately, many people put their faith in these drugs that were created by man instead of the foods that were created by God. And, as long as we continue to believe that man is smarter than God, we will be trapped with poor health and our dependency on these man-made foods and drugs. So, become a victor of wellness, instead of a victim of disease.

Spiritual health allows you to focus on your inner faith and the belief that you must respect and protect what you put into your body to maintain a healthy balance with the mind and spirit. This supports Apostle Paul’s requirement to glorify God in our body, as well as our spirit:

“Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost . . . therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”  [1 Corinthians 6:19-20]

Discord between your Spirit and Mind usually leads to illogical behaviors and rationalizations. For example, as their reasoning for eating what they like even if it is bad for their health, I am amazed at the number of people who have told me “Well, you gotta die of something.” This type of rationalization is due to a disconnect between that person’s spirit and unconscious mind, leading to a negative effect on their body.

It is also a disconnect between the spirit and conscious mind that is created as a defense mechanism when the person can’t really explain why they’re doing something that they know is harming their body. Research has shown that a diabetic who is not healthy emotionally will not respond positively to treatment, even though they may have the best care and medicine. Discord between the mind and body is a critical factor. Diabetics know that if they worry too much their blood sugar will go “sky high” and stay high until they stop worrying.

Be wary of systemic societal prejudices (e.g. sexism, racism), which may decrease your exposure to knowledge/education while increasing the anxiety and stress in your life. How you handle these problems and stress is very important. Do not neglect the problem. Acknowledge that stress can actually be helpful. For example, the stress that an athlete feels can actually help to improve their performance if they know how to channel the stress and nervous energy. Someone like a Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan handled stress well on and off the basketball court. But, you don’t need to be Magic or Michael – just be yourself, embrace the challenge and don’t neglect the problem.

Neglect is like an infection -- left unchecked it will spread throughout your entire being. When you neglect your health (by not eating right and not exercising), this may cause you to feel guilty and guilt leads to an erosion of your self-confidence. As your self-confidence diminishes, so does your activity level (of trying to get healthy). And as your activity level diminishes, your results inevitably decline. And as your results suffer, your attitude begins to weaken. And as your attitude begins the gradual shift from positive to negative, your self-confidence diminishes even more . . . and this downward spiral continues as your health suffers.

However, you can overcome all of this by simply following some of the practices listed in Chapter 13 of the Death to Diabetes book.

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Spirituality & Diabetes

Diabetes self-management has evolved over the past few decades from just relying on drugs to a much more comprehensive system that includes superior nutrition, exercise, blood glucose testing, stress reduction, and meal planning. 

The Death to Diabetes self-management guidelines reflect a more holistic style that addresses the needs of the whole person rather than isolated parts. Holistic principles identify man as consisting of 3 parts: Body, Mind and Spirit. And, all 3 parts must be healthy for the whole person to be healthy.

Holistic medicine is not a new concept. Socrates knew that it was important to treat the body as a whole when he wrote, “For the part can never be well unless the whole is well.” An old Indian saying states that the body is like a house with 3 rooms: a physical, a mental/emotional, and a spiritual room. To be a whole person, one must spend at least a little bit of time in each of these  rooms every day. For example, food and rest satisfy our physical needs; learning about the world and using what we learn enriches our minds; and validating and coping with our feelings meets our emotional needs. Our spiritual needs must also be addressed.

Spirituality can be defined as experiencing the presence of a power or force and experiencing a closeness to that presence. Spirituality may mean being involved with organized religion, taking time to contemplate one’s place in the ultimate order of things, or focusing on the things that give life meaning, such as one’s family or social group. No matter what one’s personal motivation for seeking it, spirituality can be seen as part of the journey toward becoming whole and being healthy.

The Death to Diabetes program addresses these areas of needs in one’s life. Superior nutrition nourishes the body. Diabetes educators teach people about blood glucose monitoring, meal plans, and exercise. They also teach people to manage stress or to recognize warning signs of depression to maintain emotional health. Using prayer or meditation helps our spiritual part. Addressing each of these areas of our lives helps us to move closer to a holistic form of diabetes self-management.

Holistic health care seeks in part to enhance the body’s natural healing ability. Much attention has been focused on developing sophisticated drugs and learning healthy life choices, but enhancing the body’s natural healing ability hasn’t been as rigorously studied.

Recent research in the field of mind/body medicine, or psycho-neuroimmunology, though, has shown that the mind can and does have a profound effect on the body. Techniques such as the Relaxation Response and other forms of meditation, guided imagery, positive outlook, humor, hope, and even one’s beliefs can all affect medical outcomes.

Perhaps it was the growing acceptance of involving the mind in the health process that made it easier for mainstream scientists to begin to take a serious look at spirituality and prayer. Prayer can be defined as communication with God, the creator of life, the collective unconscious, or one’s higher self. Some studies have suggested that prayer can have an effect on both individuals who pray for themselves as well as on those who are prayed for by others (even without their knowledge). For example, in a study of patients in a cardiac intensive care unit, those who were prayed for (unbeknownst to them) by a group of community volunteers had about 10% fewer complications than those who were not prayed for by the volunteers.

Research at Duke University’s Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health has looked at “intrinsic religiosity,” which is defined as one’s beliefs rather than participation in organized religious activities. Those with higher levels of intrinsic religiosity had better survival rates after severe illness, less depression in older age, less disability and mortality when faced with chronic disease, and possibly stronger immune systems. These and other studies raised interesting questions about the effect of prayer on both medical outcomes and general wellness.

More research in the field of spirituality is necessary, of course. However, for those comfortable with incorporating prayer into the fabric of their daily lives, the use of prayer may be yet another resource to enhance diabetes self-management and therefore, general wellness.

For more information about emotional support, motivation or spirituality,  read Chapter 13 of Death to Diabetes, or get one or more of the following ebooks:

• Motivation, Will Power & Discipline: Secrets to Health
• Stress Reduction -- How to Reduce It with Food & Spirit
• Depression -- How to Defeat It Without the Drugs

Many people act as if God is not important to them, even religious adherents, because quite often they may attend their church, temple, or synagogue once a week, and the rest of the time they get caught up in their usual affairs of the world, instead of applying their spirituality to the whole of their lives. They section off their various daily activities and keep them separate from one another. In most people's minds, they put God on the back shelf, and save Him for a rainy day, or when some tragedy befalls.

Essentially, they keep God last in their lives, or He may be placed at the bottom of their To Do List. Many people don't even have God in this list at all. God is not important enough to them. This is usually because God seems to be too ambiguous and distant to them, and sometimes they question whether or not God exists at all. They may perceive God as being far away, but the truth is people have removed themselves from God, who is closer than hands and feet, for our Creator's Spirit is within us.

A particular Zen philosophy suggests the God is as important as breathing. But then your breath is a primary key to God's presence within you. Hindu teachings refer to "prana," the vital life-force in all living things, but generally accepted as manifesting through the breath, hence God's Breath of Life within every living soul. 

So why is God so important in our lives? Things may go wrong in your day-to-day living because you're not letting God guide you in what to do, whether it's basic things or dire circumstances. Most people don't listen to the Voice of Spirit within, also called intuition. If they did listen, circumstances would go much more smoothly. But listening within is definitely a learning process, complete with the usual trials and errors, until you learn to recognize the Spirit's Voice within; therefore, you must learn to discern. The sheep recognized the voice of their shepherd when he calls, and they will not heed a stranger's.

Likewise, it should stand to reason that all living creature that are created would not exist without their Creator, and those beings who are aware enough should realize they owe their allegiance to this Divine Source, thus committing their praise and worship to this Most Holy One. Many people may merely acknowledge the existence God, and yet there are those who do not. But those who have dedicated their lives to this Almighty Being, in one form or another, do indeed realize God's importance to them.

God is important because, very simply, "God is love," or so declares St. John in the New Testament. Life is essentially empty without love. When you apply Jesus Christ's Commandment of Love to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and to love your neighbor you are fulfilling the Creator's plan for you and He will guide you into His loving embrace. When you become His lover, for He is the Sacred Beloved who embraces you, divine unity is forming, and you will be transformed; hence, through love and surrender divine union with God is experienced.

In the physical plane of existence, all things appear separate and diverse. However, in the greater Divine Reality, all things exist in Oneness. When a soul exists in apparent separation, he lives in an illusion, so he perceives God as separate from himself.

When the human consciousness ascends toward Cosmic Consciousness, this divine union is realized and experienced by the aspiring soul. Reaching this Holy Oneness is yet another reason why God is so important in our lives.

How can the grain of sand be complete without the beach? How can the drop of water be whole without the ocean? How can the sun-ray emanate without the Sun? And how can you thrive harmoniously without God?

People may have the delusion that they can live without God, and this may last a long time, but when things in their lives begin to fall apart, or tragedies befall them, it's quite possible that they will finally realize they can't. Unfortunately, many have succumbed to a deep sleep, and they soon die, never knowing the truth.

There is an old Zen story - and I'm going to paraphrase it here - where the master and his disciple were cleaning linens in the river. The disciple blithely asks the master, "How much do we really need God in our lives?" The teacher suddenly and without warning pushed the disciple's head under the water and held it for almost a minute before he let go, allowing the startled one to rise up quickly, gasping desperately for precious air.

And the master replied, "THAT'S how much."

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The Power of Churches
Many of us attend or have attended a church. One of the missions of the church is to provide spiritual guidance to its church members. Consequently, in order for a church to be successful, it must provide spiritual guidance in serving its congregation and its community.

The role of the congregation is to help the church with its mission.