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Living Beyond Lyme:
Reclaim Your Life From Lyme Disease and Chronic Illness

Learn how to lead a rich, vital, and meaningful life despite the daily challenges of Lyme disease and chronic illness.

Living Beyond Lyme helps patients side-step the often frustrating controversy surrounding Lyme disease. This book instead focuses on living meaningfully, using mindfulness and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) approaches. Whether it is acute or chronic, Lyme disease causes suffering, and ACT, an evidence-based, scientifically driven approach, can help people change their experience of their illness.

 

Living Beyond Lyme is a much-needed and extremely welcome book addressing a specific approach to helping those with chronic Lyme disease manage the psychological and interpersonal effects of this life-altering illness.
Lori Dennis, M.A, LCP, Author of Lyme Madness: Rescuing My Son Down the Rabbit Hole of Chronic Lyme Disease.

 

Dr Joseph J Trunzo
The Author of Living Beyond Lyme

Dr. Joseph J. Trunzo has dedicated his career to researching and treating psychological issues that people experience when they have medical illnesses. He forged his career in research with cancer survivors, but he has since focused his efforts on addressing the unique problems facing those with Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses.

His mission is to bring awareness to the Lyme community about the benefits of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, an empirically based form of psychotherapy that focuses on living a vital, rich, and meaningful life while you continue your journey to wellness.

Dr. Trunzo is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Applied Psychology at Bryant University and a licensed psychologist in Rhode Island. He is an active clinician who treats patients with a variety of diagnoses, including Lyme disease, in his private practice at Providence Psychology Services in Providence, RI.

He is a member of the Rhode Island Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), and the Association for Contextual and Behavioral Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. at Drexel University, completed his pre-doctoral internship at the University of Vermont, and completed his postdoctoral training at the Centers for Behavioral & Preventive Medicine at the Brown University Medical School.

 

ARTICLES & VIDEOS

 

Living Well When You Don't Feel Well: Overcoming Lyme Disease and Illness

In this video ted Talk at TEDxBryantU, Dr. Trunzo highlights a different way of thinking and coping with diseases (and life), specifically regarding Lyme disease.

Learn how to better your life while living with Lyme disease and the first steps to acceptance.

In this interview learn: What the ACT approach is, how it can be helpful to those with Lyme Disease and without, how to better your life, and the first steps in acceptance


Sailing Into the Storm

By: Joseph Trunzo, PhD, published at Aeon Essays

Acceptance and commitment therapy teaches us how to live a values-driven life even in the face of dark emotions and trauma.

Acceptance asks us to recognise this paradox, to understand that it is part of being human to experience pain, that life requires it, and to exert endless effort towards always preventing pain is more than a full-time job that will never be accomplished. If, however, we can be open to experiencing pain and fear, to recognise their connection to things that are meaningful and purposeful, to give up the never-ending battle of avoidance, then we create room for our life to happen, even if things are difficult. So, acceptance is not just ‘sucking it up’, it is remaining open to our most difficult and painful emotional experiences so that we can move through them, all the while staying as engaged in our lives in meaningful ways as much as possible.

Read more…


The Best Life Possible

By: Joseph Trunzo, PhD, published at Aeon Essays

Living with chronic illness is hard. But there are psychological techniques that make it possible to thrive even when ill.

Before Donna got her diagnosis, she thought of herself as a musician, a busy professional, a volunteer, a mother, a grandmother. After she got her diagnosis – Parkinson’s disease, at age 58 – she thought of herself as a patient. The time she used to spend engaging in the things that gave her life meaning was eaten up by doctor’s appointments, diagnostic tests and constant monitoring of her symptoms, her energy, her reactions to medication. Her sense of loss was profound and undeniable.

Read more…


Tips for Coping With Lyme Disease

By: Joseph Trunzo, PhD, published at Psychology Today

How do you live your life when you feel so sick?

If caught early and treated properly, Lyme disease can be a relatively simple bacterial infection to treat. However, if the infection goes untreated for a period of time, it can become a debilitating illness. Also, not everyone necessarily responds to treatment completely.

These factors can contribute to longer-term symptoms that require considerable medical and psychological management. Below are some tips for coping with complicated presentations of Lyme disease.

  1. Notice your thoughts, but don’t let them rule the day. We tend just to believe everything that runs through our minds, but we need to pay more attention to what we tell ourselves and notice what we are really thinking. You don’t have to agree or disagree; just say, “I notice I’m having the thought I will never feel well again.” This simple change creates room to respond to the thought rather than just getting stuck with an automatic reaction.

  2. If a thought isn’t useful, disengage. Rather than arguing about whether or not a particular thought is true or false, just ask yourself if engaging in that thought at this time is useful in moving you forward in a valued direction. Again, if you think, “I’ll never get well,” arguing whether or not this is true isn’t really helpful. Let that thought go and engage with more functional thinking about more meaningful things in the present moment.

Read more…


The Psychological Implications of Lyme Disease

By: Joseph Trunzo, PhD, published at Psychology Today

Are your symptoms because you have Lyme, or are they caused by Lyme itself?

As difficult as it might be for a health professional, it is even more difficult for the person who is extremely sick, who has no scientific training, who is potentially cognitively and emotionally compromised, and who feels lost, scared, and hopeless regarding their condition. Awareness of all possible causes of symptom presentation is important in moving toward proper treatment and symptom alleviation. Inquiring about the possibility of infectious processes contributing to psychological symptoms is a worthwhile inquiry, especially in tick endemic areas.

Read more…

 

Many physicians believe that if the illness is not quickly and properly diagnosed and treated, then treatment becomes considerably more difficult. Others disagree. If medicine can’t agree on the diagnostic criteria, testing, and treatment procedures, then this increases the likelihood of missed or inaccurate diagnoses, potentially causing greater impairment, suffering, and disability.
Joseph J Trunzo, PhD., author of Living beyond Lyme