Recovery from Raynaud’s disease and chilblains 

As I paddle in the sea on Easter Saturday sensing the cold water running around my feet, I say to myself “cold is only a sensation”, and carry on. 

I had surprised myself with my steady determination to take this step, despite the temperature in both sea and air. Generally, when I have attempted to get in the sea even in the hottest weather, I jump about, prevaricate and get out without ever really getting in. 

But I’m starting towards the end of my story, so I’ll now return to the beginning. 

I considered myself to have ‘bad circulation’. My left foot in particular gets very cold due as I understood it, to an injury in childhood. As the years have passed I have felt incrementally colder. I wear multiple layers of clothing from October through to April. In the winter I have become verging on the obsessional about seeking ways of keeping warm. The situation was definitely deteriorating, but I didn’t do anything about it, because I thought it was a combination of old age and the residual issues relating to my previous accident. 

This all changed, however, when I read an article on the SIRPA website written by SIRPA practitioner, Irralee Andrzejowska, in which she described her own journey with Raynaud’s Disease (see below). Many bells started to ring in my head – maybe this theory could apply to my problem with the cold as well? I recognised myself in her description of her overreaction to cold and I was intrigued by the pathway she had taken to recover using the SIRPA process.  

It didn’t take me long to contact Irralee via the SIRPA website and our introductory conversation was nothing short of mind blowing. Her original training as a physiotherapist was particularly useful in that she was able to explain both the anatomy and physiology of the circulatory system very clearly. It took her very little time to assess my somewhat back to front thinking about circulation. 

 It just so happened that I was going to see an acupuncturist the very same day. I described my conversation with Irralee to her and she reminded me that she was treating me for what in Chinese medicine terminology is referred to as ‘heat’. She had on occasions told me that the focus of the treatment was to move the heat down from my head in the direction of my cold feet but somehow this piece of information had not really landed with me. Now, hearing it again in this context, I felt confused. In my mind, heat was primarily transferred from the feet upwards, a theory developed as a result of the use of foot warmers of all kinds! What I had failed to understand was that initially the arterial blood supply pumps down from the heart towards the feet. All very obvious when I thought of it.  

Irralee’s commentary on this approach went something like this. When we address an inside job with treatment from the outside, we are often 180° off. Just as I had come to imagine the source of the body heat rising up from the bottom rather than continuously pumping down from the top. In other words, the heart centre had escaped my attention. 

During our next conversation, Irralee provided me with yet more accurate information, which allowed me to transform my fearful belief that I had something wrong with my circulatory system creating symptoms that I worried would only worsen with age. Rather, I came to understand that there was nothing wrong with my blood vessels. The symptoms were being produced by my subconscious fear resulting originally from early loss in in my life which had created a chronic freeze response, which was more exposed in cold conditions. It was also exacerbated by fear and my focus on the symptoms themselves, thus activating the sympathetic nervous system. And guess what? This shuts down blood flow to extremities in order to prioritise blood flow for flight or fight.  

I began to understand that it was not a structural problem but rather a fear-based problem which was over-activating the sympathetic nervous system. The treatment strategies were therefore directed to resolving the fear, plus re-establishing a sense of safety back into my nervous system, mentally, physically and emotionally. 

In summary, I was treating a condition that arose from the still unrecognised internal distress of the premature and ill-timed loss of my mother. Added to this was the buried memory of the accident to my leg, with the application of ever greater layers of clothing and hot water bottles and so forth, all applied from the outside and reinforcing my focus on the symptom itself. 

By way of further context, I need to explain that I had been seeing a podiatrist for a long time, partly because of concerns about the circulation in my toes, particularly on the left foot. Being very professionally aware, she regularly checked the pulses in my feet and found that they were normal. So, we were both aware that my symptoms were not reflected in my pulses. It simply didn’t make sense. 

The childhood accident consisted of a fall from a tree when I was about eight years old, which left me with a major gash on my left leg just above the knee. I was away from home at the time playing with a friend and the subsequent treatment wasn’t straightforward as it had to be stitched twice. I still have a clear memory of some of the treatment involved, as well as reassuring my mother as we walked into the hospital on the day of the second stitching that I didn’t need to have it done because it would always be covered by a skirt! 

How very anxious we both must have been. 

Somewhere along the way, I had come to understand that the tissue damage would affect my circulation in that leg. 

Then, after my mother died, I got married and three years later had a child. I began to realise just how much I missed her and that I had no support of the kind she would have provided. Rather I continued to support other family members. My father also remarried when my son was six months old, somehow taking me further away from my mother. 

I then started to develop chilblains in my feet, especially the left one. Up until then I had had no particular issues with the cold. 

At that time, I experimented with many creams for chilblains and bought sheepskin lined boots and so on. The problem with the cold persisted from then on. I was aware, for example, that I always needed to be sure that I had enough clothes on if we were going out, say for dinner in a neighbour’s house where I couldn’t be sure of the temperature. This was, however, only a background issue until I grew older and, in particular when we recently moved house and became involved with a complex building project. The house of course was cold and I believe that really kick-started the more intense symptoms. 

Talking to Irralee about all of this began to make sense of it Somehow, I simply hadn’t connected the two conditions. 

A friend who is also a psychotherapist helped me to understand this further. I asked her to define trauma for me. She  described it as being an adverse event experienced in an unsupportive emotional context. The question she suggested I address was this: 

What was missing for that 24-year-old young woman at that time, what did she need that she didn’t get? 

This help me to reflect on the situation in a new way. 

Some of improvements that I began to experience almost immediately, revolved around the provision of salient background information, which Irralee provided with great clarity. The difference between arterial and venous circulation, for example. She pointed out that had I torn an artery on that occasion, most likely I would not have survived. She also explained that the vessels would have found new pathways. 

Against the background of the combined traumas, the early accident and the loss of my mother, I had somehow got stuck in the sympathetic part of the nervous system. 

There was one key moment in our exchange which, in many ways, underpins the need to speak to someone about these matters rather than solely read about them. Irralee told me that in the past she had hated the cold. I knew in an instant that I didn’t hate the cold, I was frightened of it. 

This changed everything. 

Anther part of the work I did with Irralee concerned changing my relationship with the cold. Knowing about the root of this problem was not sufficient in itself. She gave me a number of practical suggestions, including turning the shower to cool before switching off. Unsurprisingly I take very hot showers and so this sounded like a big ask. But using the phrase that she provided, “cold is only a sensation”, I didn’t find it difficult at all. It wasn’t long before I was getting dressed in the morning in the bedroom rather than huddling in the shower room. I also began to take my gloves off when I was out walking, just to see what it felt like, plus not automatically layering myself with clothes. All very liberating. 

Irralee also recommended imagery work which I found equally helpful and have gone on developing in different ways. Similarly, she introduced me to therapeutic journaling, which is a work in progress. In fact, I had already written a great deal about my experiences back in the 1970s and I’m sure this preparatory work helped assimilate the help that both Kate and Irralee offered me. 

Finally, I had told Irralee that, although we live close to the sea, I hadn’t been in it for years. So, as I walked down the sand towards the sea on a cold grey afternoon, I did so with complete conviction that it would be alright, and it was. 

And read the 2 part blog Irralee wrote about her own recovery from Raynaud’s Disease, here. 

After years of worsening cold intolerance, Raynaud’s symptoms, and chillblains that Judy believed were caused by poor circulation and old injuries, she discovered through SIRPA work that her symptoms were actually driven by fear, past trauma, and a chronic freeze response in her nervous system. By addressing the emotional roots, changing her relationship with the cold, and retraining her nervous system, she experienced rapid improvement and can now comfortably do things she once avoided — even paddling in the cold sea.

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