Healing Your Relationships

Chronic illness brings changes and challenges to every relationship – your partner, children, parents, employer, friends, and even yourself. Your relationships can fracture or deepen depending on how you integrate illness into them.

Get Started

Learn to deepen your relationships through the unique changes and challenges that illness brings.

Actionable Information

6 modules packed with helpful ideas, questions, and practices.

Meaningful Interaction

6 live Zoom calls which feature both teaching and discussion, recorded and archived on the site. Be apart of a supportive group of participants to share with and learn from.

Useful Resources

Multiple materials including PDF downloads, links to helpful resources and in depth videos. PLUS access a special bonus course: The Six Skills Of Meditation.

Our 6-week live, virtual course will help you navigate these challenges so that your relationships deepen rather than fracture.

Focusing on illness as a path of growth can bring new ways to grow together and love more fully in all of your relationships, and it can teach you new and better ways to communicate your needs and your reality in ways that empower you.

When illness appears on the scene, every relationship you have undergoes some adjustments. You have to renegotiate household chores and responsibilities, income production, finances, emotional labor, and sexual relating with your partner. Parents and children face questions of independence and dependence and may conflict over how to handle the illness.

Your colleagues and employers likely won’t understand the changed situation that chronic illness brings, or its impacts on your time and energy and emotional resilience. Friends will want to support you but either won’t know how to do it or will be afraid to even offer.

Even your relationship with your self changes, as who were before your illness is not who you are now, or after.

These changes can feel like a threat to your relationships, but they don’t have to be.

This Course Will Help You:

Identify the ways in which illness has affected your relationships with friends, significant others, work colleagues, medical providers, and even yourself
Determine what aspects of your relationships could be improved or deepened
Use boundaries to create mutually healthy and happy relationships
Learn how different worldviews affect people’s approach to illness
Work to establish more rewarding relationships
Use illness as a path for mutual growth and soul connection

This Course Is For:

People who are struggling with changes in their roles and responsibilities
People who want to deal with relational guilt, anger, fear of abandonment, and other emotions that are often sparked by illness
People who find that illness interferes with their ability to communicate or be fully understood by others
People who want their lives to be full of healthy interactions, love, and support

Register Now

Pay what you can afford. No one will be turned away for financial reasons.

Course Overview

Week 1: Overview. Illness and Relationship.

Week 2: Bridging Perspectives: The Integral Quadrants.

Week 3: Conflict and Healing across the Quadrants

Week 4: Bridging Perspectives: Stages of Development

Week 5: Conflict and Healing across the Stages

Week 6: The Integral We Space

Your Instructor

Dr. Lynn Royster Fuentes

Lynn is a college instructor, educational course designer, and a mediator with a BA, MA, JD, and PhD. An experienced classroom and online instructor, she has designed and taught courses in transpersonal psychology, writing, planning, chronic illness, and conflict management at DePaul University, where she also founded and directed the Chronic Illness Initiative, a program to help students with chronic illness obtain a degree.

A devoted student of Ken Wilber and integral philosophy, she has published integrally oriented essays and articles on conflict resolution and illness management and weaves integral ideas into her course design and teaching. She follows an integral life practice of physical, psychological, meditative, and cognitive development.

Lynn has volunteered in many capacities – with battered women, people in the recovery community, and people with chronic illness – and served on the board of the Solve ME/CFS Association of America for many years. Despite her study of many disciplines, Lynn regards her greatest learning as long-term caregiver for severely ill family members.

FAQs

Do I have to do all of the courses? Or, do them in order?

What if I can’t attend the live calls?

Who are these courses for?

Testimonials

Wendy

And Lynn – simply wow! Thanks for being such a pioneer and putting such an educational and heart-full class together for our benefit. I will read and re-read your handouts as I continue to live with this chronic illness. Your work is a blessing and a deep comfort to me. It is good to be understood and to have partners on this journey. So thank you for showing up on my computer – I will never forget you!

Liz Taylor

As a person struggling with a chronic condition, I find the world isn’t often interested in hearing about my challenges when they come back again and again. But being able to hear from, respond to and talk live with others who share that experience gave me a sense of being seen and heard in such a healing way. Never have I felt so connected to so many new friends in such a deep and meaningful way.

Heather

Lynn has created a way of seeing our experience of illness that empowers and enlivens. Being part of her course let’s me know I’m part of a greater whole where my challenges are shared. I can feel connected, seen and heard. Even the difficult stuff is allowed.

Brent

I can’t count the blessings and benefits these courses have been for me. When I was first looking for a sponsor in AA, it was suggested that I look for a man “that had something I wanted”. Don’t worry, I have a sponsor – but that’s the feel I get from you.

You have a wonderful presence – kind, wise and humble. I’m not the best book learner/reader – I’m more experiential. This has been a great experience in learning Integral theory and practice.

Thank you! Deep bow of gratitude.

Susan Schuurmans

The course has prodded me out of my comfort zones, humbled me when I see the challenges others face, invited me into a valuable self-assessing of myself, and challenged me to engage once again with the Integral model, this time grittily working on my understanding of myself and where I can grow into further ways to work with great consciousness with this dis-ease. Lynn teaches from a place of being a person still learning after all these years in the territory of illness and caretaking and shares as a companion on this challenging journey how she finds the perspective of Integral is useful when living with illness.

Laria

This course is wonderfully thought provoking and has so many valuable tools I hope to keep revisiting it again and again to further contemplate all that you have given us.