Refuel & Resource:
Making a Life with Chronic Illness, on Our Own Terms
Recovery from mainstream wellness & medical harms. Create a life that fits you and the body you have today, without blaming, shaming, losing hope or burning out.
An 8 week online course with weekly group coaching to support you to build a healing life that fits you.
This class will open in 2025.
Get on the waiting list below.
I Believe
I believe that what we are taught in school, in (most of) our library books, and in TV shows, is not the truth about disability and chronic illness.
I believe - I know - there are thriving communities, activists, advocates and everyday folks living meaningful, powerful lives, on their terms, with, through, and alongside diagnosis.
I believe that the diagnosis handed to us in the hospital does not have to define us.
I believe diagnosis can define us, shaping our lives, our experiences, our relationships, and ourselves.
I believe it’s important we write those definitions - not have them stealthily shaped by the stereotypes people heap upon us.
I believe the discrimination, judgements, cruelty and microaggressions that wear on us over time - and we need to unpack that.
I believe that the medical model may treat us, but it doesn’t serve us.
I believe that we are greater and more complex, loving, messy, funny, delightful, raging and human than many medics will acknowledge.
I believe self-help can do harm and community care is interrelational and essential.
I believe mainstream wellness culture does great harm in its ableism, the pathologisation of suffering, anti-fatness, anti-trans rhetoric and its perpetuation of whiteness and heterosexuality as beauty and health.
I believe it can be possible to find a place between ‘miracle cure’ and ‘unable to keep going’ and to make a life there.
I believe our pain and our possibilities.
The Bootstrap Wellness Narrative
I’ve written a lot about the Bootstrap Wellness Narrative and Compulsive Miracle Cure Culture.
If we live with a non-normative body, we have probably been exposed to the Bootstrap Wellness Narrative and Compulsive Miracle Cure Culture.
The Bootstrap Wellness Narrative is an individualistic, perfectionist, capitalist approach to healing.
It tells us we can - and should - heal alone and if we try hard enough, we can live a “normal” life.
It assumes we all have access to the same resources like wealth, access to fresh food, transport, safe housing and green space and much more.
It invisibilities systemic inequalities and often draws on makeover stories where suffering is long past.
We don’t assume access to resources, wealth or normative ambitions here.
Compulsive Miracle Cure Culture
Mainstream wellness taught me that I needed to spend all my energy, capacity - and most importantly money - on “getting better”.
Because that’s what we’re taught a good life looks like.
(If you can’t scale a mountain to do your asanas or eat your blueberry-chia pudding, are you even living?)
Compulsive Miracle Cure Culture tells us we should always be searching for a cure.
We must be seeking a way to get back to being “normal” and “productive”.
If we aren’t performing that search sufficiently, maybe we don’t truly want to get well. Perhaps, we aren’t really ill.
We are simultaneously blamed for becoming ill in the first place.
In self-development spaces, this myth is often based on a ‘law of attraction’ belief system which suggests it is possible to ‘manifest’ healing through positive thinking, visualisation and belief.
It often suggests painful experiences are the result of ‘negative’ beliefs which have ‘attracted’ similar ‘negative’ events.
It can lead to people blaming themselves for suffering which is a result of complex interplays of circumstances.
We honour those complexities and contexts here.
There’s a space between miracle cure success and mired in suffering.
I believe in living well in the midst of it all.
But the Bootstrap Wellness Narrative doesn’t help us heal.
(Or it didn’t help me).
It piles on the pressure and tells us health, wealth and freedom are possible if only we try hard enough (and buy this programme with just 3 easy payments).
It tells us we don’t have to struggle anymore and one day we too can be shiny, happy and, at least according to the photos, thin, femme and white.
But these narratives undermine and dismiss our real lives, real struggles and real needs.
All of which exist outside of an Instagram square.
I believe in finding ways to live well now - while working to shift the structures of inequity which are contributing to our struggle in the first place.
I didn’t want to wait to get better to dress in a way I love, do things I enjoy or show up in the world.
Because I didn’t know what “getting better” would even look like for me or if it would ever come.
But I found there’s a space between miracle cure success and mired in suffering.
I believe we can play, build community and live there.
Hi, I’m Grace Quantock
I'm an anti-oppressive psychotherapeutic counsellor, writer and advocate.
I help marginalised folks to live well with pain, illness and trauma without disembodiment, burnout or blame.
I’m here for folks with bodies that are deemed complex.
For lives and selves outside the binary.
For all of us who don’t fit the boxes.
For those living on the margins.
For people with chronic illnesses and hurting bodies.
For less-than-patient patients.
For the neurospicy.
For psychiatric patients and survivors.
For the dismissed and disbelieved.
For chronic illness patients who need pragmatism, not platitudes.
For disabled people tired of inspirational tropes wanting to live well.
What Refuel & Resource offers
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If you are looking for support because…
You’re sick and struggling and tired of being told to try yoga by people who’ve never had to pace or manage big pain on too little medication.
Self-help books haven’t worked because they never seem to grasp all you have going on.
Wondering how you’ll ever live when you feel so broken
Feeling lonely and lost from the world because of your struggles
Wondering how to feel human again and if you’ll ever be the person you were before this awful thing happened
Buying every Instagram-recommended supplement that turns out to be a waste of money
Trying a different alternative therapy every month in desperation and to no avail
Fearing that, because you’re NOT able to follow the latest fad or quick fix, you’re not fully committed to your healing (we both know that’s not the case)
Struggling to know where to even begin when it comes to the big list of medical, self-care and wellness tasks you “should” be doing—instead, you’ll know your next steps and what to turn down.
…Then you are in the right place, because I made this course for just these struggles.
I am here for inclusion, for access, for community, for co-production, for nothing about us without us, for all of us or none at all, for making it accessible or burning it down, for ancestors and descendants.
I help marginalised folks to live well with pain, illness and trauma without disembodiment, burnout or blame.
I’ve been featured in The Hay Literary Festival, The Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, NPR and many more.
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My training brings together psychotherapeutic counselling and activism.
I do this to recognise our whole selves as we navigate systemically unjust and struggling systems.
So we can make a life in the midst of it all.
My approach draws together psychodynamic principles and lived experience of disability, chronic pain and health inequity.
So I hope that you can show up as yourself without needing to educate me on your day-to-day realities.
My work draws upon these traditions and teachers; Stefanie Lyn Kaufman Mthimkhulu, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dori Midnight, Marion Dunlea, Linda Kohanov, Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Sins Invalid and Alice Wong.
My work grows out of disability and social justice, activism and advocacy and my approach is grounded in interconnectivity, community and allyship with our land and world.
I offer an alternative to the medical model and the individualistic self-help model, together we integrate the practices, tools and possibilities that fit you and find a new path to your potential.
What You Will Get On This Course
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We’ll meet via Zoom, for weekly group coaching office hours so you can get real-time feedback on your challenges and get support to tailor the content to your body and needs.
The sessions will have an automatic transcript and a panotypist and ASL/BSL interpreters are available if that’s an access adjustment for you.
We will be an intimate group, so you won’t get missed in the crowd.
As this course is for folks living with limits, you’ll likely find other folks’ questions relevant and find they offer insight into your own experiences.
This matters because mainstream wellness often isolates those of us with non-normative bodies, terming us ‘outliers’ or somehow irrelevant to the main discussion.
Here, our experiences our centred, disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent bodies and minds are the default.
You’ll access the course materials on the online platform Teachable.
Every week there’s an editable PDF workbook (and a screenreader-accessible version).
As well as an audio covering the material - with transcripts.
There’ll be support to make an accessible plan, tailored to you, to live well with whatever illnesses and complexities you are experiencing.
The price is £555 for the course.
Yes, there are payment plans available and there’s no extra charge for that. You can start as soon as we open for enrollment for just £235.
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This is not about miracles, cures or happily-ever-afters.
I’m still sick, still not cured, but I found more possibility and space to live when I stopped trying to have a life designed by someone else, for bodies not like mine.
But my work is not about teaching you my path or trying to make you like me.
You may not want to see therapy clients, teach workshops, sit in the boardroom or fundraise capital for accessible tech startups (but if you do, call me, because we need more folks doing this).
I intimately understand that the charity approach to our pain (the charity model of disability) doesn’t work.
Not only is it patronising - I don’t need pity - but it’s inaccurate as for most of us, we aren’t a singular sick person surrounded by well-resourced non-disabled people with plentiful time, money and energy to support us and our goals.
We heal in community and we may be both responsible for/to others and living in relationship with people, communities, landscapes and lineages.
This means we don’t heal alone, even when we feel alone.
We have to account for our lived relational experience when we are thinking about change.
The Bootstrap Wellness Narrative tells us we can do it all ourselves if we try hard enough. I don’t think that’s what it is to be human.
I’m working with you to find your own way, what fits your body and life. What this means for you is that my work emerges directly from lived and community experience and is intersectional.
I’m not going to impose my experience on you, try to teach you to be like me or assume your body or life is anything like mine.
I’m going to believe your experiences and help you navigate them and strategies to live well, in the midst of it all - whatever that looks like for you.
If that sounds good to you, come and join us and let’s find a way to live well, now, in the midst of it all.
What We Cover in Refuel & Restore
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Beginning by looking critically at diagnosis as a medical and social construct so you can see clearly what shapes your experience of your body.
We consider diagnosis as a disruptor, an opportunity to critically consider other life-limiting assumptions and conventions so this disruption becomes shedding of outdated limits.
Exploring what health looks like for us in our body, today allows us to make choices which fit the body and future we need.
Unpacking the pressure to produce and perform positivity and wellness (which impacts our energy levels and pushes us into depleting boom-and-bust cycles)
Realigning ourselves from common myths about mainstream wellness, toxic positivity and Compulsive Miracle Cure Cultures helps us make strong choices about our own care.
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Formulating ways to be alongside our body and illness fluctuations without feeling like we are failing.
Logging experiences alongside pain, as we are not synonymous with our symptoms.
Exploring our emotional awareness and regulation without pathologising our suffering for freedom to feel without guilt.
Sustainability and creativity when living in limits helps us make plans that don’t fall apart under a flare day.
Planning for tough times with pragmatism and compassion.
Making flexible plans to grasp our futures without setting ourselves up to struggle.
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Taking inventory of our current environment and exploring what is reflective of us now.
Finding possibilities with limited options - exploring self-advocacy for our medical and care considerations.
Approaching patient blaming and symptom minimisation. Protecting ourselves from prejudice in assessments and applications.
A compassionate approach to research and exploring medical and self-management options helps us gather the data we need without overwhelm or burn out.
Unfolding making meaning with connection, creativity, career and more.
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Exploring self and community care as disability culture and justice.
Unfolding our relationships with the medical and care industrial complex. And separating campaigning from immediate care needs.
Unpacking the conventions we carry and choosing what to take forward.
Having tricky conversations with folks holding stereotyped views of living with illness.
Practising the care and feeding of community, while living with limited energy to maintain what we most need - receiving and giving.
Creating a care pod and tending our care webs for stronger foundations.
How does Refuel & Restore work?
We are putting together practices for making a life with chronic illness that fits our bodies and lives.
It doesn’t have to be miracle cure or bust.
There are alternatives to handing over our autonomy to anyone in a white coat or swallowing the conspiracy snake oil.
Another way is possible.
My approach in Refuel and Restore rests on my 4R Process of Review, Renew, Reignite and Replenish which helps us to unpack, connect to what works for us and find ways to bring that forward into our lives.
About Your Facilitator
Hi, I’m Grace Quantock
I'm an anti-oppressive psychotherapeutic counsellor, writer and advocate. I help marginalised folks to live well with pain, illness and trauma without disembodiment, burnout or blame.
I help marginalised folks to live well with pain, illness and trauma without disembodiment, burnout or blame.
FAQs
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This isn’t suitable for everyone. I have lots of free and low-cost resources you can find on this website.
This programme is the most support you’ll get from me for the money.
It’s substantially cheaper and working one on one.
If money is tight, (and I’ve been there—with all my money disappearing on medicine, rent or food) I understand.
Feel free to explore the lower-cost options I offer.
This is my livelihood. I need to charge for my time and energy.
This isn’t just an ebook download, it’s a complex process we are exploring together, creating a tailored experience for you to find your way of living well on your terms.
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Managing our symptoms, dealing with day-to-day tasks and just simply feeling bad takes up a whole lot of time.
But imagine what would happen if you had some of that time back - what would you be able to do?
Taking this course can help you plan for a life that fits you.
If you are not well enough now - when you take the class, you get lifetime access.
So even if you take just one lesson now, that’s more support and shift than you would have had otherwise.
The class will still be there for you.
You can dip in and out as needed or join us and do a little more each round and be in the group with new students.
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I get it, I really do, illness itself is overwhelming.
There is so much information, so much pain and pressure coming at you all at once.
And if you have allergies or sensitivities buying a bottle of shampoo becomes a herculean task.
With Refuel & Resource, you have access to my 14 years of work and research.
I will teach you my overwhelm-busting research methods too.
You have a supportive community, paced learning with an option to take as long as you need.
It's time to exhale, let's do this together, if is sounds right for you now.
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There’s tons of free information online that I can read to learn about how to live well with illness.
I’m sure you can.
But why should you have to?
We all need teachers and allies and I don't want you to deprive yourself of the support if it would help you.
Let's get quiet and ask - how is it working out so far, trying to deal with it all on your own?
How does it feel?
What are you looking for from this programme?
Because if you love what I share here, join us.
You deserve a break, dear one.
You've had to be strong alone for so long.
Learning to live well with illness is not just about information.
Here, you get feedback and support from an experienced coach and a supportive community.
As master coach Erika Lyremark says, "Olympians don’t become champions from reading information."
Often it’s the implementation that we struggle with and this is something we will do together here.
Get ready to join us
This programme will open in 2025.
If you resonate with this, please join me. However, if you are interested in this because you feel manipulated, a fear of missing out, false scarcity, or that any hesitation you have is “just an excuse and means you don’t want it badly enough”, please do not purchase this, as I don’t want to be a part of, or participate in creating that experience for you.
If you feel this is a path or truth, depth, transformation, and kindness, then I am already doing my job and would love to have you join us.*
* credited to beloved and amazing Randi Buckley.
You can sign up for the Restore & Resource waiting list here.
Signing up isn’t committing to anything. It just means I will notify you when I open for enrollment.
You can opt-out at any time (and in the mean time, you’ll get my Healing in Tough Times newsletter - I think you’ll love it).
