I just wanted to pop back and revisit this comment that you said to me a few days ago. I have been really lucky I was referred to a chronic fatigue clinic and had someone brilliant act as a mental health therapist which was really helpful in getting me to accept this was a life long, life changing condition. I have been diagnosed with Moderate ME/CFS and you are right, a big part of what I had to go through was grieving for the lost me, the man I had been that was now gone.
One day I described to my therapist an incident that had happened to me when out with my wife and they told me I had experienced a classic panic attack. From that I ended up having therapy with a brilliant bastard of a therapist for anxiety and depression, which started off focusing on what I thought was depression, but ended up highlighting I was suffering from crippling levels of anxiety. I call him a brilliant bastard because for many sessions he would tear me apart and then build me back up again, week by week, and a large part of this was getting past the grief I felt for the lost me.
In one session I described how I had not attended a local Remembrance memorial service, because it would have meant me sitting while everyone else was standing. He asked me how would I feel if I saw someone with walking sticks sitting down at such an event? I couldn't answer, I fell apart. The truth hit me like a speeding truck. I would have felt compassion. So why could I not feel compassion towards myself? (Cue more blubbing)
Anyway, long story short, I am better now. Not fixed, but that wasn't the point of the sessions. The voices are still there, but now I recognise them for what they are and tell them to piss off. If I start to find excuses not to do something then I really look at them to see if they are valid.
It took six months, but this therapy is directly responsible for me taking these first steps of re-establishing the Male Chastity based FLR my wife and I enjoyed for so many years, during what we now see as a golden period of our marriage. I cannot do what I used to do, but I can do versions of what I used to do, and we can find different ways of doing things.
My wife got many of her ideas of things she wanted me to do back then from the much missed BDSM Male Chastity FLR communities on Tumblr. One example was the evening she made me strip and kneel in front of her (obviously caged!) and hold a glass of red wine for her while she watched a movie. For two hours she did not talk to me, just held out her hand when she wanted her drink. I wasn't allowed to put it down, I wasn't allowed to speak, I wasn't allowed to watch the movie. By the end of the experience I was deeper into subspace than I had ever previously been, during our debrief she admitted she could hardly remember anything that happened in the movie as she had become so ridiculously aroused by the entire experience.
The 'what could have been' is gone, as this was one of those moments when we realised this FLR Chastity thing wasn't a game any more, it was real. Who knows where we would have ended up if life and all its stresses hadn't got in the way. But my therapy taught me to find ways to make new memories, and that is what we are doing.