In the seemingly endless and timeless saga of gallbladder pain and removal, a lot is coming up for me about the topic of pain. Today's realisation: Do you know what happens when you validate someone's current pain from a place of sincerity? When they know for a certainty that they, who never know anything coming from others to be certain, apart from pain? They begin to heal from past pain.
Validating current pain, especially if you have been as close as you can get to having been in the same situation, allows the other person to look at all the pain they've been through in their life and say: the pain was not just in my head. It was real. And because it was real, it should have been dealt with by that parent, that teacher, that nurse, that doctor, that older, more experienced, more skilled, MORE person.
The pain I went through upon waking up from surgery has made me realise all of this, about all of my pain as a person living with CPTSD and surviving it daily. This is not a pity-party; it is not a wallowing; it is not a feeling sorry for myself - that most cardinal of sins. Sometimes, a lot of times, we don't feel sorry for ourselves enough. How can you heal if you cannot acknowledge that you were hurt? How can you develop the self-empathy necessary to let go and move forward if you listen to that voice of your childhood gods that tells you not to feel sorry for yourself? I'm sorry that happened to you is socially acceptable when someone else says it, but we're not allowed to say it to ourselves?! Fuck that. I need to heal. I need to heal like I need to breathe.
In my endless litany of instances of childhood pain, I was helpless and I was not helped. I cried out in pain and was not heard. So I had to internalise that pain and present an okness, even a happiness to the other person in order to meet their level of need not be bothered by my presence, let alone my need.
So I hid my pain. I was taught to hide it. That was all I knew and could not know better; because if parents don't respond with care, who will? How does a child know better than that? It's difficult enough for an adult to wrap their head around parental neglect and abuse of those parents' own child. Instilled in me from my first breath, I did not learn how to be otherwise, because I didn't know otherwise existed. So I continued to hide my pain, sometimes consciously, but mostly not. To the extent that no one, not even my partners, my piercers, my tattooers, my doctors, my psychologists, my chosen family, have any idea that I'm in pain or, when they do, to what extent.
Memories keep surfacing in the continuing emotional aftermath of traumatic pain. And they've never been allowed to surface, so I'm experiencing them fully for the first time. Today's surfacing reminded me that I have lain on a roller derby room floor for over an hour with a calf bone broken in two places, a dislocated ankle and a torn main ankle ligament, my foot held to the calf by a torn off t-shirt sleeve while my sister discussed the purchase of a pair of rollerblades before taking me to and leaving me at the emergency room door.
HOW did I endure that? WHY did I endure that? Why didn't I, through my numerous physical and psychic traumas scream and wail and shout? And why is my anger at myself for not asking for help as loud as my screams should have been? Why is this internalised screaming and rage not directed outward?
I endured it because I was taught that pain, whatever its form, needed to be endured because causing pain benefitted them. I'm sure I did scream and wail and shout in the beginning, as much as a child can who has been abused by its parents in numerous forms, numbed by the ultimate form of grooming. I know I did this at the age of 3 because I was told that I did. I was also told, in the same breath, by the person complicit in the pain, that nothing was done. I was not heard or seen or believed. I was not comforted or nurtured or tended to or rescued. I was not treated the way someone who loves another human being treats their loved one. I was not even treated the way someone who loves their dog treats their dog. Because I was not loved. Because I was a burden.
My anger at myself for not asking for help is based on the, I now realise, fucking ludicrous notion that I was not helped over and over and over again because I was asking for help in the wrong way. They're not helping me because I'm not using the right words, or because I can't verbalise what I'm feeling, so I have to keep trying different words, bigger words, un-ignorable words; and when this fails, I need to read and read and read and learn more and more and more words to word my way into being cared for. I'm 45 in a few days, have thousands of books and over 100 000 words, and I am only now learning how to put into words the events, incidents, years, decades, lifetimes of horrific things that have no alphabet, let alone a word to form around them. Mostly, I am learning that the words are not enough. They never will be. But I have to, need to, keep speaking, writing my truth. Because that voiceless child needs to be heard to heal. I will keep fumbling, stuttering my way through in order to externalise this pain, this rage and, ultimately, this grief.
I have struggled and still struggle to externalise my pain, rage and grief beyond my own flesh and lungs. Because it's a lifetime of pain and an accumulated lifetime of rage and grief. How do you even begin to expel that from your body? I sit here with all of this pain flooding back into my body as I begin to remember more and more of it, more and more frequently. The sheer volume of incidents, severity and incomprehensibility of others' neglect in the face of them slashes open scars healed and forgotten, as well as wounds that have gone unnoticed and untreated for decades. Bleeding, bleeding. So much fucking blood.
50 Minutes of therapy four times a week only applies so much pressure to the vomiting wounds. A half an hour, one hour, two hour gap between something coming up in discussion with Noah or someone else in my chosen family and the time before they have to leave or work or make a long overdue meal, is not enough to staunch the blood. How can it be? I feel like I need my loved ones taking turns to hold me, around the clock. We sit with grieving people after a bereavement. That bereavement doesn't end once the sitting with comes to a polite end.
An already difficult year has culminated in unacknowledged and unmanaged severe acute post-surgical pain for 4-5 hours. It is no wonder that it's been a relief for not-medicating-headaches me to have had to be on strong painkillers since the 9th of April. Even though up until yesterday some level of pain causing discomfort has been present throughout, it has been an oasis. Being at the point of being forced to rest, be cared for and care for myself has been like a breathing in deeply after a coughing fit.
Recovering from severe life-long chronic trauma (CPTSD) is not easy. Because experiencing childhood trauma does not mean it ends in childhood. Every single relationship, every interaction with another human being, is tainted by that trauma. Because your mind is injured, damn near to irreparably. Because those essential to birthing you and the yous to come almost murdered your mind, you, the yous to come. It is a relational trauma - a trauma borne from the first relationships you form. This affects every single relationship you'll ever have and all relational events traumatic in and of themselves are complexly interwoven with childhood traumas, making them more traumatic.
A wound cannot heal if it is constantly, constantly reinjured. And I always put a brave face on it. A stoic face. A completely unreadable face. A mask. I have to let that mask down in order to heal.
To the friend who validated my recent pain from a place of having been there, the thing that validated me most was you knowing that current pain always spreads throughout the body and mind and each and every wound re-opens. You have changed not only my experience of that pain, but all the pain before it. You, from over 1000kms away, have sat in front of me, taken both my hands in both of yours, looked me in the eye, unblinkingly, and said, I believe you when you say how much that hurt, I'm sorry that happened to you, and it was not ok, you did nothing to deserve it, you did not do anything or not do anything to warrant receiving less care than you deserved and needed. And then you held me in your arms 'til long after I had finished crying, brought a comforting meal and drink in on a tray, tucked me in and kissed me on the forehead after I had settled down, and sang Soft Kitty. And you didn't have to say I love you, because I felt it, and you knew this, but you said it anyway. I don't know you very well in the socially accepted way that is measured. But I see you. And I love you.
And Noah, as always, you're on my thank you list: you haven't been where I am or was, and yet you respond from your own trauma in ways that make me feel that my feet are not alone in the shoes I have to walk this road in. You are unbelievable - a phenomenon beyond belief. And yet I believe in you, because you keep performing miracles. You keep being a miracle.
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