My therapist has been working through some traumas with me. Amazingly, most of the war trauma has significantly lessened already, but I have found through talking with her that I still have significant medical traumas. We were talking and suddenly I started crying. No warning. Just an instantaneous reaction.

“Do you want to unpack that?” She asked.

“Yes”.

I’ve had a line of bad therapists. One who once fell asleep in front of me during session. The same one who told me extensive details of his own child abuse. Another who misgendered me immediately after finding out I was nonbinary. One who told me I would be “healed completely” if I followed their advice. A lot of inappropriateness.

So following my car crash last year, I was entitled to some therapy sessions to work through my fear of driving, and found Catherine. She was my third therapist with the insurance company. The first one I fired for telling me they would heal me completely. Not a good fit. The next left after a family emergency and didn’t come back.

Catherine was different. She immediately told me the boundaries of the relationship. What she could and couldn’t say. What she would and wouldn’t write in the case notes. I liked her. As time wore on, I found her style to work really well with mine.

She told me about this technique that seems really silly, but works for me for processing a lot of traumas. So far every trauma I’ve tried. You cross your arms in a self-hug and start tapping alternatively on each shoulder. While tapping, you imagine the trauma like a movie in full. Then you imagine where that trauma is stored, like your stomach, or your head. Next, you imagine some sort of tool, like a hammer or a chisel removing the block of trauma, chipping away at it until it’s gone. Then you reimagine the trauma, but change the ending. So if you turned right into a crash the first time, this time, you turn left.

So I worked through three medical traumas with her in session. Once, where they didn’t realise I had malaria and sent me home, even though I specifically asked them to test for that, because that’s what it felt like. I nearly died that night, my fever dangerously high.

Another time, where I failed the tilt table test spectacularly, my heart going up rapidly and excessively, me puking and then passing out. Only, instead of taking this as a finding of a problem, the doctor told me I was “too fat” and to just “lose weight, eat more salt, and wear compression stockings”. Hard to exercise when every time I stood up, I passed out. My quality of life became nonexistent.

The third time, they told me I had lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, a whole host of different conditions that turned out to be wrong. Then they thought leukemia and told me they were about to start me on chemotherapy, when my allergist finally decided to ask about my travel. They found my parasites that day, and I was healed with only three simple pills, taken every three months for a while. The damage to my body from years of them wreaking havoc was too late.

When I started to look into the past, more incidents came up. One after another, after another. Several years, almost a decade of getting sicker and sicker physically and being told it was PTSD. Of not being believed. Of being told to lose weight. Work out. When that literally made things worse.

I wish doctors had to train in bed for two weeks, incapacitated, but their mind still working, so they can feel the pain of being incapacitated or being disabled. So they can understand that people come to them for help, and their flippant attitude toward any patient is fucked up. Maybe some better bedside manner training.

So Catherine and I worked through my three traumas and I spent the next two days working through every traumatic memory I could muster. I told her about my progress and she kind of chuckled a little, “you’re not supposed to do all your life’s traumas in one go”.

Little did she knew, I barely scratched the surface.

Subscribe