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"Calm down, it's nothing to cry about."

  • Oct. 17th, 2010 at 3:01 PM
toomuchplor: (Default)
I broke my wrist – just a little greenstick fracture, the kind that barely needs a cast – when I was 2 or 3 years old.  I don't particularly remember the accident itself, though I have a clear memory of the minutes leading up to it, and of the hospital plastering room afterwards, but my body remembers it.  I'm almost thirty years past that little minor fracture and to this day, when I'm upset, I feel it in the base of my throat as everyone else describes, but also as a painful random pulse of pain spiking up into my right thumb and down the side of my radius. 

I even associate the feeling with a sort of shameful self-pity, probably because I cried and whined a lot (too much, my parents say) as a little girl and was usually told that I was making a fuss over nothing.

[As an interesting aside, the same thing happened, I'm told, when I broke my wrist initially.  I fell off a piece of playground equipment, landed on my wrist, and wailed and carried on for minutes afterwards.  My older brother and I were in a summer play group, and even when he told the leaders with all sincerity that even his whiny baby sister didn't usually cry this much, the leaders in their wisdom told us both that I was fine and I should stop crying.  Eventually, I guess I did.  It wasn't until hours later, playing out in the back yard, that I took a second tumble – whiny and clumsy, I guess – and hit the same place on my wrist and screamed an unholy scream.  My mom came to take a look and found that my wrist was purple-black around the place it had been fractured.  Vindication!]

I don't think I've ever told anyone that before, but that's where I feel pain physically when I'm hurting emotionally.  Isn't it weird, the places our bodies choose to carry trauma?

Anyone have a weird thing they've never told to anyone before?  Anonymous comments turned on and IP logging off, if anyone wants to share without sharing their identity too.

Comments

sheafrotherdon: Two men, seated, leaning in to touch their foreheads together (Default)
[personal profile] sheafrotherdon wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 09:45 pm (UTC)
Memory is such a powerful thing. I feel memory almost every day in my arms, which throb as though I have the flu, but only there. My arms are what I used to fend off my abuser, and they were pinned by him at other times - by body remembers both; the movement and the stillness.

In 2005 and 2006 I sought help for the debilitating cramps I had every time I had a period. I'd been prescribed percocet for the pain - whether I took it or not, I had to miss work every time I had a period because I couldn't move or function when a cramp came. I had every test imaginable; I had ultrasounds internally and externally, with saline solution in my uterus and without; I had lap. surgery to explore for endometriosis. The doctors found nothing.

Since beginning EMDR I've noticed that when I have a flashback or a bad dream, I get cramps. The cramps aren't linked to a period - I've been on hormones to suppress my cycle since 2006. They're pains linked to a memory I don't even consciously have. I don't know what my body has stored in that pain - rather, it's that I've come to understand and trust that my body bore witness when my mind shut down. I may never know what happened; all I can do is care for this body when it steps out of time and experiences an old hurt as if it's new.
monanotlisa: (lean on me - alias)
[personal profile] monanotlisa wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 09:49 pm (UTC)
*gentle hugs*
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 01:58 am (UTC)
Wow, that's so intense. I remember having one of those deep post-adolescent conversations with a friend of mine about self-identity and how we knew with certainty that we are the same selves we were as small children. I argued that only I hold certain memories, and that gives me a sense of continuity -- but I think the body memory argument might be even stronger. I am wildly different in a million ways from that little toddler with the broken wrist but my body remembers that (probably first) intense pain even when my mind doesn't.

*hugs*
monanotlisa: symbol, image, ttrpg, party, pun about rolling dice and getting rolling (Default)
[personal profile] monanotlisa wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 09:47 pm (UTC)
What a fascinating story. I have no trouble believing that body and mind would forever link this experience and replicate the physical pain with only a mental trigger later on, knowing that our body accumulate flaw lines: through regular exercise, I don't have backaches anymore...but two days before my period, the area around my lumbar spine gives me enough trouble to contemplate more exercises, or painkillers. It's right where my crushed vertebra is - where the neurobiological path for pain impulses is, in my case, more like the friggin' Autobahn. ;)

Weird memories I can come up with - the above doesn't even count; pain memory as such is well-documented - but I honestly think I probably told most of them. *g*

Edited 2010-10-17 09:48 pm (UTC)
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 02:00 am (UTC)
Hmm, interesting that your back would be a locus for pain. I guess I'm lucky with my wrist. The moral of the story is that parents should make sure the first major injury is to an extremity? Haha...
(Anonymous) wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 10:18 pm (UTC)
This is in a slightly different vein, but I heard voices when I was little. There would be a high pitched, electric, tinnitus kind of sound for half a moment that resolved into a word or a phrase or a bar of music, more clear and perfect than anything I'd ever heard with my ears.

At night, I saw horrible, demonic faces hovering over my bed. I hallucinated that the doorway was shrinking in on itself and blue light was streaking along the crown molding. When I crawled out of bed and walked down the hall to the bathroom, I would stare up at the weird light.

When I was a teenager, I read, somewhere, the early signs of schizophrenia and totally freaked out, expecting to have a psychotic break any day. Never happened. The voice phenomenon became less and less frequent and is now an extremely rare occurrence. The nighttime hallucinations stopped by the time I was six, or so. My dad was furious that I was waking them up every night and eventually locked me in with the nightmares. I guess it worked.
medeine: Red maple leaf on aqua, reading Medeine (Default)
[personal profile] medeine wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 12:55 am (UTC)
Me, too. I couldn't watch Stargate for years because the deep, modulated Goauld voice reminded me so much of the voice I heard, which was always a man's voice. I always knew that it wasn't real and struggled to make it go away. Eventually, I told the voice that it was my friend and couldn't scare me, and it finally went away. I had terrible hallucinations, too, mostly when I was feverish but occasionally at school (though those ones I had to figure out in retrospect, because they seemed real at the time!)

When I was a teenager I finally told my dad, and he told me that I may have staved off schizophrenia.
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 02:06 am (UTC)
Amazing! I had a friend who had night terrors as a little toddler and would wake up screaming unintelligibly. When her parents finally coaxed her into English, she'd only say, "I don't belong here," over and over. She has no memory of these incidents, but her mom was kind of spooked and said it seemed like weirdly strong evidence of past lives. I'm totally not a 'woo-woo' kind of person but that one still gives me the willies, especially as this friend is one of those people who is constantly being told she as an "old soul".
medeine: Red maple leaf on aqua, reading Medeine (Default)
[personal profile] medeine wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 05:18 am (UTC)
I'm told that I had night terrors, too, but it's true that you don't remember them at all. At least in that sense they're better than nightmares!
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 09:50 pm (UTC)
Agreed. And probably a little comforting for the parents, too, I guess.
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 02:03 am (UTC)
Ooh, reading this gave me shivers. I remember some creepy childhood visual/auditory hallucinations, but nothing persistent or vivid like this. I do recall being so overtired at about 7 or 8 that my wallpaper started crawling up and down the wall and I ran crying (see above, re. whiny child) to my mother because it scared me so badly.

Neurologically speaking, our brains take a long time to sort out sensory pathways so I suppose as children we're much more susceptible to a nerve impulse firing down the wrong pathway and triggering a hallucinatory event. I've read that babies under about 6 months literally can't differentiate sensory input - touch, smell, taste, sound, sight all use the same pathways in the brain, so listening to music or watching a picture is literally a psychedelic experience for infants that young. Cool.
lately: (hanging on in there)
[personal profile] lately wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 11:57 pm (UTC)
After all this time, there's still shit I don't know about you. ♥
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 02:04 am (UTC)
I'm sure it's the same with you! I do have a few of these weird ones stored up that I've never divulged, not out of some sense of secrecy, but because they're so ancient.
gozer: tweeter made this! (Give her a pony!)
[personal profile] gozer wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 04:53 am (UTC)
When I was very little, pre-school/kindergarten/1st grade age, I saw a multitude of sparkling, swirling dots as I lay in the dark in my room -- they were so vivid, aggressive, and bright that I used to hide under my blankets in terror! When I was a little older, say about the second grade through the fourth, I suffered from what I believe are called "myclonic jerks" -- I'd be lying in bed, almost asleep, and suddenly it would be as if the bed had been flipped over with me in it. Terrifying!

The dots finally stopped after I realized I could control them -- I used to form them into the shapes of roller coasters and Ferris wheels -- and the bed-flippies happened less and less often and eventually stopped when I grew up (I was kind of enjoying them by the time they stopped.) Apparently the sensation of flipping over was caused by my inner-ear growing as I got older, and I found out later that very near-sighted people like myself can have "visual migraines" when they are young, also probably caused by the eye growing, and the brain trying to make sense of what it's seeing.

I am really glad I never told anybody about the dots -- schizophrenia runs in my family (grandmother & uncle) and I think I might have been falsely diagnosed if I'd shared!
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 05:17 am (UTC)
I found out later that very near-sighted people like myself can have "visual migraines" when they are young, also probably caused by the eye growing, and the brain trying to make sense of what it's seeing.

Oh, weird! I was (up until my Lasik surgery a year ago) very nearsighted too, though not terribly so, but I guess I missed that particular experience. I so remember the falling/flipping feeling though.

My little niece was here for a sleepover a few days ago, and I was quite surprised to discover that (aged 2.5) she's suddenly entered the phase of childhood where she gets spooked at night. She's one tough little cookie most of the time but she called me into the room insisting that she was hearing noises and there was someone in the room. *shivers* Why does it sound more credible coming from such a little one? It's baffling.
gozer: I made this! (Default)
[personal profile] gozer wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 08:01 pm (UTC)
I had glasses in Kindergarten, so I think my eyes were pretty badly off pretty much from birth.

I loved a talk given on the TED site by Oliver Sachs where he talked about perfectly normal, very vivid hallucinations that people who start losing their eyesight have... then he revealed that he, himself, suffered from them. Most people don't share because they're afraid they're going crazy, but apparently it happens to a ton of people.

So jealous of your LASIK! I went to see if I could get LASIK and was told I was a poor candidate.

I'll be someone told your niece, either teasing or in jest, that the monsters were coming, or she saw a cartoon that stuck in her head. Something definitely precipitated that reaction!
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 09:50 pm (UTC)
I loved a talk given on the TED site by Oliver Sachs where he talked about perfectly normal, very vivid hallucinations that people who start losing their eyesight have... then he revealed that he, himself, suffered from them.

Huh, I've heard of that. A blind friend of mine who lost his eyesight gradually since childhood and has no vision now was telling me that he is constantly having "light shows" like flashes of colour and light even though his eyes aren't capable of seeing light anymore. Crazy!
gozer: I made this! (Default)
[personal profile] gozer wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 11:28 pm (UTC)
How much crazier would it be if he saw 1/6-sized people dressed in old-fashioned clothing, like one of Sacks' patients. Sacks himself sees numbers and letters and checkerboards and funnels! He compares it to having a phantom limb.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/09/17/qa_with_oliver/
toomuchplor: (Default)
[personal profile] toomuchplor wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 09:51 pm (UTC)
Oh, and in answer to your other comment -- my mom is convinced she saw a kid being scared of the dark on a TV show, and that's where it came from. Who knows what goes on in their little heads, though?
gozer: I made this! (Default)
[personal profile] gozer wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 11:30 pm (UTC)
Yep, that sounds right. If they identify with a character in a show, the character can influence them, for good or for ill. How do you get a kid to *stop* being scared in this instance? The question is, do you give her a nightlight or is it better to try to reason with her, or just let it lay and hope she gets over it eventually?

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