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

[toomuchplor]

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]

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]

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*

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[lately]

After all this time, there's still shit I don't know about you. ♥

[gozer]

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!