"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]

*gentle hugs*

[toomuchplor]

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*