Deconstructing the old way

Deconstruction is like a pendulumn. You start at one side, and before you land somewhere in the middle you swing wildly to the other side, to the point of other people thinking you may have gone insane. At least that’s the way it was for me.

I spent my entire life in the medical system, in such a way that I was deeply reliant on it. Not only to be alive, though many, many medical interventions were taken to ensure my survival, but also in a trauma bonding way. Before I could even talk, I got the message that someone else was the authority of my life. My body wasn’t trustworthy, numbers on a page said more than my feelings ever would and regardless how I felt what I did was dictated by someone else. I wrote once it felt like every part of my body was being marked with a red pen, and how does one grow under such scrutiny? Hint: they don’t.

I have great respect for doctors and all they do, and innovation has come a long way in my lifetime. And I experienced this environment as toxic and abusive, and the number one thing it did was teach me not to trust myself and to ignore my intuition. Anyone else? The concept of medical trauma didn’t exist yet, and so I grew up thinking I was the only one who ever felt this way, that I needed to yet again ignore my feelings and just be more grateful. This denial of self set the path for many future abusive relationships, not speaking up and allowing things to happen I definitely did not consent to.

When I began to feel slightly better post transplant, some of that freed up energy began to be put to use shedding light on that trauma I’d silently endured for years. It broke my heart. So much so that I felt so strongly I never wanted to go back into the healthcare system or see any doctor ever again. This wasn’t a reality, nor would it have been a safe, responsible thing to do, but it was a natural response to the trauma I’d stored inside my body. It was my far swing in the opposite direction. Every time I ended up back in the hospital for one thing or another, I lost all sense of intuition and power, and I felt sucked back in. No matter how much I didn’t want something, something in my body knew submitting was easier than fighting. My thoughts, my intuition, anything other than my blind consent was not welcome here, and as a survival mechanism my body switched on the fawn response. It’s similar to fight or flight, neither of which I could have done in my situation, and as a way to try and ensure survival one becomes overly sweet and accomodating in hopes of remaining a non-threat in a situation they feel is very threatening. My fawn response would switch on, and when I would get home and out of “the danger zone”, I would beat myself up wondering why I’d consented to this and this, why I hadn’t said something.

Trauma isn’t something you can think your way out of. Despite my mind knowing what I wanted, as soon as my body felt threatened it took over. As soon as my intuition was questioned by a “medical professional” I played nice and accomodating. It’s a common response for women, raised to believe girls are sugar and spice and everything nice, with very low tolerance for emotional expression. When we don’t break patterns, we repeat them, and on and on it goes. To work through this trauma stored in my body from years and years of violation, I needed to go into it. Trauma was clogged in my body, making it insanely hard for anything else to even emerge, or for my intuition to even stand a chance. And it wasn’t my fault. But healing was my responsibility.

I was writing a piece not too long ago about our current political climate when I wrote something about freedom that struck me. “I want to be as free in a jail cell as I am on the wide, open prairies.” In that I meant my freedom isn’t external. No authority figure or physical location or mandate can take it from me. If it can, that’s not true freedom. I feel the same way about safety. Tired of being yanked around on a chain, I didn’t want my sense of safety to come from anything external. Freedom and safety, I learned, were qualities I had to resource within myself. And I wanted, needed, to expand my capacity for them.

The world we live in gives us a great deal of knowledge. I went home from my transplant visit with an entire book full of resources and things to expect and potential side effects. And we should have knowledge. We should know how our bodies work. In situations of illness or transplant, we should know how these conditions affect the body. Knowledge is power. And. And knowledge is useless is it just stays knowledge. If we can’t hear our intuition, if our body is too clogged with trauma to resource our power, if we don’t have this sovereignty and keep looking outward for safety and freedom we can only find internally, then what’s the point? What does it matter if you know the symptoms of liver rejection if you don’t know what to do with it? If you don’t know how to trust your body’s signs of what is ok and what isn’t and what you can handle and when you need support? I have a great medical team. And they aren’t the authority on me. I am. They can give me insight and guidance and treatment, but I call the shots.

I don’t need anyone to save me. I don’t need anyone else to interpret my body for me because I can hear her when she speaks.

This is how this work began. Widening the capacity for freedom and safety. Trusting and standing firm in your intuition and power. It’s never over, it’s always a practice. It’s a practice in a new, radical way of being, of living. I want that for me. I want that for you, too.