Relational and Medical Trauma: My Pain Connects Me to the Pain of Others

For someone who suffers from relational trauma and medical trauma, having to rely on doctors, surgeons, nurses, and healthcare administrators I don’t trust is a subtle but exquisite form of torture.

It is not waterboarding or sleep deprivation or rats crawling on my limbs or needles under my fingernails or toenails.

It is not seeing my loved ones shot or having a gun put to my head.

It’s being confined to an elementary school populated by minor criminals. It’s being slapped across the face repeatedly on your birthday. It’s an invisible elephant sitting on your sprained big toe. It’s mosquitoes and hornets. It’s stepping out of the bed in hope of a new day and falling interminably through space until you smash on stones. Your lips bleed. Your nose runs.

What do you do when the world and its inhabitants disappoint you again and again and again?

Just when I expect to arrive home, to be welcomed and catered to and loved, the agents cloaked in bulletproof vests, power, and anonymity, close in for examination and interrogation. Where have I put my citizenship papers? Where is my card of belonging? The special pass that allows me to be, simply be, myself, safe and free. Protected and not molested. Whole and unscathed.

And I know, in the context of global problems, my terror and my loathing are small bits. Are threats I can run from, are problems I can solve, because I am not as exposed as some people although I feel exposed. I am not as vulnerable as some people although I feel vulnerable.

However minor my oppression, it gives me a wide field for feeling. It allows me to develop and refine a sympathy, an empathy, which connects me to others who I know and who I don’t know, who I meet and who I don’t meet, who I understand and who I don’t understand.

The pain that resides in me connects me to the pain of others. It is not nice or easy. It is not kind or comforting. But it has shaped me and formed me. It motivates me to stay on the right side of life, to weigh my words and my actions carefully, to create miniscule miracles of tolerance and witness. 

Because hardship has made me gentle. 

Because cruelty has made me virtuous. 

Because injury has made me strong.

Expanding the field for feeling