Why We Don't Trust Ourselves
And how healing can only begin when we own the truth of how our bodies are feeling.
I argue with people in my head. A lot.
Most often, in these made-up conversations I find myself arguing for the validity of my pain or struggle, and/or trying to convince my imaginary interlocutor that their perspective on weight/gender/rest/ability/etc is wrong. Currently I am spending a good chunk of each day internally yelling at ghosts that: Autism is a real thing, and I have it; ARFID is a real thing, and I have it; the way our healthcare system treats people in fat and/or disabled bodies is trash; white supremacy is the root of all evil.
I’ve had moderate success shutting down these phantom debates by conjuring my inner Ron Swanson and embodying the same energy he brings to being accosted by a Home Depot employee.
As annoying as it is to have so much mental real estate invested in these pretend arguments—and as much as I love sending in Ron Swanson to shut them up—I know that they signal a deep, unmet need. I’ve realized that days when the arguing is the loudest are the ones when the unmet need feels most tender—which is often days when my capacity is the lowest.
The unmet need is to have my pain, struggle, or distress seen, witnessed, validated, and attuned to by the people whom, historically, I have had to rely on for care, comfort, and/or survival: my parents, other family members, teachers, health care providers, etc.
Arguing that our pain, our struggle, our distress is real is the very same thing as arguing that WE ARE REAL. The project of white supremacy and the enslavement of Black people was rooted in denying the pain their bodies have endured, and continue to endure. The current project of trying to disappear trans people via legislation is rooted in denying the pain they experience, the cure for which is gender-affirming care.
When we deny someone’s lived experience of their pain, struggle, or distress, we dehumanize them. We deny their very humanity, their very existence. And this happens at various scales and to varying degrees of harm, from ignorance to callousness to outright fascism and genocide, at every level of relationship we are a part of.
So while my phantom debates with the ghosts of my mind might be fashioned out of facts and figures, and might run the gamut from elegant to cut-a-bitch trenchant, at their root is the same plea: MY PAIN IS REAL. I AM REAL. I NEED TO KNOW THAT YOU SEE ME.
We are fundamentally social creatures, wired to connect. Our brain development and the development of so much of our nervous system and physiology depend on safe connection and safe attunement with our caregivers when we are infants. In many respects, we do not learn to see ourselves outside of what is mirrored back to us in our early environments of care.
So if our pain, our distress, our struggle is not mirrored, not witnessed, not acknowledged or tended to by our caregivers, we land in a profoundly confusing and alienating place: one in which my body tells me one thing, which is that I am hurt, and therefore need help; and my parent or teacher or other grown up tells me that I’m fine, that my pain isn’t real. As a small child with a still-developing brain and sense of self, how then do I know what’s true? How do I know if I am even real?
(CW: childhood injury, trauma, blood.)
When I was about 6-7 months old, I was cruising along in a baby walker1 and fell down the stairs in our split-level house. My forehead gashed open at the hairline, and blood trickled down into and out of my ear, so there was concern that the bleeding was coming from inside my ear (it wasn’t.) My aunt, who was about 15 and my babysitter for the summer, tried to take me to our neighbor’s house first, but there was nobody home, so she called my mom who worked nearby.
This is a story that I have grown up hearing and telling, and it was always made into a joke, as is the preferred method of dealing in my family of origin. Hahaha, wasn’t that hilarious that time you cracked your head open on the landing. The story was told to me as a joke, and so that’s how I internalized it: it was this thing that happened to me that made the grown-ups laugh. It was their story, not mine, and it was a funny one.
Once I started digging into developmental trauma and C-PTSD, a lot of these old stories resurfaced, asking to be told again in a new way. Early last year, I called my mom and asked her to tell me the story of the walker again. I took notes while we talked, about 6 pages worth, and in those notes I have counted no less than 12 statements in which she minimized the impact of the accident. “Nothing bad happened.” “You were ok.” “You didn’t cry.” “It was fine.”
One striking part of the story that I didn’t remember having heard before is that, as my mom walked up to the house, having taken a taxi home from work, she saw blood on the sidewalk. My blood. On the sidewalk. From when my aunt had carried me next door, seeking help.
As an adult hearing the story anew, these two things are hard to reconcile. Which is it? Was there blood on the ground in front of my house, blood from my baby head? Or was I fine? I feel like any day in which one of my kids should happen to bleed from their head would be decidedly not fine. I’ve had a couple instances—blessedly only a couple—when I feared for one of my kids’ lives, and the only way to accurately describe those instances is to say, I have never been more scared in my life. That I felt the life drain out of me, as I do now, thinking back so that I can write this. There was an ok part to the story, but it came later.
Look, this isn’t a story to dig on my mom, or anyone else whose care I’ve been under. This shit is generational; it rolls downhill. You can’t connect and protect at the same time2, and when I reflect on this story (and others like it) from my childhood, I see the patterns of protection that had to be in place for generations.
My mom didn’t minimize my pain because she didn’t care, but because she couldn’t care. Because there were no resources for her as a mom if she were to really feel the fear that something bad happened to her child, just like there weren’t safe resources for her own pain when she was a child. Therefore, me being ok was the only option. So I was ok–outwardly. Inwardly, it’s another story. The one I’m telling right now.
But wasn’t I ok—meaning, alive? Didn’t everything go back to normal, meaning, the bad scary shit went away, I had a wad of gauze wrapped to my head, and then we all laughed? Isn’t that what ok means—it looks ok, and then we tell jokes?
It’s important to tell these stories now—the ones about how our pain and distress were missed, or ignored, or denied, or belittled by our caregivers—because many of us are in positions of needing to learn to be safe caregivers to our low-capacity bodies, and the ways in which our bodies’ needs were believed or not, were met or not, is going to deeply influence the ways in which we listen and tend to our bodies.
By far the biggest obstacle I have found to tending to my low-capacity body (second only to the complete lack of systemic & collective care) is the constant questioning & gaslighting myself when it comes to my body communicating its needs.
Am I REALLY that tired?
Am I REALLY that burnt out?
Can I REALLY not do xyz care task?
Do I REALLY need support for this?
Can I REALLY not work harder/better/more?
We come by this kind of self-doubt honestly. When our pain, distress, hunger, loneliness, etc has historically not been witnessed or validated by those we depended on for care, comfort, and/or survival, we learn to question our body's communication methods.
We learn to disconnect from our truest, deepest knowing.
I still have a faint scar along my hairline from that fall; it’s so pale, you wouldn’t see it unless I pointed it out. On the surface, that’s the only marker left from that event. But I can draw a line from that event (and others like it), and the way the story has been told to me, to the ways in which I struggle to validate my own experience, the ways I yell at ghosts in my head.
As a baby, I didn’t have language to say, I am not ok. This isn’t funny. But I did internalize the fact that my pain, distress, and fear were at best funny, and at worst nonexistent. When I’m struggling to validate my own pain, fatigue, loneliness, I can feel the echoes of my baby self, confused that what she was feeling inwardly wasn’t at all what was being mirrored by her environment. When I’m arguing with ghosts in my head, I am giving that baby girl a voice: I AM NOT OK. I AM NOT OK. I AM NOT OK.
It’s hard and necessary work to reclaim our inner baby voice and declare I AM NOT OK. We can't heal what we can't feel, and we can't recover from what we don't admit is happening to us.
You can’t recover from fatigue you don’t admit you have.
You can’t feed hunger you don’t admit you have.
You can’t comfort loneliness you don’t admit you have.
You can’t heal pain you don’t admit you have.
You can’t ask for accommodation for needs you don’t admit you have.
You can’t recover from burnout you don’t admit you have.
When our experience has been that our pain was ignored, minimized, or denied, even though we could feel it was real, we learned that our bodies were untrustworthy. If there’s a mismatch between what we feel and what is mirrored to us, as children, we’ll take out caregivers’ word over our own felt experience because that’s what is necessary to survive.
But our bodies have always been trustworthy; it’s the adults who were in charge of our care who weren’t. The first step to being a safe caregiver to our low-capacity bodies is to learn to recover our bodies’ inherent trustworthiness.
Your pain is inherently trustworthy. It always has been.
Your fatigue is inherently trustworthy. It always has been.
Your sadness is inherently trustworthy. It always has been.
Your fear is inherently trustworthy. It always has been.
Your needs are inherently trustworthy. They always have been.
Your feelings are inherently trustworthy. They always have been.
Your body is inherently trustworthy. It always has been.
Only when we fully step into the role of our own safe caregiver, channel our inner Ron Swanson and declare I KNOW MORE THAN YOU, I AM THE AUTHORITY ON MY OWN BODY AND ITS FELT EXPERIENCE will we be able to actually, fully, start to heal.
This Saturday, I am offering a brand-new workshop in which we’ll explore together how to do exactly that.
Small Spoons: Trauma Repair + Low Capacity Living is rooted in the belief that repair is possible inside of every interaction we have with our bodies, and that our relationship with our bodies, no matter how fraught, holds the possibility, and is deserving, of repair.
During the workshop, I will take you through the genesis of shame and the survival function of internalized ableism; offer a gentle framework for trauma repair for low-capacity bodies; as well as suggestions for ways to ease the burden of care tasks in day-to life. My teaching style emphasizes autonomy, consent, and the sovereignty of lived experience.
This workshop is for you if you experience one or more of the following:
Chronic pain, chronic illness, and/or disability
Neurodivergence
Burnout (for any reason)
Pregnancy & postpartum
Long Covid
Recovery from acute illness/injury
Grief & loss
I’ve intentionally made this as financially accessible as possible. There are three price options, $22, $44, and $66. Choose whichever option best suits your budget. If the cost of the workshop is prohibitive for you at this time, please email me at hello@thetraumawitch.com with the subject line Small Spoons to receive free access, no questions asked.
🥄 Small Spoons: Trauma Repair + Low-Capacity Living 🥄
Saturday, May 6th, 12pm-3pm, Central Time on Zoom
🥄 Register for $22
🥄🥄 Register for $44
🥄🥄🥄 Register for $66
Fun fact: baby walkers have since been banned in Canada, precisely because of this kind of shit happening. People in the US are free to put their children in plastic death machines because freedom, I guess?
Hat tip to Susan Raffo: this is a variation on her concept that we can’t protect and grow at the same time.
Oh my goodness I so relate to the ongoing phantom arguments. They haunt a lot of my writing and yet I've never considered squarely focusing on them in a post, as you so brilliantly have. Maybe because they're so fraught with emotion and pain that it's hard to think straight. Anyway, thank you very much. This brought me into more presence with the phantoms and their relationship to what I do speak out about.
Hi, Fanny. If I register and can't make it,will a recording be sent or is this only offered as a live event? Thanks.