Perhaps the greatest thing that has come from this course on mental behaviors and disorders is the new awareness of self. As I read about certain disorders I can’t help but feel goosebumps as I recall certain memories that scream out this child needs help.
I know there is a tendency to self-diagnose when one reads about disorders but it’s not so much about the diagnosis as it is the red flags. Certain symptoms, behaviors, cognitive processes and the like are overwhelmingly obvious to me now that I have the words and the knowledge to identify them.
As I complete this assignment about somatoform disorders I chuckled.
I remembered that as a child my mama would often call me a hypochondriac. I spent a great deal of time in the nurses’ office. I was pretty much Thomas J, but a black girl with braids and barrettes. There was always “something wrong”. For the most part, I recall my childhood pretty fondly (prior to age seven). I think the darkest moments were probably being molested, witnessing my parents are argue and the eventual dismantling of my family as I knew it. I was fortunately shielded from many of the ugly truths of my childhood for a long time.
I don’t mean to nonchalantly glaze over the molestation but I can’t honestly say that I harbor any strong feelings about it either way. Which brings me to my next point, I wonder if I internalized those feelings and they manifested as the little “ailments” that sent me running to the nurses office. I remained “friends” with my school nurses (and guidance counselors) until I graduated high school. That’s something that never changed. They have to be attentive. They have to ask you what’s wrong. They have to be concerned. I wonder if I wished that I had more attention, more concern and more outward expressions of caring. My mama walked in to find me in the bed with her friend’s daughter who was on top of me. I remember her yelling. I remember just laying there because I think I knew she shouldn’t have been touching me and kissing me, but I wasn’t sure if it was really wrong. And after the fact, no one ever mentioned it again. No one ever talked to me about it. It became a secret, I guess. I think the only indication that anything was wrong was because my mother shouted. I had to have been about four at the time so a raised voice definitely indicated “bad” but I didn’t have a true understanding of why she yelled or what was bad. I didn’t like it but they were older and they were bigger and I desperately wanted friends. So if “playing house” somehow always resulted in awkward kisses and touches in private places then I guess I’ll be the Dad this time.
People who suffer from somatoform disorders tend to have difficulties coping with life’s stresses; they have difficulty verbalizing their emotions and as a result their hurt, their emotions and their struggles manifest physically.
It’s funny what you remember decades later. After my mama was arrested, I moved in with my Nana. No one talked to me then either. No one really explained that this would be permanent. No one considered, or at least it didn’t seem that way, how traumatizing it must be for a child at the age of seven to literally witness her mother handcuffed and removed from the home. Ushering children out in hushed tones, hoping that they don’t see what’s happening isn’t helpful for anyone. Being physically ripped apart from my brother that night is a memory that haunts me to this day. Because that moment when my aunt held him back and my nana pulled me away to put me in the car was the last moment that I can say that we were a family. That was nearly twenty years ago and I can still feel that. I can still remember hollering and looking back and reaching back for him.
No one talked to me.
I cried for weeks. I struggled to comprehend what was happening. Things never went back to normal; for me or for my family that would be no more. I was always a visitor at Nana’s house but now this was to be my home. That never quite happened. There was a sense of permanency and security after a while, but I always felt like I was a track of dirt, infringing and marring the clean excellence that this side of the family put forth. I, rugged girl, grass stained jeans and dirt under her nails, sitting still so not as to mess anything up for over a decade in a place I was to call home.
I had many headaches from age seven to thirteen. No one questioned it. They just gave me Tylenol. I had to take it with me to sleep away camp each year.
“I get headaches”.
No answer as to why, no wonders as to how come.
“I get headaches”.
And now I do wonder. I wonder how many questions I had as the little girl who chose to sleep on the floor because that bed didn’t belong to me. I wonder how many questions I had as I cried myself to sleep listening to my mama’s favorite station WBLS. I wonder how many times anyone ever whispered when they thought she was asleep, “should we say something?” “do you think she has questions?” “do you think we should address this?” “Do you think there’s anything wrong?” Or were the hushed tones the sounds of shame and humiliation being swept under the rug and pride that kept you from checking on me?
I don’t know. I just wonder about the headaches. I wonder if it ever seemed weird that I loved going to the doctor. I wonder if it ever made you worry that I spent so much time in the nurses’ office that they called home. Was it strange that after a couple of years they let me “volunteer” in the nurses offices, probably because they saw this clingy brown girl who just wanted attention, even if that means bagging ice and getting her temperature taken.
98.6 again.
That can’t be right. Something has to be wrong.
Little did that brown girl know.
2006 marked the beginning of her diagnoses.
Could these have been avoided if someone talked to her? If she was equipped with adaptive coping measures at the beginning. If she was taught that when something happens, when something hurts, when something changes, that we should talk about these things, that we shouldn’t bottle these things.
PTSD can be markedly prevented depending on the measures taken immediately or soon after the trauma. At the rawest, I experienced my first trauma between ages four and five. No one talked to me. My mama was arrested, my family destroyed and I was relocated and separated from my brother at seven. I feel comfortable saying that ages 9-17 were tinged with more trauma in the name of abuse, life as the child of an addict and dealing with the unearthed trauma of years prior. Only to go on to experience a sleuth of other traumas in the years following my diagnoses at age 17. I only began to talk about things at around age 18. That’s easily fourteen years of trauma. No preventions, no debriefing, no talking.
It’s a known fact that many individuals who are exposed to high levels of trauma and develop PTSD later develop bipolar disorder. The idea is that the repetitive traumas essentially throw the body into a constant state of stress.
And so, as I march on in my fifth year of Operation Face This Thing Without Meds, I’m amazed by how this string that threads these memories together glows. In my darkest moments, I can trace it. I remember it all, probably better than the people who were apart of the memories.
But what I’m coming to realize while tracing this thread is that revisiting these memories are the only moments when This Thing “makes sense” and seems a lot less like a smiting from this Zeus-like God on his throne.
Anyway, I have homework to do.
Talk to your kids.
I beg you.
She's ByePoleHer 