Being Honest

  I have an appointment coming up. It is a gynecology appointment. I have put it off for a long time. These kinds of appointments are very triggering for me. I have had so many traumatic experiences in this area of my life and as the appointment approaches the dread has been building. So much so that I decided to try to address it in counselling this week (I talk to a counsellor every two weeks and have done so for four years now). The first time I got my period as a young girl I almost died. It was a very awful, scary experience. I was sick for days, we were snowed in, I ended up being admitted to the hospital and had to stay there alone and part of my stay involved a gynecology type appointment with a very angry man who must have been very stressed. It was traumatizing. The first time I got pregnant as a twenty-two year old I ended up with cancer after miscarrying. The amount of gynecologist type appointments I had and with multiple men who were not kind in the slightest were many. It was horrific. Fast forward to the time I had my first baby where I tore horribly during labor and the man who stitched me up did such an awful job that an hour after I gave birth to my second baby I had to have emergency surgery to 'fix' the damage (thanks the good Lord the man who did the surgery was kind, caring, and empathetic). I have had many gynecology type appointments since then. Women just do. Many of them have been filled with trauma. So this is why I put them off when I really shouldn't. 

  Today in counselling fear ended up being the topic that we talked about. As a child fear is not something we can process well alone ( if at all). We need a loving, caring, empathetic adult to help us through emotional experiences. If, as a child, you had to attempt to work through fear quite consistently alone there might not be tools in place to actually process fear through your body. You might live in survival mode and not actually KNOW the feeling of letting go of pain because it has been worked through. Therefore, it is just stuck there and compounded and compounded through years and years of experiences. 

Children need their pain to be held by someone else for them. They cannot hold it alone. They need to be supported and loved through their emotional experiences. They need to learn the feeling of resilience.

Pain can be processed

Fear can be processed

What would it be like for me (or you) to know that I (and you) can get through pain and go towards healing. That we can lean INTO fear and address what it is needing to say. 

That was what I talked about today. After the conversation was over I tried to lean in towards this specific fear. Just to sit with it, face it, grieve it too.

It was really hard.

We can't run away from death, cancer, pain, anxiety, failure, and gynecology appointments 

And so 

That is another journey to embark on.