Defective. That’s the main theme that came up in my session today.
We are continuing to history probe to find where my thought process is coming from. We started by looking at feelings that were brought up last week, specifically being a burden.
I talked about when I had surgery at 5 years old and it took a village of people to take care of me. My sister (7 at the time) had to stay with friends. My mom, dad, and grandmother stayed in a hotel across the street from my hospital so that one person could stay with my brother (2 at the time), one could be with me, and one could go between so that neither of us was ever left alone. My therapist asked me what that says about me. And I know it says I’m loved enough for that many people to be willing to pitch in. After all, there were lots of kids that had no one with them the whole time they were there. But it also makes me feel guilty that they had to. Maybe I didn’t feel it at the time, but I do now. I know it’s unfair of me, because I would do the exact same thing for my kids if the need arose. But I do feel like a burden.
I talked about how my brother and sister were often sent off to friends’ when I needed to be taken care of. Or, in some cases it would be me shipped to a friend’s to sleep in their mist tent when I had bronchitis. I don’t feel like my family is one unit. We were 5 individual people living in the same house. My mom didn’t like traveling, so what little we did was just me, my brother, and my dad. I don’t remember doing all that much together. That may have been because of the strain between my parents, which I felt was partially my fault because of the financial burden my health put on them.
I also talked about feeling like so much was out of my control. When I was 7 I got my first pacemaker and met a boy who was getting his leads repaired. Our shared cardiologist teased that he had been doing “belly flops on the concrete” and the only logical conclusion my brain could come up with was that he had been riding a bike and fallen off. So I didn’t ride a bike for years. It was one thing I could control. I didn’t like attention on myself, but joined theatre because it was attention I could control.
She asked me for a specific memory tied to feeling out of control and I recalled the time I went for my annual checkup with my cardiologist when I was 13 and he said it was time for me to get a new pacemaker because the battery was low. I went from feeling happy to see my doctor that always made me giggle to defeated because I had to go into the hospital that day (my mom wanted to get it done as soon as possible because school would be starting the next week). He also decided I was old enough to go to the adult hospital instead of the children’s hospital, so I felt like a fish out of water in this hospital full of old people. Oddly enough, as an adult I had surgery a couple of times at the children’s hospital and felt like a fish out of water then too. I guess the advantage to getting older is that eventually I will look like I belong on the heart floor.
I talked about how I had a student that said his father had told him that if I ate right and exercised I wouldn’t have heart problems. I quickly taught my class the difference between acquired heart disease and congenital heart defects, but it stung. Because people make all kinds of assumptions. I have had people point at my scars when I was in a bathing suit at a waterpark. And the looks I would get as a kid at the cardiologist waiting room when everyone else was old, or as an adult at the pediatric hospital. Everyone is judging without knowing me.
Eventually my therapist dug out that a common theme seemed to be that I feel defective. Which is true. I wasn’t able to have kids “the normal way.” I have to plan for surgery at least every 5-7 years (I’ll be having on by the end of this year). I have scars all over my abdomen. I take lots of medication every day and can tell when I miss. I’m not like everyone else. I can’t just blend in.
We ran out of time, but plan to explore the feelings of defectiveness more in two weeks. Next week I’ve volunteered to chaperone a field trip with my kids. She said that we would spend a bit more time digging through history and then work on resources. I’m not sure what that will entail. I wonder when we will actually get to the EMDR part. But I’m trusting that we will get there eventually and try not to be too impatient.
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