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- #13
Sadielady3
MyPTSD Pro
@grit Your response made me tear up.
This hit me hard. I outsource most of my thinking to others. I am extremely approval seeking and lack the confidence to just make decisions for myself. The vast majority of the time I will present my ideas to other people that I trust only to have them agree with what I'm thinking. I know part of my problem right now is that I am having serious vertigo issues but because no one can find the cause for the vertigo, I feel like I'm making it up or wrong about my own experience. I rationally know that just because Urgent Care can't figure out what's wrong doesn't mean that when I see the ENT specialist that he won't be able to figure it out. It keeps feeling like something is crawling around in my ear canal but the Urgent Care doc of course looked and saw nothing. However, someone who specializes might hear that description and know exactly what to look for. I rationally can see the logic of all of that but for so many years, every time I got sick, I was told I was being overly dramatic and would even be punished for getting sick. Now I struggle to accept when I am physically unwell. Whenever I do get physically ill enough to actually seek out medical help, I usually get scolded for not resting or coming in sooner. I don't actually know how to listen to my body. Until fairly recently, I didn't really make the connection. Hearing someone else say that this can be a thing is hard. I know my brain works differently because of the trauma but I mostly just feel like a freak and feel like I should be able to do better, be better, if that makes any sense.
As I read your post, I could not help but notice, you may be outsourcing your own inner intelligence to others or professionals and they are diagnosing you with their own judgement and value based on whatever symptom you bring that day. So now it may be that, time is being spent categorizing what they think and what you think rather than spending time (as you suspected) listening to your body that left you long time ago because you were experiencing unbearable trauma against your body. We may give names to the trauma to use language and categorize it so we can talk about it intellectually, but the it gnaws at the body still...and language or diagnosis hardly ever touch the body that was traumatized enough to dissociate.
This hit me hard. I outsource most of my thinking to others. I am extremely approval seeking and lack the confidence to just make decisions for myself. The vast majority of the time I will present my ideas to other people that I trust only to have them agree with what I'm thinking. I know part of my problem right now is that I am having serious vertigo issues but because no one can find the cause for the vertigo, I feel like I'm making it up or wrong about my own experience. I rationally know that just because Urgent Care can't figure out what's wrong doesn't mean that when I see the ENT specialist that he won't be able to figure it out. It keeps feeling like something is crawling around in my ear canal but the Urgent Care doc of course looked and saw nothing. However, someone who specializes might hear that description and know exactly what to look for. I rationally can see the logic of all of that but for so many years, every time I got sick, I was told I was being overly dramatic and would even be punished for getting sick. Now I struggle to accept when I am physically unwell. Whenever I do get physically ill enough to actually seek out medical help, I usually get scolded for not resting or coming in sooner. I don't actually know how to listen to my body. Until fairly recently, I didn't really make the connection. Hearing someone else say that this can be a thing is hard. I know my brain works differently because of the trauma but I mostly just feel like a freak and feel like I should be able to do better, be better, if that makes any sense.