Talking To Doctors Vs. Believing Own Experience

[greenleaf]

The title I wrote is strange, but I think I'm having trouble believing my own experience for long, when talking to medical folks and other times. It's like the world with those experiences can't be true, or it doesn't feel safe for me to say it's true, when talking about physical issues in particular (this week at least.) Mentally it seems reasonable that this is pretty directly from my mother and grandmother's minimizing of my brother's violence toward me; they never really stopped doing that and are both gone now. However I seem to have some physical issues I may have ignored, numbed out, I can't even tell sometimes and feel scared/numb out when I try to guess.

So how can one talk to a medical professional when in the middle, one stops believing that what you're talking about is real? My approach is to shift to memories of what the issues were and ignore the feelings, but I get more and more scared it seems. Hard to "ground" or whatever when a doctor is staring at me. (The doctor in question is really quite nice...) I stop having faith that I can "read" what they're feeling about me...

 

[shimmerz]

Can you start by talking about this @greenleaf ?

Mentally it seems reasonable that this is pretty directly from my mother and grandmother's minimizing of my brother's violence toward me;

And ask the doctor if he is familiar with how this may be affecting you - that you feel it does? That might give you some validation and a trusting that the doctor understands before you broach the topic of body issues associated with it?

Just thinking out loud.

 

[StellaBlue]

I think I can relate to what you're describing, if I'm understanding you correctly. My brother was physically abusive and it was either minimized (to the point of "it didn't happen") or, when it couldn't be ignored, I was blamed for it. Intellectually, I can see how this has made me question reality (or minimize issues) in most areas of my life.

From a medical standpoint, a few years back I was misdiagnosed (and knew it in my gut). I waited a couple of months and then decided to get a second opinion - although I felt really uncomfortable doing this. Turned out to be a fairly rare, usually fatal type of cancer. Interestingly, most of the time I was undergoing treatment, I minimized the cancer - to the point where I would tell people, it's not really cancer, they're just treating it like it is. I'm actually thankful for that defensive mechanism as I think it kept me from totally freaking out...but still.

The downside is, I have put up with a lot of things that most folks wouldn't, because I think it's "normal" (if that makes sense). One thing I work on in therapy is to get "reality checks".

I think @shimmerz idea of talking to your doctor is a good one, if you are able to do that. Another option might be to take an "advocate" along to your appointments. Sometimes it helps to have someone there who understands where you are coming from but can also impartially hear what the doctor is saying.

 

[Intrepid]

I was told directly and indirectly not to tell anyone about what experienced with my mom and grandfather. I also had what I went through minimized. I minimized it myself. I didn't want to believe it.

Tell a doctor the truth? Really? The threat might not be there anymore, but the expectation of violence for being honest comes back all of the time. I know @shimmerz, that your advice is correct. It's just hard getting there!

 

[shimmerz]

You know, a friend and I on the board do something like this. We make up a fairy tale with different names. We pretend it isn't true. We tell each other it isn't true (although the other knows it is when we say 'fairy tale'). It is an interesting way of 'dissociating' intentionally while telling the story. But dissociating in a truthful (not sure if that is a good word for it) way. It has helped us through a lot. Not sure if that is helpful to you at all.

So kinda starting with 'I have a friend who had a problem with.....' or 'there was a beautiful princess named Cinderella .....'

 

[Ronin]

Seconding story telling, seriously. It allows for a switch of perspective while avoiding being 'too real' and can help by entirely skipping out the details; on another hand the switch of a channel can unblock other repressed feelings pretty rapid, so I'd take it in baby steps too. Three-liner, issue-pertaining ministory, maybe? ;)

 

[Chava]

Trust your experience but be patient if it feels murky sometimes, and also don't write off doctors if they don't seem to get it or have an answer for you right away....if they listen, that's the good part. If they tell you that you are full of crap, find a different doctor. I have lots of complicated pain stuff. I've had all kinds of tests. There is definitely a stress component and the pain itself sends me into meltdown and bad body memories. But there are some weird structural things too. The problem is that none of it fits together into one neat diagnosis or framework for the average MD. My doctor is pretty good though because she'll make referrals to check everything out. She believes my pain is real, even if she can't see it or describe why it's there. So, while we don't have an answer or a cure yet, nobody has really invalidated me.

Not sure if this relates or is helpful at all. But I know it's hard to believe your own experience and also easy to sort of submit to doctors. Write about what you notice and form questions that you think your doctor might be able to help with. And, even if they can't totally help, know that it does not make your experience less real. Find a doctor who at least wants to listen, try to understand your experience, help in whatever ways they can from their position, and problem solve...vs have need to find perfect answer (and write you off if you don't fit into their pre-existing templates).

 

[Friday]

There's a placebo effect of walking into a doctors office (or ER or anywhere where help is expected). No matter how sick you are? The relief that help is there floods the body with endorphins (natural pain killers) and relieves both stress & shock.

It's a trick paramedics actively use to keep people alive longer. Telling them that they're fine, they're going to be okay, help is here (even if help is hours away, and they're bleeding out, and may not last 5 minutes) can stretch a critical patient's life expectancy dramatically upward. If you can make someone believe they're going to be okay? 5 minutes can stretch into 5 hours. It's as they quit believing that the pain floods them, and they start going back into shock.

((To be clear, this is a placebo effect. It's not like every patient can be stretched longer, and it's not like people wouldn't die if they didn't believe they were going to. Its a tool, to trick a brain who is still capable of it, of performing certain tasks.))

Doctors are used to people walking into their offices and "feeling better". They're also used to people lying to them / faking illnesses. Best way around this I've found? Tell them. Even better, query them. Ask them if it's normal to feel 100x better just by walking into their office? Why you can feel so terrible at home, come here feel better, go home and feel worse again? <grin> This lets them tell you about endorphins and the placebo effect, and that's always better. That way they know you aren't faking, and they're the ones who came up with that answer for you ;)

 

[greenleaf]

Hi @FridayJones ! I do feel great walking in to see one doctor I go to; she's quite warm, I have known her for years... Oddly, for me, that means sometimes my trauma-related feelings will actually come up in her presence. I guess my "normal" tendency is to keep it separate from my functioning self, even if I have two internal worlds going on. That's how I learned to function and escape into the somewhat safer "outside world" as a kid. It's very rare that this "system" gets so overwhelmed that I just can't do this, and it's pretty automatic. It doesn't let me actually heal the "inside" stuff though, and I'm finally working on that; therapists just didn't understand these types of dissociation years ago. (I've been working on trauma issues for 30 years or so, which has helped me in many ways but not gotten to the core of many issues for that reason I believe.)

So, while the "placebo" thing I can see might be an issue for people whose brains don't do this automatically, provided you trust the doctor, if I can't sense a certain level of actual emotional warmth from a (doctor or other "authority" type), I can still start to go into "old" modes. Colors start getting greyer, I start to numb out, remembering what the heck I really wanted to focus on gets more and more difficult.. I can "push" through this for quite a while and act "normal" but lose track of my gut feelings; it's all cognitive functioning... then if it keeps going, recently, I find that I can't even keep track of a sentence... but that seems to be with medium-safe people; it's almost like my brain stuffs the (fear?) more if I really don't trust the people and I keep functioning. The work I'm doing recently has let me become more aware of some of these patterns and they seem to be changing somewhat; I can actually feel the afraid level sometimes now, and am working on techniques that my T (and folks here, etc.) suggest to calm the "afraid" level.

It's interesting that you mentioned those "normal" reactions that people have to doctors... one of the problems with explaining a less-common set of responses to doctors seems to me to be that we not only are feeling this junk, but might be trying to explain it to someone who has never read about it or known it was going on in any patients... so I fear that my "credibility" will start getting doubted, which adds to the zillions of other bizarre issues I think I'm having (and then there's that self-minimization stuff that others here very wonderfully validated. thanks everyone.)

Being both the person trying to tell a doctor something is *real* but also the person *with* the condition, puts strain on whether they'll find us credible; typically they rely upon other professionals, studies, etc. to Officially Learn From. It's such a relief to me when a medical helper will read a book I give them a bit! It makes me feel like I have support then.

Some medical folks are able to really believe patients when presented with something unusual, or at least treat the person totally respectfully with body language. The doctor I saw earlier this week didn't *not* do that, but she stopped radiating empathy, maybe got "cognitive", I couldn't "read" what she was feeling about me, and my paranoid younger levels got all freaked out... I wasn't "feeling better", I was feeling *nothing*... (except fear that I was trying to numb at some level it feels like now.)