The Pain Inside Me Wants To Get Out
They say that trauma gets stored in the body. And by 'they', I mean psychiatrists and other professionals working on the field of psychiatry. There is a lot of scientific evidence of psychological trauma not only affecting the brain, but the entire body. Human beings are not the only species experiencing such post-traumatic symptoms: the same phenomenon can be detected in animals like dogs and cats. I remember reading in one article on the science of trauma that because animals' brains are not able to comprehend and deal with the psychological trauma they might have gone through, they resort to physical reactions instead. These typically consist of shaking, trembling, and convulsing. That is the main method of dealing with trauma for animals.
For humans, we do have other means of comprehending psychological trauma, but sometimes we also experience these physical reactions. We shake, tremble, twitch, convulse, ache. They might be secondary methods of coping with trauma, but sometimes they are just as intense and debilitating as the complex psychological issues our brains develop due to trauma.
make it stop.
One way of describing it would be to say that it is like your entire being – body, mind, soul – is traumatized instead of only your brain, and that is why these attacks of shaking and convulsing occur. But since the brain is at the core of everything that makes you you, it would also be appropriate to say that it is, indeed, your brain that has been damaged, and therefore so has your entire nervous system, which controls your muscles. So really, even if you conceptualize psychological trauma as something that is only in your head, that in itself makes it a matter of the entire body.
⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅∙∘☽༓☾∘∙•⋅⋅⋅•⋅⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅
Since falling ill, I have experienced a variety of physical symptoms that all have their roots in my trauma. During the years, they have gotten progressively worse, but health care professionals have yet to address them in any way despite my attempts to make them more known. Right now, I am at a point where I experience multiple physical symptom episodes in a week. Those episodes vary a lot, they have several subtypes, but particularly debilitating have been the shaking/convulsion episodes.
It is usually my legs that start shaking and trembling uncontrollably. Sometimes my arms join the legs too, but more often than not, the episode starts from the legs. Words like 'shaking' and trembling' are not big enough for what I mean by them in my opinion, so I will try to describe the severity of these episodes in another way.
Think of the last time your hands were shaking, maybe due to low blood sugar or fatigue. Think of the way your fingers were twitching and could not hold still. Remember how you couldn't take a picture with your phone because the shakiness of your hands prevented you from holding your phone still enough to take a clear photo.
My tremors are that same movement that you had in your fingers that day when you hadn't remembered to eat enough. The difference between them is that my tremors are about 1000 times worse. The slight shakiness grows into a bigger movement, and eventually all muscles in my legs are convulsing to the point that I am kicking the air like a baby who didn't get their favorite food. It is just as involuntary as your shaking hands, but my tremors are so crippling I cannot even walk.
Whenever my body goes through these attacks, I am thinking about that one article I read a while back: how this is just the trauma trying to force its way out of my system. It has become too much for my brain to handle on its own, so it resorts to a mechanism far older than dissociation or flashbacks.
Sometimes you truly just need to shake it off.
A leaf in the wind,
ichigonya
⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅∙∘☽༓☾∘∙•⋅⋅⋅•⋅⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅
