The migraines returned. Two and a half short days. Today is the 29th and I have officially had four days this month without significant physical pain. After exploring all other options, weather, bad food, bad drugs, medication issues, etc. I am coming to believe that the biggest culprit of all is still my battle with shame.
As scientists discover more and more about the total human body, mind, will, and emotion, they are learning with greater assurance that the physical and the emotional are on one continuum. I have no proof to offer. I offer only my own experience.
It has been decided by the National Headache Foundation doctors that stress is what is considered an internal trigger for migraine. Keeping in the emotions, and the story itself, through shame, has to have an effect on my physical being. A few of my doctors were surprised at the beginning of this journey that I was not succumbing to more physical symptoms in relation to the trauma. I was surprised myself; mostly though, I was pleased.
I finally ended up at the ER on the Friday, and then on Monday experienced a cardiovascular event that earned me an overnight in the hospital. Having intractable migraines makes a person much more susceptible, I am certain having intractable emotions does as well.
Last night an old and dear friend told me I should never feel ashamed to tell her anything…and I’m not. My shame is my shame. I am ashamed of what happened to me and of talking about it. Each time I think I have overcome it, I find a new shame place in which I still struggle. I have it so clear in my head that I do not own this shame, it belongs to him, the jerk who perpetrated me. My heart is another story. I thought I was getting better at telling when the situation called for it, yet another friend and mentor told me that I still say it with no emotion attached. The words make it out of my mouth and the emotion stays inside to eat my alive.
So maybe the physical pain is here to teach me, as the emotions shout through my body, “Let us out, give us a voice.” I shut down the emotion so I don’t have the pain of feeling, and it comes out in pain that I feel none the less.
Hopefully I will continue to heal and to grow through this and one day I will be able to cry when I tell the story. And one day I will not need to.
Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. (Romans 8:37, New King James Version)