Bones and Brains: Healing and Empathy

Let me begin with a scenario: Imagine that you have broken your lower arm bone; your radius in this case. It’s a simple fracture—you see a doctor, it heals, and on you go. A few months later the radius gets broken again in the same part of the bone. Your arm must heal anew, but now it is healing over the less-than-ideal healed bone of the previous break. It takes longer. It looks a little wonky. Eventually, it heals. Down the road a bit, somehow, that bone gets broken again and again. What do you think, at the end of multiple breaks, your arm will look like? Will it look like a healthy human arm? Will it function like a healthy human arm? Keeping that in mind, let me then take you down a slightly different but, you will find, related path.

The Case for Brokenness

I was ruminating and reviewing poems I wrote about a man to whom I was attached (TWM) and about the conversations we had over the months we were attached to each other.

Conversation One: He called and told me about something he was very proud of which he had accomplished at work. In my marriage, I’d have praised the man I loved and given him a verbal pat on the back. TWM’s line of work, however, sometimes rubbed me the wrong way a little. When his voice came happy and bouncing over the phone and he proudly told me of his successful day at work, I was tepid. I didn’t downplay his success, nor did I say, “Wow, Luv! That’s awesome!” In the moment, I felt justified in my response.

I was not.

Later, I reviewed my reaction and was ashamed of it.

When I spoke to him a couple of weeks later (Conversation Two), I began with, “I may be over-thinking but…,” and apologized for not hyping him as I should have. I told him I was proud of him and impressed with his skills. He laughed; it never really occurred to him that I was anything but proud and he said with considerable amusement, “Yes, you are over-thinking.”

Those two conversations are not the point of this post, but they are the context needed to understand where I want to go in this entry and why I speak of poorly healed wounds.

The Correlation Between Over-thinking and Past Wounds

Did I over-think when I was younger?

To a some degree, I have always done so. I am, by nature, empathetic and tend to isolate and cogitate as writers do. So, when I was young, any situation in which I felt I had messed up (arguing with a friend in school, doing poorly on an exam, getting in trouble in class) became something to fret over for a couple of days. This over-thinking rarely got in the way of my life, however.

This habit is now destructive and problematic. I struggle with long periods of rumination (over-thinking) about my history (likewise, my future) as I try to get through simple tasks (driving across town, trying to fall asleep, etc.) and I am often at odds with people I love who interpret my over-thinking as being “unresponsive” or “difficult” or delaying decisions because I’m “stuck” or “unmotivated.” There is a kernel of truth to this but, as with most such things, that kernel is standing in a crop of trauma wounds.

So it has been that in those ruminations about my brief relationship with TWM, I came to recognize more psychological wounds of my own.

As often happens these days, these are wounds readily recalled, but they are things I didn’t examine on a deep level because my sanity could not tolerate the pain of revelation. The further I get from the injuries, the easier it gets to examine them, although it is never easy.

Whence Came the Wounds?

Was I this bad before my second marriage? Did I really go down into those rabbit holes this deeply when I was sixteen, eighteen, twenty, or twenty-five? I can say with considerable confidence, “No.”

I certainly was motivated when younger: I made good grades; got up early every morning for school (then for work in my twenties); took care of my child, my pets, and my spouse; and started college again in my early 20s with little help except the occasional babysitting from my mother when my first husband bowed out. If I ruminated, it was over the bills, the condition of my vehicle, or my first husband’s infidelity. When I was working, I always arrived early for the day and left late. My work ethic was solid and remained so even when I worked at home for my second husband—up to a point. From 1997 on, problems slowly emerged. After 2012, everything went sideways.

What changed in those years?

Without elaborating on the details—in those intervening years, after I began working for my spouse and my child moved away, I became more isolated and my actions and motives as an adult woman were challenged regularly and often without warning.

As I became both inured to and constantly on guard for the need to defend against my spouse’s expectations and disappointments regarding my behavior in everyday life, I developed a “skill” for over-thinking.

This hyper-developed skill doesn’t just go away when one leaves a relationship of thirty years. So, when TWM told me a story about work and I reacted judgmentally instead of with the level of support it deserved, Ms. Paranoia Over-think went overboard. Another time, when he and I had a slightly tense exchange over a minor misunderstanding, I sat on it for three months and ground on it mentally until I finally broached the subject and he looked at me like I was an absolute kook.

He: <Shrug> “I thought the conversation was fine.” <head tilt, half smile, silently judging me as a little odd>.

These kinds of events would have led to hours or days of intense and painful discussion with my ex-spouse. I admit, there was an odd sort of “let-down” when TWM quite literally shrugged off my concerns. I had anticipated anger, hurt, or frustration. I’d expected a fight. I was thankful for the calm, but the buildup of anxiety fell away into a sort of emotional well. For a moment, I wasn’t sure how to respond to that lack of reactivity. Would that I can someday find a partner who isn’t “wrong” for me yet has that clarity and security.

What’s to Blame, Really?

We all evolve over time in good and bad ways. We may grow more patient but more introverted. We may go from never having cursed to relaxing and using more colorful language. It’s possible that I just started over-thinking and becoming anxious in day-to-day communication because stuff happens. It’s more logical to think, however, that I was trained to be this way by virtue of being in mental fight-or-flight mode on a constant basis. It’s rational that, as described above, the regular expectation of having made a mistake in a simple disagreement that would lead to a protracted harangue created a sheepdog mentality; always alert to danger. It’s rational that never knowing the correct course of action because there never was a correct course of action in my spouse’s eyes, made for the inability to respond to situations requiring seemingly simple decisions.

Mangled Bones & Mangled Minds

I wish I could make others grasp how deeply embedded this feeling is and how hard I am working to rid myself of it. I don’t want to tell them what I’ve experienced. I certainly don’t want them to experience what I experienced so they can understand. (Rest assured, as I’ve said before, there was never any physical domestic violence.) Instead, I ask others to look at this entry and think, “Jeez. That makes sense. Maybe I should cut her some slack while she recovers from thirty years of hurt and confusion.^“

I ask them to imagine my mind is a physical part of me that, like that arm bone, has been fractured repeatedly and often, especially between 2012 and 2020 when such psychological injuries occurred several times each month. To be fair, it is a physical part of me when the effects of stress hormones are taken into consideration.*

So, I ask: If one can empathize with what it takes to heal a bone over and over, can one not empathize with what it takes to heal mental anguish on that level? Can one not grasp what damage is done to the structure and functionality of any system that has been injured repeatedly over the course of decades?

My Part of the Healing Process

I’ve been on this journey in some form or fashion since March of 2020. It has been piecemeal and each new phase presents a new question.

This phase presents this question: Can I retrain myself?

Currently, anxiety and over-thinking are solidly in place though I grow incrementally stronger and drift through these revelations. I seek ways to disrupt the over-thinking. I’ve taken up kayaking. I walk Sammy, write, and listen to music. I am learning to speak calmly when I am hurt rather than shutting down or being reactive. I work, albeit slowly, to rediscover my self-worth and skills so I can survive. It is a process akin to feeding grains of rice one-by-one to a starving animal: not without merit but barely keeping the critter alive.

I think of TWM, my ex-spouse, and others in my life who compartmentalize on the surface but whose stress or grief has caused them to do unhealthy things (overeat, overwork, mistreat loved ones, and seek inappropriate distractions**). We represent extremes: they, on one end, have shut out their emotional and psychological pain in favor of other methods of survival; I, and others like me, remain steeped in our psychological and emotional upheaval, unable to compartmentalize and locked into anxiety and over-thinking.

Neither strategy is optimal. Both are clearly destructive. We could all stand to get to middle ground. I say that, recognizing that this has been an impossible task for me thus far. I continue to struggle with it daily, even hourly.

I continue to patch the breaks, examine them, see that the healing is ugly and only partly functional, and move on to the next task with the hope that someday, the result will be a fully functional system rather the current, distorted structure.

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* The scientific/medical community knows that stress releases excessive cortisol into our bodies. Cortisol has a significant impact on multiple body systems. While my ex-spouse was under constant stress because he wasn’t happy with my performance as a spouse & he feared further & more dramatic failures, I was under stress…well, for the same reason. We both developed physical ills. In addition, I developed rage, hypervigilance, and fear of abandonment among other emotional problems, including the above discussed over-thinking.

“The body’s stress response system is usually self-limiting. Once a perceived threat has passed, hormones return to typical levels. As adrenaline and cortisol levels drop, your heart rate and blood pressure return to typical levels. Other systems go back to their regular activities.

But when stressors are always present and you always feel under attack, that fight-or-flight reaction stays turned on.”

Chronic stress puts your health at risk – Mayo Clinic

** All things traumatized non-compartmentalizers must cope with as well, but we generally don’t delude ourselves into thinking we are “happy” or “eternal optimists.”

Last Updated on September 29, 2023 by Lee Ellis