On Illness and Trauma; A Short Essay

Our CEO Natalie Collins reflects on being ill recently.

I lost my voice this week.

It started with a sore throat, a mild flu-like thing.  I persevered through meetings.

‘I’m not over exerting myself, I’m just sat at a desk.’

Reader, I was over exerting myself. Apparently.

My voice gave up.  I’ve been almost totally silent since Thursday evening. It’s now Monday morning.

For awhile I have been reflecting on how physical ill health can mimic the felt experience of trauma that abusers cause.  It turns out being physically voiceless is really quite traumatic when you have a history of being silenced. 

When our brain registers a threat, it will select from five threat responses; fight, flight, freeze, flop or friend.  This process is not part of the rational, thinking brain (official name: pre-frontal cortex).  It’s not even part of the emotional, remembering part of our brain (official name: Limbic System). It’s the Brain Stem that responds; the threat response part of our brain.

In the moment of threat response, our body can feel completely alien to us. A threat appears and suddenly, in a friend response, we feel completely calm; we laugh and joke along with the man who scares us, unable to make sense of why we’re not running away or screaming loudly.   We awake to find our partner sexually assaulting us, we want to scream or hit him but in a flop response our body won’t move; we scream inside our head but it never makes it out of our mouth.  We see a threat coming towards us, our thinking brain wants to run, but our legs are rooted to the spot: we. just. froze.

Our body protects us when our thinking brain is still establishing risk levels and escape routes.

As we emerge from the threat response we can feel like our body failed us. ‘Why didn’t I fight back? Why didn’t I run away?  Why didn’t I scream, bite, kick?’  We start to doubt ourselves. ‘Maybe it wasn’t that bad?  If I’d been that scared, I wouldn’t have frozen. It’s my fault because I failed to react.’ We blame ourselves or minimise how bad it was.  We don’t thank our body for keeping us safe. We don’t feel badass and brilliant. We feel like a failure, with a body that let us down.

When our thinking brain is online, we try to pacify the abuser. We stay quiet when we want to speak out. We don’t tell our family or friends how bad it is, because we know we’ll let them down when we can’t muster the strength to leave him. Sometimes we are silent because speaking would make it real. Inside our head, the shame and horror denies us language for what he did.  Or the words stick stubbornly in our throat. Latterly, we want to speak those horrid words, but we are scared. They are an incantation of doom; if we say what he did, the world will collapse.

We somehow escape him.

Fast forward through the years.  We see a therapist. The words finally flow, and the world doesn’t end. We come to understand the trauma. We recognise our body was trying to keep us safe.  We learn to be grateful for our body’s threat responses. Or maybe we don’t. Instead we muddle through, ignoring what we’ve been through. We stay in the present and try to forget the past.

Either way, we somehow get to a place where we are safe in the present.  Life continues on and the past fades, either a little or a lot.

Then we get ill.

The flu knocks us hard into bed. Our limbs won’t move, our head feels fuzzy, we’re weak and need help.  We know we’re now safe, but the muscle memory says ‘This is like when he was hurting me and I froze.’  The health issues that, while not so wholly debilitating as flu, trigger discomfort or pain in parts of our body where pain previously broke our soul; UTIs, thrush, piles.  A stomach bug leaves us faint and queasy. We know we’re safe, but the lethargy and weakness takes us straight back to when we were anything but safe.

We lose our voice and it feels

just like

when the words wouldn’t come

and nobody could hear me.

There’s something about illness which feels like trauma. Our body failing us.  Our brain not working properly. The temporary loss of autonomy. The reliance on others to help us. The shock of vulnerability. And we’ve no even got the energy to make space for our feelings.

A somatic flashback (soma means ‘body’) occurs as physical sensations from a historic trauma inflict themselves on the body in the present. Illness is not a somatic flashback, but for those afflicted, it perhaps feels the same.

Visual flashbacks are more well-known. Images from traumatic incidents flood the brain as the past violently interrupts the present. Somewhere along the way, my brain protected me from these as I lost the capacity to visualise (don’t give me visual directions if I ask you the way and don’t expect me to care whether the character in the film looks like the one in the book, as I never saw her anyway).  I thought I’d escaped flashbacks.  But apparently not.

So what do we do?  Those of us for whom illness becomes a site of trauma?  When laryngitis transports us back to the silencing of shame? When the vulnerability of illness transports us back to the vulnerability after he raped us? 

Writing this seems a good place to start.

Usefulness is a core value of mine. Even if it it feels a bit too practical to be a Real Value, it’s not very touchy feely. But it’s part of how I got sane, wanting to be useful and hoping my pain could help others to heal. That’s another reason why illness is so troublesome. I can’t be useful. Which is just how he liked it; me being useless, hopeless, pathetic.

And so writing this feels like part of the solution. Ensuring others don’t feel alone if illness awakens their trauma too. 

In this also is an acknowledgement that how we feel isn’t always how things are.  

Most of the time feelings are reliable. Healing after men have traumatised us requires that we learn to trust our self; he dismissed our feelings, gaslit us in our convictions, got us to the point where we doubted reality.  And so, learning to trust ourselves is a place of healing. 

But sometimes, feelings are unreliable.

Years ago, I had a feeling of rising panic and a severe headache.  I’d become skilled at validating my feelings and here I was, in the midst of severe anxiety without a discernable cause.  ‘It must be a deep trauma’, I thought worriedly.  So deep, I couldn’t even identify what it was. Eventually I realised I hadn’t had a coffee for the whole week. I wasn’t in a trauma spiral, I was in caffeine withdrawl. 

It turns out, illness can be like that too. It can hit us like trauma and we have to remind ourselves it’s not.

If illness becomes a place of trauma for you, give yourself permission to have your feelings. Journal your experience or write a blog (so everyone can join in, ha!).  Breathe slowly and be kind to yourself.  This moment is only temporary, your body hasn’t let you down, its doing its best to look after you, just like when you survived what he did. Accept the help of friends or family; you are not alone.  And when you get back to full strength, this moment will fade and you’ll get back to your healed self.

It’ll turned out she was there all along, she just had a flu-like thing and needed a nap.

Final Thought: I've written this from the perspective of minor illness, but realise that chronic illness and more severe illness may induce a much more challenging reality for traumatised people. Feel free to comment with any useful resources or reflections for those who are dealing with bigger health challenges.