I avoid the doctor, specifically my gynecologist. I haven’t always been this way, I used to be very diligent about my yearly appointments. I’m sure any therapist can look at my past and immediately see why I would specifically avoid the gynecologist, and even I logically know why I steer clear of that office, but I don’t think I really faced it until just recently. I was listening to a podcast about grief and one of the statements that really stuck with me was that we need to sit in the pain and walk through the pain in order to heal. I have read this before but hadn’t really applied it fully to my life. I’ve known that working through the pain of our miscarriages was important in order to really recover from it and be able to help others through the struggle. What I didn’t face was the fact that there were aspects of that pain that I wasn’t experiencing, almost like different rooms of the pain that I was avoiding. Imagine that the pain of the miscarriages were the main rooms of the house, but there were parts of the house that I really didn’t need to visit every day and therefor completely ignored. That’s how the doctor was for me. A part of the house that I hadn’t visited in a very long time because it brought me too much pain, it was the epicenter of the pain. So, I just closed the door and pretended it didn’t exist. Except, by my own definition and definition of experts on how to recover from grief, I wasn’t really walking through it, I wasn’t feeling the pain and recovering, I was avoiding. Anyone who has experienced a traumatic event, or multiple traumatic events in my case, can understand why you would want to avoid the scene of the crime. Even my doctor understood. After my last miscarriage, he looked at me and told me not to come back for a while, that he didn’t want to see me. He explained that I needed to heal and that returning to the office would just cause more trauma, almost like PTSD. I took his advice whole heartedly, and maybe took it too far. I ended up taking 2 years off of going to the doctor.
Friends! We need to sit in the pain, the grief. We need to feel it and face it, in order to really heal. Closing the door to that room and pretending it isn’t there isn’t going to help, it isn’t going to help you grow as a person. Currently, we are collectively, as a world, sitting in a lot of grief and loss. And in our nation, we are grief stuck. We don’t like to face the pain and sit in it. We like to close the door and pretend it isn’t there. I guess the question is, how do we know if we are avoiding the pain? I look at my life and see what activities am I actively avoiding? In my circumstance, this is the doctor. It’s time I face my fear and go back to the doctor and sit in that room and let myself heal. What room are you avoiding? What room do you need to open the door to and sit in, in order to really feel your discomfort and grief so that you can truly recover?
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AuthorI'm an average girl who has discovered her passion for self-development after warrioring (yes, it's a word) through 6 miscarriages. I took that passion and applied it to helping others find their passions through High Performance Coaching. Boy mom to two "energetic boys" and navigating the art of being a step mom to a teenage girl, all while working daily on maintaining an authentic relationship with the best husband around. Sometimes mindful. Sometimes a runner. Always a little crazy! Archives
May 2023
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