In the Meantime: Old Traumas and Wounds

I don’t know if any of you watch television, but I saw a show the other day which spoke to me. The show is actually one that is filled with melodrama, but I view it anyway as I love medical shows. There was an episode recently where a psychiatrist heard the inner story which kept a young woman captive. The show is called Chicago Med. The psychiatrist is my favorite character in the show. He is at once very human with his own fallible and also very wise and intuitive and gentle.

In this particular show, a young woman was brought in who her mother thought was possessed by a demon. She had scratches all over her, was out of control and so was restrained and was dehydrated and spoke in gibberish. The young woman’s father also came in enraged about how his ex-wife was treating his daughter. The psychiatrist interviewed the mother and father separately and received their stories and perceptions. 

Here we are IN THE MEANTIME again, as he figures out what is going on with this young woman…..what is going on and what does he do with her in the meantime? What he did was very touching, real and true. The staff rehydrated her and kept her lightly sedated. He came in and spoke to the demon, so to speak. He asked the demon questions, and she became both more lucid and more agitated. She spoke in that gibberish language. The psychiatrist listened and something registered with him as he understood her language. She was speaking the language from a children’s book, the name which now eludes me. After having interviewed the father, what became clear was that her father hurt this woman at the age of around 6. Simultaneously dad had been reading that book to her. She was trying to send a message through that language is spoken in the book. Basically, she had been abused by dad at 6, around the time mom and dad broke up. The parents separated, and mom kept her daughter away from dad as much as possible, and dad disappeared from her life for years. During the last year, dad had come back in her life, and then suddenly these symptoms appeared. Her early traumas had been triggered, and she was stuck in the 6-year-old trauma.

A psychiatric intern asked the psychiatrist what do they do now? He said we learn more about that early trauma and bring it to light so it can be worked with. 

This touched me because it is so true. We have to bring up those old traumas and shed light on them and understand them so we can reclaim those old parts of ourselves that we had to leave behind. In this show, the psychiatrist is now moving in the meantime of how to best treat her as she is working on her young self. What is the best way to support her as she is being treated through talk therapy until she can begin to take care of herself again? 

Exercise: We all have old traumas and wounds from our lives. Can we take a few minutes and think about an old wound or trauma and bring that period, even, up in our consciousness? Can we sit with this or not? Is it too uncomfortable for us to be with and to stay in our bodies, or not? Just notice and see how you feel as you bring this up to yourself. If you can sit with this long enough, begin to talk with that young self. What do you know now about yourself, your family, your life that you didn’t know then? Speak those words and insights to that younger self. Let you know what is now true. Then if you can, hold both parts of you at the same time: the younger hurt and hurting self, and the older, wiser self that has new insights and new truths. Breathe into both and stay with them as long as you can comfortably and then let them go. Come back to them both for just a few minutes every day for a week and see how that feels and if anything has eased or softened or not. Write down what this experience was like for you. 


My soothing words of wisdom is about your gut feelings...