Trauma has long painful tentacles
Ever heard of "vicarious trauma"? Yeah, me either, until this week.
You can be traumatized by something that didn’t happen to you. Something you can’t control, can’t predict, can’t fix. It’s called vicarious trauma, and I hate it.
I was laying down in my Acupuncturist office as she began putting the needles into a few areas that I needed to loosen up. I just started going to see if it would help with my frozen shoulders because PT wasn’t getting me where I wanted to be. Little did I know that it was going to open up many other “sore” points in my life!
She asked me how my Christmas holiday was and I walked her through some issues that we are having with extended family and that I was so frustrated because it felt like they got to be jerks and we just had to wait for the next bomb to go off with little to no control over it. You see, I am a control freak. To have VERY high emotional moments happen because OTHER people decide to call, send gifts, or NOT call when I have no control or no awareness about whats coming — NOT something I handle well. (← that is an understatement)
The acupuncturist said, “do you have a therapist because it sounds like you have experienced some trauma?” Ha, NO MAM… I responded, “Well, yes I have a therapist, and I am just fine as it isn’t my family specifically.” The next words out of her mouth would live rent free in my brain for weeks (and still do)…
“Thats not true Cate, it might not have happened to you directly but it definitely sounds like you are dealing with Vicarious Trauma, which is a very real thing too”.”
Vicarious Trauma → when someone else's crisis becomes your body's emergency response, and you have no say in when it hits.
You are telling me that someone else can do something to someone else that I have no control over, no awareness of, and no ability to manage for them — I just have to sit and watch them struggle never knowing when the next missile is going to blow up our life?
Nope, that is a NO FOR ME DAWG!
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if I like it. It’s already here. Living in my frozen shoulders. Showing up in my body every time the phone rings.
Turns out, you can love someone and still be wrecked by what’s happening to them. You can be the strong one, the fixer, the one holding it together — and still end up carrying their chaos in your body.
That’s not weakness. That’s just what happens when you care about someone whose life keeps exploding.
I still don’t like it. I still wish I could fix it. But at least now I have a name for why my shoulders won’t move.