PODCAST INTRO: Hey, beautiful soul, and welcome to Dear Body, I'm Listening, the podcast for women living with chronic pain, mysterious symptoms and invisible illness. I am your host, Donna Piper, movement therapist, pilates instructor and chronic illness navigator. The space is for the ones who've tried everything, felt dismissed and are still searching for answers. If you've ever felt like your body's speaking a language no one else understands, you are not crazy, and you are not alone. Here we go beyond diagnosis and let you know what diagnosis you try to seek. We talk about swelling, fatigue, brain fog, body shame, nothing is off the table. We explore healing through somatic spirituality, movement and truth telling, because healing isn't linear, and either are we.
________________
Donna Piper: Hey, beautiful soul, and welcome back to Dear body, I'm listening. The place where your symptoms aren't ignored, your spirit isn't bypassed, and your truth doesn't need to be polished to be powerful. Today, we're talking about a kind of trauma that rarely gets the tenderness it deserves. Medical trauma. If your heart races at the thought of a doctor's office, if you've ever sobbed in the car after a five minute appointment, if you've ever left a medical space feeling smaller than you walked in, you're not overreacting. You're reacting to harm. The episode is for anyone who's ever been dismissed, misdiagnosed, or told that everything looks fine while your body screams. Otherwise, let's unpack what it means to be hurt by the very system that is meant to help you, and how to start healing from it.
Let's get into today's Real Talk recap. When the exam room becomes a battlefield. Let's get real. For many of us with chronic illnesses, medical trauma isn't an isolated or a story. It's systematic, it's repetitive, and it's invisible to everyone but us. The moment when I sat across from a provider and said I'm in pain, and they replied, your labs are fine. As of numbers on a page, I knew more about my lived experience than I did. I've been told that I was just anxious. I've been told to lose weight, or my symptoms weren't going to change unless I changed my dietary habits. I had procedures pushed on me. I've had my pain dismissed. My knowledge of my own body has been questioned over and over. And each time, a little part of me started to believe them. Maybe I am being dramatic. Maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe I do need to push through. Nope, what I needed, what we needed and need was to be heard, and is to be heard, to be witnessed, to be treated like humans. We know our bodies, and we're not making anything up and just not checking boxes.
So if you flinch at white coats, dread follow ups, or have panic attacks in waiting rooms, your nervous system is remembering what your mind is suppressing. That deserves healing, not shame. How do we even begin to process this kind of harm, especially when we still need care? Let's start by busting one of the biggest lies we've been told, myth buster moment. It's not real trauma. Let's bust this garbage myth. Medical trauma isn't real unless you were physically harmed or hospitalized. False. False with a capital F. Here's what trauma really is. It is an experience that overwhelms your nervous system's ability to cope.
Being misdiagnosed for years and blamed for not healing, being told that what you are telling the provider can't be true because it doesn't fit in with your other symptoms or your labs, these are all traumas. They might not leave visible scars, but impact how safe you feel in your body, in your voice, and in your future healthcare interactions. And for people in marginalized bodies, fat bodies, disabled bodies, chronically ill bodies, the traumas are often compounded by bias and neglect. And it's not malice. It's not in their wheelhouse, they haven't been exposed to it. They haven't been taught it. If it's not something they know, then they don't wrap their hand about wanting to know it. They're busy, they're overwhelmed, but you don't need a diagnosis to validate your trauma, your medical trauma and your interactions with medical providers. If your body says it was traumatic, believe her. That's your truth, that's your data, that's your doorway into healing.
Trauma isn't something that you wear like a badge and have it forever. Your body is just overwhelmed. It hasn't processed what it needs to. The body is smart and wants to protect and keep you alive. So in these situations where you haven't felt safe, your body doesn't want to go back into them. So we create behaviors and feelings around this, so we don't have to carry it forever. In addition to everything else, we just want to look for a way to start to re regulate our body so we're not carrying that. So when we do go into doctor's offices to have to retell our story or convince medical systems, healthcare systems that are going to either say yes and approve our scripts for compression, or pumps, or lymphatic, or lipedema, fat removal, all of those things, we don't want to also have to feel that there's always this. We're going to get denied. It's going to be torturous, because we have to use our voices. We have to advocate for ourselves.
So in today's Feel Good Flow, we're going to start to unwind that trauma, and get back to your body. So let's rebuild some body safety. And this is just coming back to your body. Not through force, but through gentleness. So try this practice. When you're in a space where you're not driving or operating any heavy equipment, or doing anything that is distracting, you want to lie and sit down in a nice, comfortable position. Place one hand on your chest, and the other on your lower belly. Take in a deep breath, hold it, and then exhale through closed lips, like you're blowing out a candle, and repeat this slowly three more times. Take an in breath, hold and blow out, exhale. Two more times, inhaling, maybe holding a little bit longer, breathing in a little bit deeper. And then as you blow up that candle, as you exhale, really make sure you kind of get all the breath out this time. And one last time, inhale, fill up your whole body, hold for as long as you can, and really exhale it all out every little last bit of breath and air, and then just begin to breathe normally.
Now, whisper to yourself, either out loud or in your mind's eye, I believe what I felt. I believe what I feel now. Again, I believe what I felt, and I believe what I feel now. But the truth of that echo through places that were silenced in interactions that made you feel dismissed, small, embarrassed, and really started to turn your own experiences against you. Keep doing this for as long as you need. Breathe into those places and spaces. First, you need to believe in yourself, and then let go of what other people believed or didn't believe. Let the truth of that echo, again, through the spaces that were silenced. This is how we start. Begin to rewire our nervous system one moment of belief at a time.
So if this episode hits a nerve, I want you to know that you're not too sensitive. You're not overreacting. You're healing in a system that was never built for your complexity, and that makes you a damn warrior if you're doing the hard work of rebuilding trust with your body after medical trauma. Know that you're not alone in that messy middle. I'm right there with you. If this resonated, share it with a friend. Let's normalize naming the pain without being entangled into labels of being traumatized. Just know that when trauma happens, we can find simple ways to alleviate it so we can continue showing up, getting the help that we need from providers that we need because still need help with the medical system, whether it's to get blood work, or to make sure that our approvals are going through for what we need to manage our lipedema, or even to get surgery.
If you'd like to connect with me, you can email me at [email protected], and ask me any questions. I have a website, donnapiper.com, where I have resources that won't gaslight you. And if you're on Instagram, you can connect with me over there at Donna Piper. So until next week. Be gentle with yourselves. Deep breath. Know that you're telling the truth. Start to believe in yourself again. Gather that energy to go to your next medical appointments with the belief that you will be heard, you can be heard. It may take some time, but you can really get your medical team on your side. And until next week, take a deep breath, trust your body, and remember that you don't have to explain your pain to earn compassion.
________________
PODCAST OUTRO: If this episode made you feel even a little more seen, brought you a dose of clarity or pointed you toward your next step, please rate, review and share it with someone who's been quietly carrying the same questions. You can find some more resources, blog posts and healing tools over at donnapiper.com. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Until next time, Dear Body, I'm listening, and I am so glad you're here.
