Learning to trust my voice again after medical gaslighting

I didn’t feel I could speak my truth on social media, I was anxious every time I pressed post, even writing an email made me anxious. These were partly the effects of medical gaslighting.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

I still remember the shame I left the doctor’s office with after extensive testing and him telling me I was as healthy as an eagle. I had felt like a child inventing excuses — a child whose voice couldn’t be trusted.

While all the doctors and alternative practitioners telling me that I wasn’t really sick were wrong, I internalised their message, believing my truth was wrong in some way.

I found myself second-guessing every pain or every symptom:

Am I just exaggerating this?

Am I creating my own symptoms?

Am I just stressed and burnt out?

Perhaps they’re right and I need to heal traumas?

Am I doing the right thing?

But this second-guessing was not only directed at my body — I started to second-guess everything, especially my writing and creativity.

I didn’t feel I could speak my truth on social media, I was anxious every time I pressed post, even writing an email made me anxious, and after any conversation I had I would go over it again and again and again to check what I said, expecting I had said something stupid or wrong.

I could see something fragile had fractured within me and after several years of ‘visibility anxiety’ I finally understood that it had a cause. It wasn’t my personality that was the problem, it was partly the trauma of medical gaslighting that was causing it.

Learning to trust my voice again has been one of the hardest parts of healing from trauma. It’s still a work in progress, but I wanted to share with you the things I did to move toward healing.

Naming and validating my experience

It took me many years to understand that I had been medically gaslighted. It also took me many years to understand how shame from medical gaslighting was keeping me from speaking, writing and creating my truth. There were years where my illness was so severe that I couldn’t do any form of inner work, but as my brain started to clear up with medication and self-compassionate pacing I could start doing the work.

I journaled a lot (both on paper/screen and in my mind) about the feelings I had from being medically gaslighted and how I had felt it affected the way I see my truth and the way I expect others to see it. In that way I was slowly able to separate out what was the real me and what were the effects of medical gaslighting. It gave me a space to process it without judgment.

Understanding how perfectionism is a symptom of trauma

I have always considered myself a healthy perfectionist, which means I work hard, but I also know when I’ve done my best and that my best is exactly as it needs to be.

But after having been medically gaslighted I noticed how the unhealthy kind of perfectionism crept in. This manifested as a part of me setting impossible standards for myself, never feeling like I or my work was good enough, an incessant fear of saying the wrong thing and generally feeling not good enough or even worthy of being heard.

I still remember the day when I made the connection. I was having a conversation with myself in my mind about how uncomfortable this perfectionism was getting, how I felt it was ruining and slowing down my work, how I had to spend extra energy wading through difficult feelings, and it struck me: This isn’t you! It’s trauma! And a large chunk of that stems from having been medically gaslighted.

Witnessing my shame

I have a personality type (INFJ) that is highly prone to shame. You may have read how I stopped practicising and performing music at some point in my late teenage years because I didn’t feel good enough. Well, that was the voice of shame.

It got worse after medical gaslighting. I have written about medical gaslighting and shame before. I wrote:

“The smart thing about shame is that it makes you not want to speak up about what happened to you, because deep inside you feel like it is your fault. There is a sense of embarrassment embedded in shame. I felt like I wasn’t really sick, like I was creating my own symptoms. I felt shame for even having wasted his time, embarassed that I wasn’t worth a doctor’s ear. And I kept quiet about it, at the time, because that is how shame works.”

According to Francis Weller, shame thrives in secrecy. The antidote to shame is it being witnessed, validated and by finding a sense of belonging in community.

As I am bedbound I cannot find a physical community to witness and validate my shame, so I did this myself. I practiced self-witnessing and validated my experiences by talking to myself, and I meditated on feeling a sense of belonging with my fellow chronically ill and isolated peers.

It was also partly why I started The Bed Perspective. I wanted more community and a way to practice trusting my voice again.

Talking to my inner child

I always try to stay connected to my inner child and I noticed she had grown silent and small in the years after being medically gaslighted. I did a lot of work with her. Talking to her, interviewing her, giving her compassion, telling her over and over again that her voice matters, even though events in her life may have proven otherwise. I asked her what her truth was, what she thought of this and that and how she saw the world.

While all this worked, she particularly lit up when I found a way to record my songs from bed and my wheelchair. During this process we worked together on not feeling good enough to share my music with the world. It was a long, tough process.

It has taken me many years to learn how to trust my voice again after many years of medical gaslighting and all the triggers and trauma that come with it. I still feel like I have a lot of work to do and I’m sure more stuff will come up.

Tell me…

Have you experienced medical gaslighting? How did it affect you?

How do you deal with shame?

What work have you done to trust and find your voice?

Thank you so much for reading this post. If you know someone who could benefit from this, then please share this page with them. You are also more than welcome to share it in your Facebook or other patient support groups.

Did you miss?

The power of self-witnessing in chronic illness

How shame works to legitimise social injustices

I didn’t feel good enough (and I still don’t)

Meditation: Stepping into belonging

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