Before the cancer diagnosis, I was working for the Canadian military as part of a small team of senior, mostly retired, officers. It was a tough job being the only female, a civilian, and an older one at that. Suffice to say, I was treated like a minnow in a sea of self-identified big fish, and I was determined to hold my own.
At one point, during a particularly rancorous period, I decided to have a frank talk with my boss, a millennial, about the poisonous atmosphere on our team. Mostly, I was asserting the fact that I had just as much experience as my colleagues and I was being treated like a secretary. The boss was a nice and decent young man. He hesitated not quite knowing what to say.
I filled in the dead air.
“Don’t worry; you can’t hurt my feelings,” I said.
From that time on, I never waivered, never cried or complained. But I kept the boss in check. In one meeting, packed to the gills with huge “starred” fish, the boss started by introducing key members of the team. He left out two of us — the ones who had been on the job the longest and who did the most work.
After the meeting, I sent a stern email to the bossman.
“You left Paul and I out of the introduction,” I wrote. “I don’t think that was very professional, and you owe us an apology.”
The next day, the boss called a meeting, shared the screen, and personally apologized to me, and my colleague for not recognizing us. Wow, I thought. I made my point without being the “hurt girl.”
I realize now, that hurt girl is no longer alive and living in my psyche. She had been killed off during my horrible childhood.
I came to this conclusion only recently, after I was diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t cry. Nor did I cry two weeks earlier when my beloved dog died suddenly.
The younger Rose would have been a blubbering mess, inconsolable, taking to the bottle perhaps, or maybe just to her bed, sitting up nights worrying about the unfairness and fragility of life.
What happened to me?
I went looking for answers, and I found them in a new book by Gabor Maté, called the Myth of Normal. In this book, Maté describes how early trauma can alter the mind and body, and how each new small t or big T trauma can impact how a person lives her life, and makes decisions. It can also present itself as serious illness such as the tumor that I now have living in my intestines.
If a person is sensitive enough and young enough, Maté says, trauma can literally cut the connection between the mind and body, with the mind ruling things, and the body merely there for sport. This made a lot of sense to me.
My own personal trauma
I have had at least 10 bouts of trauma in my life, maybe more. Here’s a recap:
Trauma 1: Father dies in a car accident when child is eight months old, mother is confined to a psychiatric facility and has shock treatments, and child is raised by grandparents.
As result of her mother’s own trauma, nearly all motherly attention and affection is withdrawn. Small child is left alone to figure out what the world is all about and basically makes up her childhood based on what she sees on her Granny’s black and white television. She tells everybody that her dad is indeed alive, and he is a farmer. She invites no one to her house because all her friends have indoor plumbing and she wipes her ass on a telephone book. She dresses well thanks to really, really nice hand-me-downs from well-to-do relatives. She tells no one her mother is on welfare. She refuses rides to school because her mom has a peacock blue car that her grandfather found at the salvage yard.
Trauma 2: Child lives a blissful fantasy existence among a bunch of old people who feed and clothe her — that’s about it. Old people die, mom and child move into the city where mom takes a job and unloads all her own personal trauma on the child who is now a teenager. Teenager detaches and makes up a new persona for herself — Wanda LaTour, a hard partying, tough girl who measures her success by her popularity, precocious and awkward sexuality learned from Love American Style, and her as yet untapped intellect.
Trauma 3: Teenager becomes woman, claws her way to the top and is no longer recognizable to old friends and family. She gets job after great job until the bottom falls out while she is working in the Prime Minister’s Office. Because she has chosen politics as a profession, and the governing party has lost, this means all the work she had done is wasted, in her view, and she is unemployable. That is because her complete identity is wrapped around her job. She begins to disintegrate.
Good news! She is rescued by a man who whisks her away to the prairies where she has two children, then to Toronto for another successful birth. Wanda disappears and is replaced by June Cleaver.
Trauma 4: Mother dies.
Trauma 5: Three months after her mother dies, husband decamps for another vagina, leaving June Cleaver, as a basket case.
Trauma 6, 7, 8: The beloved dog, only two, dies after eating oatmeal chocolate muffins made by the babysitter just before Christmas. Woman is forced to sell her dream home and move into a hovel in the city. It has windows that don’t close, held together by twine that doesn’t quite stop the snow from coming in. She keeps the children warm with portable heaters. June Cleaver rejects this single mother lifestyle and fucks off. Women’s identity splits, and she becomes Erin Brockovich.
Mayhem ensues.
Woman soon realizes that she is NOT Erin Brockovich because she is by now an unemployed blubbering idiot. She goes to therapy and works on trying to figure out who she is. She becomes Mrs. Romano, Valerie Bertinelli’s mom on One Day at a Time, a nice sensible single mom, and meets the real man of her dreams.
Trauma 9: Everything goes to plan, but woman can’t shake the feeling husband number one has been lying to her. She discovers he is a multi-millionaire who for 10 years has left the family nearly destitute while he travels the world, showers his new wife with riches, and builds a cat house in Bermuda. Upon learning of his lies, woman becomes enraged, sues husband number one, and wins. At great long last, she is given her due and kids will finally get a good education! Right? Wrong! (Kids choose drugs instead.)
Woman finally attempts to rebuild her life, but the previous trauma has taken its toll. Woman shuts down for a decade, licking her unresolved wounds. She develops anxiety and agoraphobia. Wanda is long gone. June Cleaver is Boca Raton somewhere in assisted living. Erin Brockovich is counting her millions. Mrs. Romano is dead, and Valerie Bertinelli has a cooking show.
There is only one personality left for the woman. It’s Ina, her grandmother.
My grandmother, Ina is top left, my mother is the child, and the other badasses are great grandmas.
Woman has long admired Ina for her strength of personality, and for her ability to keep her emotions in check. Even under the most adverse circumstances, Ina hobbles forth on her cane willing to battle anyone and everyone. She is a classic Grandma of her times — widowed twice, in the grip of rheumatoid arthritis, with a closet full of fur coats she hasn’t worn in a decade, and her hair twirled in a messy grey bun. She is invincible.
The personality splits once again.
Trauma 10: Woman emulates grandmother and her entire badass generation by tamping down all her anger, resentment, sorrow, loss and misery into her gut. Recognizing the woman’s gut is fertile ground for misery, Joel the Cancer Troll is born and, like Jean Luc Picard, is hoping to explore and colonize other places. He recruits Jackie Chan, a feisty little polyp living to explore opportunities in her upper intestines.
And that is my theory of how trauma gave me cancer.
Fight me.
Remember, you can’t hurt my feelings.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="
title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I survived a childhood rape so I can identify with how childhood trauma reshapes the brain and nervous system. Neuroscientists are really beginning to study this and the physical effects on the body. There is a woman who is a psychologist whose whole practice focuses on this subject. Her Instagram account is the holistic psychologist. You might check her out. I will
always believe my cancer was directly linked to childhood trauma. My body’s reaction to stress in adulthood was that of the injured child. Years and years of therapy and EMDR have helped. My regret will always be it took me so long to find a therapist who knew and understood the link. I hope that your writing brings you peace and that your physical outcome results in finding you, a year from now, on a sunny beach sipping your favorite beverage with cancer in the rear view mirror, its memory growing dimmer with every passing day.
Eileen
Well cuz well said family trauma seems to follow us along but we don’t let it stop us from achieving our dreams or achieve our goals good for ya one day I’ll tell my demons for your book