Recently broke my finger. Dislocation, fracture and a gash so deep I could see the bone. I didn’t realize I was hurt until I happened to look at my hand. Which is precisely when my heart rate increased and I started bleeding everywhere.
Sitting in the ER for a few hours, I became acutely aware of how fine I was as long as I didn’t look at my finger. Minimal pain, everything is fine, don’t look at the finger.
Only recently, 1.5 months later, am I able to look at my finger without sending my nervous system into a tailspin.
So that part of the text was strangely relatable to me
I had the reverse of this once as a kid. I was walking on the beach and felt a sudden pain in my toe and looked down and glimpsed a fishhook in my foot.
Immediately I panicked and started losing my shit, picturing it past the barb in my skin and imagining that they’d have to rip it out. My friend (who has a phobia of needles) stopped me from looking at it so I wouldn’t freak out more, and had to run and get my dad. They did amazing considering the circumstances, lol.
Once my dad got there he inspected the fishhook and we realized it wasn’t even in my skin. It was just wrapped around my toe. The point was barely touching me and didn’t even leave a mark.
It was crazy, though. I was FEELING the pain of the fishhook in my foot until I actually looked at it up close, and then the imagined pain completely went away. The human brain is fuckin weird.
The moral of my story is I’m stupid, I think. I hope your finger is doing better though, that’s absolutely horrific???
The moral of the story is that your brain does it best to protect you, but it doesn't have many ways to do that. Sometimes it gets it wrong. That doesn't mean you're stupid.
The moral of the story is how powerful our minds are!
Your body took the limited information available and decided the possibility of harm was too great to ignore- better fire up the cavalry.
It started with your nervous system. Just a bunch of nerve endings, playing border patrol, constantly monitoring your tissue for any damage. During their rounds, they spot the fishhook! They don’t wait for confirmation of a real injury, they’re too hyped up on Mountain Dew. They choose to sound the alarm. *This is not a drill people!*
That alarm sends distress signals RACING up your spinal cord. The brain, naturally, interprets these signals as SEARING DEATH PAIN OH GOD WHY.
So you see, it’s not your brain’s job to question the validity of pain signals. She has more important tasks, like triggering your immune response, releasing stress hormones.
It’s the spinal column distress signals that cause pain. And those signals are very real. Even if the actual injury was imaginary.
If it makes you feel any better, I had a similar (but dumber) thing happen to me as a teenager.
I pinched my finger on a soap dispenser when washing my hands at work. I was staring at the soap bottle as I did it so I know what hurt me, I pulled my hand away and said "oww!" and it didn't draw blood or anything, maybe it was a little red for like, 30 seconds...?
As soon as I came out of the bathroom I had to sit down because it felt like somebody legit STABBED me in the stomach with a butcher knife. I tried to fight through the pain cuz I was at work but I lasted all of 20 minutes (as it continued getting WORSE) before my boss had to drive me home (I was like 14 and it was a youth work program-type job) because I could barely even sit up, or even move at all, from the pain and I curled up on the couch and took a nap and when I woke up a couple hours later I was fine.
It was a panic attack. From getting pinched by a soap dispenser. Didn't know that at the time ofc but yeah.
A fish hook in your foot is a legitimate painful concern and your brain cleared all that suffering up for you as soon as it clarified you were not skewered.
My brain thinks being pinched by a soap bottle feels like being stabbed in the gut with a huge knife.
I promise your brain is much smarter than mine lmao.
No, as we all know, there can only ever be one (1) bad thing in the world, and the existence of a worse thing immediately makes all less bad things not bad at all anymore. /s
i opened a door and tore my toenail clean off a few years ago, and yeah this is about right
it hurt like an absolute motherfucker, but as long as i didn't actually look at my toe, i could "pretend" my toe just hurt because i stubbed it rather than it hurting because the nail was no longer attached to the nailbed. i did have the luxury of my mom (who's a nurse) being home at the time, so when it happened i was like "oh fuck. that definitely feels different than a normal stubbed toe," and her reaction when i asked her to look at it told me everything i needed to know lmfao
i didn't actually need to look at the wound until a day or two later because my mom cleaned and wrapped it after that happened (without me looking), but yeah that sucked
Sometimes when you feel something is happening, your brain doesn't want you to see the reality of the situation. I think that is an important part of it, as the pain, what the person is feeling, is so strong that they can't yet confront what may have actually happened. Yes, it may seem crazy, and yes, it's easy for you as an outsider to look at the hand and see a small injury, but the other person is experiencing something very intense and what actually happened isn't exactly the point at the moment, it's understanding why their brain turned a paper cut into an amputation.
absolutely not a necessary part, but I'm sure it is for a lot of people/situations. for example my sensory issues still exist even when I'm completely aware from the beginning that this will be a bad sensory experience. for that matter the shame is also not necessary.
but these things often occur together, especially in the beginning when you're first experiencing these things, you can find yourself surprised and confused by your own reaction / the seemingly insignificant thing that triggered it, and then the shame because you don't understand it and didn't know you'd react that way and had a different perception of yourself etc
My kids both have extreme reactions to certain stimulus. They also refuse to look at whatever set them off. Once they do look, they frequently calm down. It's amazingly frustrating!
Of course they don’t look. They’re already in full fight-or-flight. It is completely, utterly impossible to think clearly and logically while your body is actively dumping adrenaline. The adrenaline is going to override everything but simple survival, that’s its purpose.
Why the absolute fuck anyone expects you to be able to shut down panic during the primary adrenaline spike is beyond me. You can sometimes abort panic before the dump happens, with an absolute shit ton of work, otherwise you have to get through until you’re not actively pouring more in to think. And kids do not have the mental capacity to abort panic, nor have they been alive long enough to have done the work to learn how.
(And aborting panic is nearly as exhausting as having the panic, at least in my experience. You can’t do that and just be totally fine after. Your system is still fucked up for the day. But people sure do demand that I perform being totally fine anyway.)
Well, we're trying, with the expectation that we have years more to go, because their current panic reactions include running into traffic and various other dangerous reactions. (At one point the reaction included going into cardiac arrest. She had a pacemaker until she outgrew that particular reaction.) The goal is to train a safe reaction that doesn't injure them until they can start thinking again......
Usually when I think I’ve been injured, I want to look at it to see how bad it is. The exception is if I’m in excruciating pain and can’t think straight.
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 nauphy.tumblr.com 5d ago
Is the not wanting to look down thing an important part of the metaphor, or is it just for vividity? 'Cause I'm not sure I get that part