Why I Don’t Go to the Doctor
I avoid the doctor, specifically my gynecologist. I haven’t always been this way, I used to be very diligent about my yearly appointments. I’m sure any therapist can look at my past and immediately see why I would specifically avoid the gynecologist. Even though I logically know why I steer clear of that office, I don’t think I really faced it until just recently.
I was listening to a podcast about grief and one of the statements that really stuck with me was that we need to sit in the pain and walk through the pain in order to heal. I have read this before but hadn’t really applied it fully to my life. I’ve known that working through the pain of our miscarriages was important in order to really recover from it and be able to help others through the struggle. What I didn’t face was the fact that there were aspects of that pain that I wasn’t experiencing, almost like different rooms of the pain that I was avoiding.
Imagine that the pain of your miscarriages were the main rooms of the house, but there were parts of the house that you really didn’t need to visit every day and therefore completely ignored. That’s how the doctor was for me. A part of the house that I hadn’t visited in a very long time because it brought me too much pain, it was the epicenter of the pain. So, I just closed the door and pretended it didn’t exist. Except, by my own definition and the definition of experts on how to recover from grief, I wasn’t really walking through it. I wasn’t feeling the pain and recovering, I was avoiding it.
Anyone who has experienced a traumatic event, or multiple traumatic events in my case, can understand why you would want to avoid the scene of the crime. Even my doctor understood. After my last miscarriage, he looked at me and told me not to come back for a while, that he didn’t want to see me. He explained that I needed to heal and that returning to the office would just cause more trauma, almost like PTSD. I took his advice whole heartedly, and maybe took it too far. I ended up taking 2 years off of going to the doctor.
Friends! We need to sit in the pain, the grief. We need to feel it and face it, in order to really heal. Closing the door to that room and pretending it isn’t there isn’t going to help, it isn’t going to help you grow as a person. Currently, we are collectively, as a world, sitting in a lot of grief and loss. And in our nation, we are grief-stricken. We don’t like to face the pain and sit in it. We like to close the door and pretend it isn’t there.
I guess the question is, how do we know if we are avoiding the pain? I look at my life and explore, “what activities am I actively avoiding?”. In my circumstance, this is the doctor. It’s time I face my fear and go back to the doctor and sit in that room and let myself heal.
What room are you avoiding?
What room do you need to open the door to and sit in to really feel your discomfort and grief so that you can truly recover?
In confronting our fears and acknowledging the spaces we may be avoiding, we take the first steps toward healing. The journey through grief and trauma is deeply personal, yet it is a path that many tread. You are not alone in your hesitation to face the pain or in your struggle to open doors that seem too difficult to unlock. Let this be your call to action to embrace vulnerability, to seek help when needed, and to connect with others who share similar experiences. Together, we can create a world where grief is not hidden but shared, where healing is not solitary but communal. In opening these doors, we find strength in each other, and in that strength, we find hope. Remember, you are not alone; we walk this path together, and it is through our collective courage that true healing begins.
