My Mother, My Self
These early experiences left my mother with two lifelong behavior patterns. First, when actually ill, she behaves like the self-effacing little hero that got family and doctor applause when she was so little. No complaints, only a brave smile and determination, accompany her most seriously ill moments. As the crisis passes, the second behavior kicks in. My mother also learned from her early experiences that she lost center stage as soon as the illness began to resolve. Therefore, she became adept at making much of symptoms or creating symptoms. Since this immediately brought a mixture of positive and negative notice, she also developed a highly proactive way of dealing with disbelievers and critics, learning how to engage her supporters as defenders against those who saw through her. My sister and I, raised with all this, soon recognized it, and, in our own childish terminology, called it "Mom crying ‘wolf.’ " We’ve heard "wolf" a lot of times in the last fifty years. Sentences like "I almost died last night" or "It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me" or "It’s the sickest I’ve ever been" tend to receive pretty minimal reactions from us at this point. We’ve had to learn to protect ourselves from the roller coaster drama. Recently, my mother had two life-threatening diseases: cellulitis and an abdominal obstruction. Both situations had developed over years, sometimes borne with silent suffering, sometimes complained about. When each turned critical, my mother paid the price for her childhood survival strategies in her daughters’ doubtfulness. It was hard to be a full-fledged advocate with memories of so many false alarms and overstatements. We did our best. True to her pattern, Mom performed like an athlete during the worst phase of her problems. She took nose tubes like a trooper, almost seeming eager to show her indifference to pain in the same way she had during her childbearing experiences. Doctors and nurses alike expressed amazement at her stamina, endurance, politeness, and pleasance in the face of awful physical sensations. This lasted for a couple of days. Then, as family and medical staff began to breathe a sigh of relief and hope to return life to normal, the second half of those survival strategies came into play. Nurses began being firm and then irritated. I was asked to do increasingly avoidable tasks: she could have reached that blanket herself; she could make her own phone call; she really didn’t need me to bawl out a nurse who was trying to make her more independent. In other words, my mother had moved in her internal play from suffering hero to demanding victim. But the title of my article promised that this was not just a daughter’s diatribe against an ailing mother. This is about me too. When I was 22 months old, my leg was almost sliced in half, like a submarine sandwich, from hip to ankle. I almost bled to death, and it took a full year before I could walk without dragging my foot behind me, a condition the surgeon had predicted would last all my life. From this experience, I formed childhood beliefs and behavior patterns just as my mother did. Unlike her, I was the eldest child and had already experienced being a center of attention, and also unlike her, I was preverbal. The two beliefs I’ve been able to isolate for myself are 1) that something being wrong with me physically is very frightening and out of my control and 2) that I have a miraculous ability to heal from even the most desperate conditions. These were, after all, the two things that were being said about me by all the surrounding adults. As I’ve matured, my beliefs have also gone through some transmogrifications. I deal with my terror of physical symptoms by being very proactive in my own health care, recognizing problems in their early stages, researching them thoroughly, and following health professionals’ directions to the letter. In fact, I’ve been told by more than one person that I "over cooperate," being too hard on myself or too restrictive in interpreting instructions. This is my belief that causes me some bad reactions. Like most people, I know more about my own body than anyone else does. Unlike most people, I intuit problems when they are still distant blips on the radar screen. I have an impressive record for being correct. But sometimes, my fear has a will of its own. My second belief has only brought positive reactions. I’m everybody’s little miracle girl, able to visualize and patiently work my way out of any physical problem. Like my mother, who can’t give up her vision of herself as a hero, I find it hard to release my hypochondria because it includes such a delightful and useful image of me. This view of myself as unusually gifted at surviving seems as inseparable from my personal identity as any characteristic that comes to mind. Due to these intimate experiences with hypochondria, I’ve come to some conclusions about it. First, I don’t believe it’s passed along as a legacy. My mother and I both had early intense experiences that created our issues, and our behavior patterns are significantly different. My father and sister don’t have any such. I’ve recognized hypochondria in many a person and never seen a direct family connection. That seems like good news to me: a person dealing with this doesn’t have to add guilt about how his/her children may inherit the condition. (This is not to say that hypochondria in a parent isn’t a problem for the child.) Second, I don’t believe that hypochondria is a fear of death. My mother and I both believe in reincarnation, have been present at a number of deaths, and do not express as much fear of death as most of our non-hypochondriac friends and family. Third, I think hypochondria is a direct reaction to incidents and the behaviors of important other people. I think it’s a learned behavior, a survival strategy that often keeps people hooked because of the positive side of the initial experience that keeps duplicating in repeat situations. My mother can be a hero over and over, and I can be the miracle girl time after time. I’d love to give up scared-to-death girl, but miracle girl wants to stay. Regrettably, the two seem to be twins, joined at the hip in that rescuer-persecutor-victim vicious-cycle triangle. Finally, I’ve decided that simply understanding this isn’t enough to break the pattern. It’s some of the hardest work anyone can ever do. My mother and I are highly educated, well-read, intelligent women who’ve had plenty of feedback about our hypochondria, much of it from people we love. Of course, we’ve also hybridized our aberration to include ways of dismissing that input. And, unfortunately, we’ve been given plenty of opportunities to see that some people’s input needs to be dismissed. Resolving hypochondria requires, in my view, a couple of huge jobs. The individual must find some way of sorting through his/her own physical messages and the messages from outside, as well. Simply doubting one’s inclinations or taking someone else’s word as more accurate is not a good method for anyone to adopt. For example, the first emergency room doctor to see my mother about her bowel obstruction — and she was in her uncomplaining hero phase at that point — told me she had psychosomatic symptoms. He sent us home, where she threw up violently from her lower intestine for 26 hours before the second ER doctor took an X ray, found the difficulty, and admitted her for emergency surgery. She was right; the first doctor was wrong — almost dead wrong. Someone with hypochondria must weave his/her way through all the inaccurate and insensitive "help" as well as through the warped self-view of sensations and symptoms, attempting to make decisions that are already hard for the best-equipped people. All of us have bodies, and these are susceptible to damage and illness. And all of us feel some level of fear around that fact. Hypochondriacs, comparable to overeaters, cannot quit cold turkey as smokers or alcoholics do. Maybe the worst part of hypochondria, like the worst part of being addicted to food or alcohol or gambling, is the blame and shame that go along with it. Maybe the hardest part to deal with is the praise from others for the positive component, which is much like the approbation for workaholism and addictions to exercise or dieting. Does this make hypochondria a social disease like alcoholism, drug use, and addiction to gambling? It does seem that the causes and consequences go beyond the individuals directly affected. |
At five years old, my now eighty-year-old mother had her tonsils out. She remembers it clearly. At ten, she once again became the focus of a concerned family when she developed a sinus problem that required surgery and temporary removal to a drier climate. As the plain-Jane middle child among three daughters, my mother was awed by her sudden ability to affect the entire family, even causing her mother to leave her husband and home for a short period of time.