Murmuration

It was no mistake that I ventured into a hospital as part of my undergraduate premed training. All it took was one unprecedented morning in the emergency room that put me on a livesaving path to personal inquiry, unlearning, and healing of my childhood wounding.

Excerpt from the story Murmuration from page 73 from my memoir “The Great Unlearning.”

Excerpt from Murmuration

“With a goal of becoming a doctor, and more credits than needed to graduate from the University of Hawaii with an undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences, when the opportunity to shadow doctors for two weeks at The Queens Medical Center in Honolulu came up, I jumped at the chance.

My first day included a grueling and unprecedented morning in the emergency room where I witnessed the horrible physical and emotional pain of a fifty-year-old woman who had been beaten by her husband with a baseball bat. Standing stunned and paralyzed in the doorway of the trauma room, seeing how her enormous physical and emotional distress was causing this badly injured woman to want to die, I felt her pain deep in my gut—even though I had never been physically harmed like that.”

“In a few years I would learn why I had reacted the way I did in the ER: I hadn’t recognized, or embraced, my own suffering, so how could I compassionately embrace anyone else’s? My own trauma was rotting somewhere in my gut, and having never allowed myself to feel it, I was deeply triggered in the presence of great pain and suffering…”

Listen to me read the whole story by visiting my podcast on Spotify. Or support me by purchasing a copy of “The Great Unlearning” on this site.

Author Reflection

After reading this story for my podcast, these thoughts came to mind:

I sure did a great job at compartmentalizing the experience in the emergency room. More accurately, I stuffed my feelings. I didn’t speak out loud about it to anyone, I simply stuffed my terror down into a cement vault with all the other traumatic experiences I had endured.

Stuffing my emotions gave me a false sense of emotional safety I suppose. In the moment, it felt easier and safer to do.

I thought if I didn’t allow myself to really feel my emotions around witnessing the trauma of others, I wouldn’t have to deal with them. But as we all might not know, bottling up emotions can backfire in unexpected ways. This is a topic I will explore with you in the next podcast episode.

I didn’t grow up learning that expressing emotions wasn’t safe, I grew up learning that you don’t talk about what is troubling you.

I lacked the emotional intelligence to know what to do with my feelings and didn’t trust anyone enough to share anyway. I don’t think I even trusted myself.

Wanting to learn more about compartmentalizing and stuffing our feelings, I asked my mental health counselor daughter Emily how much of it was skill or was it a form of denial.

She said, compartmentalizing is a short-term way of protecting yourself, it’s a defense mechanism. It’s not necessarily negative, sometimes it’s best to put a conflict aside so that you can manage another situation. Like you might have problems at home and then go to a busy job, its best to put aside the stress of home so you can deal with the stress of work. Then deal with what is going on at home soon, and in healthy ways to avoid the pain you will experience by putting them off. If you don’t deal with a troubling situation in a timely manner, it will fester and bite you later. That’s stuffing emotions. So much more about in later podcasts..

Here is analogy that might be helpful. Compartmentalizing is like purchasing something with a credit card and then paying off the balance before it starts accruing interest. Stuffing your emotions is like not paying the purchase off in time, or late, and it becomes more expensive because of interest and late fees.

It’s a pay now or pay more later situation. The choice is always ours to make.

To listen to me read Murmuration and how I addressed a potent reader question, head over to Spotify .