One of the therapists I went to for awhile, I remember telling her about this thing I used to do as a really little kid, where I’d pretend to get injured. My parents once had to take me to an ER to get an x-ray because I fell off a slide at a playground and wouldn’t stop limping (I was like 3, I have no memory of this). I was fine. As soon as the doctor told them I was fine I started walking fine, too, so it’s not like it was a bruise or something--I was just limping.
I DO have a memory of the time I took a red marker and scribbled on my knee with it to make it look like blood, then taped a piece of cotton over it, like a bandaged wound. When my mom saw it she immediately took me to the bathroom to clean my wound, only to find out it was just marker (I think at the time my parents decided I must’ve fallen onto the red marker and mistaken the red for blood. I didn’t correct them. We had a good laugh. I was maybe four or five? I have vague memories of this one).
All through elementary school, I used to wrap my arms and legs with ace bandages we had at my house, leftovers my mom brought home from work as a nurse. I snuck them to school then clumsily wrapped my arms or legs with them. I limped around. I put bandaids on my legs for no reason. I longed for a pair of crutches. Even to this day, when I fall or twist my ankle, I get a momentary thrill at the idea of having done real damage, of having broken something, maybe. I don’t WANT to have a broken bone--but there’s this deep instinctive reaction to the thought of being hurt.
When I told my therapist about this, I was embarrassed and ashamed. I told her it was because of this that my parents never believed me when I said I was hurt or sick later in life (I’d been telling her about the 4 separate incidents in my adolescence long after I’d stopped with the pretend injuries where I said something hurt, my parents said ‘you’re fine,’ and I ended up either having surgery or going to the hospital). I said that wasn’t their fault because I’d basically primed them not to believe me by pretending to be hurt all those years as a toddler/young kid.
She said, “Children have a way of seeking the things they’re not getting. What do you think you were lacking that these pretend injuries got you?”
I thought about it for awhile and shrugged. “I don’t know. Attention, maybe?”
She said she thought it was very likely that while my parents cared for my every physical need, they weren’t emotionally available to me, and shocking them into emotion with a bad injury was one way I was trying to fill a void. The fact that I was doing so as a child too young to really think that through was extra proof to her, because kids are clever but not on a conscious level--there’s no way I, a 3 or 4 or 5 year old child, had the thought “my parents are emotionally neglecting me, I need to attempt to find ways to get their attention.”
I said “Well then why do I still sometimes feel that way now? Why do I sometimes still feel a little thrill at the thought of breaking a leg or an arm or something?”
She looked at me and said, “So you have external, visible pain to validate your internal, invisible pain, and you stop feeling guilty for feeling traumatized for being emotionally neglected by parents who were otherwise wonderful.”
So yeah I guess there’s something to this “we wish we were traumatized” thing--it’s not that we wish we were, it’s that we are, and we wish someone understood our pain, because it hurts whether people understand that or not.
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