People in Pain.
Aug 29, 08- (by JunkysWife)
- 6 responses
- Sober Salon
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Someone got hurt in my yoga class today, and it brought up all kinds of interesting things for me.
We were all pretending to be wheels like we do in yoga class. I was thinking how good my body felt. I’d been sick last weekend, and today is the first day when I really felt like myself again. I could actually breathe! Through my actual nose!
So I was celebrating in my wheel pose, and suddenly, someone made a noise like an animal…that kind of noise that you can only make when something hurts, bad.
“OK, lower yourselves down, one vertebra at a time,” said the teacher. The other student made an awful noise again.
“Breathe in. Now breathe out completely, and come back up,” said the teacher.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!” screamed the student in pain. I didn’t go back into bridge posture. I stayed still, terrified, and my mind took over:
Is she hurt? Should I help her? Why isn’t somebody helping her?
“DON’T TOUCH ME! DON’T TOUCH ME! I’M SORRY! I NEED TO CALM DOWN! OH LORD!” she kept saying.
Should I go help her? What can I do? I’m not a doctor. Maybe the teacher is helping her. Is she crazy? Is she really hurting, or is she just crazy? Am I ok? Am I hurting? If she’s crazy, is she dangerous? Should I leave? Why isn’t the teacher helping her?
The teacher kept teaching, “Raise your legs above your head. Now pulse up for 10, 9, 8…”
We’re working on our fucking abs while this person is hurting?
“OH MY GOD! DON’T TOUCH ME!” I heard the student scrambling.
Finally, I heard the door open and close, and it was quiet. The teacher kept teaching. She told us that we should do our best to focus on ourselves. She said that if our bodies felt ok, that we should be grateful, and try to get back inside our own bodies.
I never quite got back outside of my head after the woman got hurt. I couldn’t stop worrying about her. I couldn’t stop judging her. I couldn’t stop worrying for the teacher and judging the teacher. I couldn’t stop worrying for myself and judging myself.
I recognized, though, that it’s kind of a microcosm of my most recent life story. I can’t stop worrying about my husband. I can’t stop judging him for the ways he’s sick. I can’t stop worrying for myself. I can’t stop judging myself.
After class, we all saw the woman who’d been injured standing outside. She was fine. She is one of those folks, apparently, whose arms pop out of socket all the time, and she knows how to pop it back in by herself. It had never happened to her in an inverted yoga post before, however, and so it was extra scary because she was upside down, and she got really upset.
She was ok. She wasn’t crazy, and she wasn’t even really badly hurt. She’d been afraid, and she’d reacted like people react when they are afraid. She was ok. I was ok. The teacher wasn’t a bad person.
I am sometimes still astonished by my lack of boundaries between myself and others. When other people suffer, I lose track of where that person ends and where I begin. I heard a person in pain, and I became concerned for my own safety…my own morality. My instincts are to FIX IT, and I lose all focus on myself.
It was an odd experience.
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I’m confused–was someone trying to help the woman and that’s why she was screaming “Don’t touch me”? Seems like an odd thing to yell if no one is even trying to touch you. But, anyway, I totally identify with this post. My lack of boundaries is compulsive–sometimes I just can’t stop making other people’s crap about me.
Honestly, this sounds like a common reaction. I’m definitely not a co-dependent, seeing as I’ve been the addicted one and been to rehab and all that good stuff, but it’s just natural to be curious and worry about someone if they’re obviously in pain, and then rush out with no explanation. It’s more human nature than codependent nature.
I love this post. That panic and fear around someone else’s pain, the need to fix it so that I can feel comfortable — oh, that is so familiar. You’re the bestest!
Yes, I wasn’t writing clearly…It’s kind of hard to explain how I felt like I wasn’t supposed to look at her, and so I couldn’t tell if the teacher was helping her or not because, although the teacher kept teaching, I couldn’t see her. I could just hear her.
Man, those boundaries. I wish they weren’t so gelatinous for me, either. P.S. I have a sister with schizophrenia–voices do plague her. It is a brain disorder. It affects cognitive ability, perception, the whole gamut. It really does cause structural brain abnormalities, and a variety of genes are implicated in it, though they haven’t found all of them for all the subtypes, yet. It isn’t fun for the person experiencing it, not for their family members either, and it is just as much not their fault as any other physical disorder–in fact, if smoking is implicated in lung cancer, then those with schizophrenia are even MORE blameless than people with physical illnesses (like cancer) that other people always have empathy or sympathy for.
“Icouldn’t stop judging the teacher” - yeah. There is someone in authority who knows what they’re doing, is taking care of the situation as they see fit and is concerned with the majority of people who are under her care and we think we know more about what should be done than she does. Somethin’ wrong with that?