TRANSCRIPT
I talk a lot about trauma and dissociation. I talk a lot about the consequences of unresolved childhood trauma. Well, yesterday I had an experience that really highlighted something still going on in my psyche. I passed out at the doctor’s office, and I would like to talk about it because it was very interesting to me.
I’m not someone who normally sees myself as being afraid of needles at all, though they don’t bother me. I’m not really terribly afraid of the sight of my own blood. However, yesterday I was getting my blood drawn at my yearly doctor’s physical, and it went really in an awkward and uncomfortable way.
What happened was there was a nurse who normally draws my blood. However, she had a nursing student with her, and it was the nursing student’s first day on the job. The nursing student said, “Can I draw your blood? Do you give me permission?” I said, “Well, she probably doesn’t seem to have a lot of experience with this, but you know what? The heck, I’m all out for helping her get her training.” So I sat back, and the nurse was in the background. I was sitting in the chair; I put my arm out, and what she did is she started to put in the needle. But I could see she was nervous.
Well, she put it in, but she didn’t put it in far enough. Then the other nurse saw that she wasn’t quite doing it right, and so telling her, “Come on, you have to put it in more,” was a little bit harsh in her tone. The nursing student got more nervous instead of pushing it in and pulling it out and pushing it in. I could see my vein was getting bigger, and I started getting uncomfortable. I was like, “Oh god, I don’t like this. Let’s get this over with.” Well, it went on back and forth, and finally what happened was the other nurse started coming in and putting her hands in the middle, and the two of them were fussing over what was going on in my vein. It was like it was actually hurting; it wasn’t feeling nice at all.
Then I started feeling a little different, a little woozy. Now, let me take a step back because this also happened in a context. The day before that, I was editing a video on circumcision, and in that video, I talked a fair amount about myself having been circumcised and having been circumcised also against my will. I was a little baby, and really thinking, “What did that do to me? What was it really like for me to be taken into some room with a bunch of people I didn’t know, away from my mother, in my first, what, hour of being born? My first hour of being out of the womb and having these strangers touch me and move me around and put me in position and then cut me without any anesthesia?” I just must have been terrified. Because I had just been talking about it so openly, I felt particularly raw and vulnerable from it.
Well, now fast forward to the next day when I’m sitting there, and they’re doing this, and suddenly I just felt everything started turning purple that I could see. I started sitting back, and I saw my vision get tunnel-y. Oh, I could feel myself getting nauseated, and then boom! I just sort of like zoned out. And then the next thing you know, it was all done. I guess they’d taken my blood, and I opened my eyes, and they had some ice pack on my head. I said, “Did I pass out?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” They said, “You weren’t out for very long, but you did pass out.” I actually felt kind of embarrassed, even a little bit ashamed, like, “Oh god, I felt so vulnerable in this position.” Both of them were looking at me a little bit strangely.
I also realized at that moment that I had dissociated, or at least that’s what I thought had happened. I really felt it was a psychological reaction that triggered this whole physiological reaction that caused my body literally to shut down, my consciousness to shut down, the blood flow to my brain to shut down. I really think, or at least I wonder, if what I went through there was really a post-traumatic sort of triggering, a post-traumatic reaction to my having been circumcised that’s still being buried inside of me.
I know I’ve heard people say, “Oh, it’s better to circumcise boys when they’re very little babies because they won’t remember.” How all the worst idea is to circumcise someone when they’re an adult. Yes, as an adult, you can give consent to be circumcised if that’s what you want, but how painful and how horrible, and you’ll never be able to forget it. Babies, they don’t remember it; they’ll just move on with their life. Well, I don’t really buy that. I really do believe that that stuff is really deeply buried inside of me, that and a whole lot of other stuff that happened to me when I was very, very little before I was actually creating what’s called more like adult memories, things that I can really be sure happened.
Basically, what I talked about in that circumcision video was that I didn’t even know I was circumcised. It wasn’t really even until I was an adult that I kind of started even figuring out what it meant, what I’d gone through. I had no memories of it, except I think it is still inside of me. So I really do speculate there’s a connection between me feeling violated, especially with blood in a doctor’s office, me feeling out of control in a way. Sort of like, “Yeah, I gave consent for her to do this, but I didn’t give consent for all this awkwardness and the in-and-out with the needle and poking me.” It’s like, “No, no, I just gave consent for her to poke me, take the blood, and let’s let it be done,” kind of like how it always is.
Well, let me take another step back now because this also is not the first time that I have passed out like that. I looked it up on the internet afterwards; there’s even a word for it. I think it’s called vasovagal syncope. Well, I’ve had this happen. I was counting in my memory; I wrote it down even. I think it’s happened at least three or four other times, and I realized there really is a pattern for when it happens.
The most recent time was exactly ten years ago when I was making a film up in Massachusetts, and I was staying in a place that I’d been allowed to stay that wasn’t technically even a residence. It was actually a workspace, but I was allowed to live there at night. Just when this incident happened, when people started coming into work, I felt a little awkward, like suddenly the place that was mine wasn’t really mine anymore.
I was opening an avocado with a knife, and I was opening it a little too fast, and I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to get the pit out of the avocado, and I jammed the knife in to stick it in the pit. It slipped through, and I stabbed myself really hard in the hand. My first reaction was, “Uh-oh, I just stabbed myself. That’s bad.” So I pulled the knife out, I put the avocado down, and right away it just started bleeding, and really profusely. It was a deep stab wound into my hand, and my first thought was not, “Oh my god, what’s gonna happen to my hand?” but, “Oh my god, the people who are letting me stay here are not going to be happy with this. They don’t want a big bloody mess here.” So I started trying to pinch it closed, and I looked at it really closely, and then I realized it was too much blood; I couldn’t stop it.
I took my hand off, and I touched my hand on my face for some reason, and then I remember suddenly I streaked blood across my glasses. At that moment, I was standing up, and I was like, “Oh my god!” The exact same thing happened to me ten years ago that happened to me yesterday: tunnel vision. I started to feel nauseated, and thank God what I did is I went right down to my knees, and then I sat down on my butt, and boom! I was out. I just leaned back, and I was gone.
When I woke up, there were people standing over me, and they were like talking to me. “Are you okay? Are you okay?” I still was bleeding all over the place. There was still blood on me, but it wasn’t just blood. Blood did help, I think, further me to dissociate like that, to pass out. But really, it was the emotional awkwardness. It was like the incredible emotional difficulty of feeling like, “Oh my god, I’m doing something inappropriate. I’m gonna get caught. I’m gonna make myself get embarrassed. I’m gonna embarrass the people I’m with. I’m not gonna be able to live here anymore.” So it was really that intense emotional conflict that triggered it. I bled before. I’ve had so many times in my life where there’s been blood all over me. I don’t pass out. It was the blood plus the emotional discomfort. Well, I’m gonna go back to the next time. The time before that, I would think was about five, six, seven years before that. I had a friend, and he had a really terrible accident. He actually ended up in the hospital, and he was unconscious. I went to visit him, and while I was visiting him in the hospital, one of his close relatives showed up, and his romantic partner showed up, his girlfriend. His girlfriend and this relative of his were standing on either side of his bed while he was unconscious, and I was right there in the room. They started having the nastiest, ugliest fight about who was at fault for him falling down and getting hurt. I’m watching this, and I was trying to intervene. Then suddenly, I looked at him, and I realized he actually might die. And then there was another part of me that was like, “But maybe he can even hear this, and maybe he can feel this, and maybe they might even kill him.” It was just so awkward, and I’m trying to tell them to stop. Suddenly, we’re tunnel vision, and I realized, “Oh my god, I’m gonna pass out.” Thank God I had the wherewithal to immediately sit down in the chair and then slumped over. I went out. Really intense dissociation. It was like, really, like, it was just emotionally too much to handle. There were too many different things going on at once, and the best response that I could personally have to protect my own feelings was just to whoop, unplug, get out of there, disappear from this situation. Well, now I’m gonna share my first time that I can remember passing out. What happened is I was in high school. I was 17 years old, and a friend of mine got in a car accident, and she was killed. It was horrible. I went to her memorial service. There were hundreds of people all packed into this crowded funeral home, and I remember standing and looking, and suddenly I saw her coffin. Then it just hit me, she’s dead, and this is real. Suddenly, I started just spinning around. Well, thank God my dad was next to me, and he had the wherewithal to realize what was going on, and he took me into his arms. This is what I was told afterward, and caught me. All I remember next is I opened my eyes, and I was outside in a police car, and my dad was standing outside the police car talking with a policeman. What I was told is that I’d passed out, and I think I’d been out for at least a minute or two. Then it gets back to why do I do that, and is this really also a post-traumatic reaction? Well, I think for me, when I was a kid, I really did learn to dissociate. I did learn that shutting down sometimes, even if it risks me falling and dying, is better than feeling these horrible feelings, feeling this pain. I really do speculate, I don’t know, but I really do speculate it does go back to when I was a little baby, and I was circumcised at one hour outside of the womb. I really believed it wasn’t just the physical pain, even though I believe the physical pain was absolutely horrible, probably the sight of my own blood also. But I think it was also that incredible sense of abandonment and betrayal and lack of emotional trust and feeling totally 100% absolutely unsafe. I really bet I did dissociate. I wouldn’t be surprised if I passed out when I was one hour old, and I just went into a catatonic state while they cut the foreskin of my penis off without anesthesia. I think it really set the stage in my life for me learning that lesson that at times like this, when life is totally overwhelming, when there’s too much emotional information for me to process, or I just feel like my body in some way is being terribly violated, like with needles going in and out, in and out, in this very uncomfortable interaction going on between these nurses, then it’s just better for me sometimes just to check out. I can’t handle this. Too much, too much information, emotional overload. But I also wonder if I hadn’t been circumcised, if I hadn’t gone through a super traumatic experience like that as a little baby, and probably lots and lots of other ones, because I have evidence if there were other ones that I went through kind of similar to that, would I be dissociating as a response nowadays to things like needles going in me and realizing about a friend’s death, or seeing a friend in the hospital with screaming going on around him, or seeing my own blood when I’m in an awkward situation, an awkward living situation? I suspect I probably wouldn’t dissociate. I really think it’s a pattern that I learned in early childhood, and I think I still have not resolved some of those very early traumas. So I think when situations in my adult life tap into some different parts of that dynamic or very similar parts of that dynamic, I have a very ancient response. I think part of why I was so interested by my response yesterday when I passed out, especially right after I woke up, is that’s an opportunity for me to learn. To learn about what happened to me, to learn about what I went through, to learn about what’s still inside of me, and somehow to learn how I might heal it. So how might I heal it? The first thing I think is I still have to regain my feelings. I have to somehow go back and regain my sense of anger and betrayal and fear and terror, to reconnect with those feelings. I think part of it is that going through that experience yesterday of having my blood drawn, I did start to reconnect with those feelings, and it was just too much. I just couldn’t handle it. Another thing that I found interesting is my reaction for the whole rest of yesterday. I was just completely emotionally wiped out, absolutely drained. I think I was like partially dissociated for the whole rest of the day yesterday. Today I feel a little bit better, but I still feel exhausted. I feel like I just got emotionally just beaten up yesterday. And I guess the reason I share this is because maybe others can benefit from this. I sure hope so, because also nobody yesterday told me, “Oh, you emotionally dissociated.” They didn’t even say it was anything to do with emotions. “Oh, some people just pass out because of blood.” They said it’s very simple. It’s just a physiological response. It’s not necessarily emotional at all. I think that’s so often true in our world. Things just get labeled as, mmm, physical, physiological, blood pressure, and blood vasovagal syncope. Nothing to do with what’s really going on on the inside with us psychologically, emotionally connected to our history, connected to our history of trauma and betrayal. So that’s why I open this up, and that’s why I want to explore it.