Endometriosis and Medical Trauma: Resources for Recovery for the Whole Family
- Lorraine Truman
- Jul 9
- 5 min read
Imagine repeatedly stepping onto a battlefield where your pain is invisible, your symptoms are minimized as anxiety, and your pleas for understanding are met with a systemic lack of knowledge stemming from decades of insufficient research.
This isn't just a physical battle; it's a profound medical trauma, a continuous loop of interactions that erodes trust, self-esteem, and the very ability to advocate for one's own body.
It's a reality where conditions like endometriosis, one of the top 20 most painful diseases in the world, can take over a decade to diagnose, leaving individuals to silently endure immense suffering while striving to lead normal lives.
What is Trauma?
Trauma is the inability for an individual to process emotional events, settling into a feeling of overwhelm. The individual can experience a threat to bodily integrity or threat to life and sanity.
How does medical trauma differ in the spectrum of trauma?
Medical trauma often has many different roots and experiences that have gone on for extended periods of time. These are traumas that continue in a loop of interactions that continuously cause people to face their trauma within new medical appointments and treatments.
To add insult to emotional injury, women's health based medical trauma can often plague in a more intense manner because of the statistics of old-school medicine being practiced.
Poor bedside manner equals sexism, bias and plain ignorance as it applies to a woman’s body.
The trickle-down effects of basically zero women’s health research until 1993 has caused a crisis when it comes to knowledge of the woman’s body and hormonal effects on the rest of the body systems.
“A recent study in the Journal of the American Heart Association revealed that young female patients (aged 18–55 years) who presented to emergency departments with chest pain had a 29% longer wait time for potential heart attack evaluation compared with their male counterparts.”
How does endometriosis connect to medical trauma/CPTSD or PTSD?
The path to diagnosis for endometriosis is often lengthy (average diagnosis timeline is 6-10 years).
During this time period many patients experience dismissal, unnecessary procedures, gaslighting, refusal to treat, prescription of anxiety medications and general negative bedside manner. This lays a foundation of mistrust, low self esteem and the inability to properly speak out and outline symptom management treatment needs.
Endometriosis sufferers experience longer diagnosis and wait times in general.
In my own experience it took over 15 years for doctors to even begin to name the disease that was plaguing me. Many of the times I have sought medical care for my symptoms it has been cast in a light that leans in the direction of anxiety or hypochondria.
All of these dismissals and questioning are surmounted in years of denial and dismissal. This looks like rushed appointments and vague wastebasket diagnoses like: anxiety, irritable bowel, interstitial cystitis, unexplained infertility and pelvic pain disorders.
Overall, patients with women’s health concerns are discounted in the medical world. It is not to say that there aren’t any doctors that are willing to explore things further.
I have often found that natural and functional medicine doctors are willing to take a combined approach with the scientific data supplied from western medicine. Most of my doctors in this specific fields have a background in internal medicine from a reputable hospital system.
They simply found that they could not spend enough time with each patient to have conclusive, deep seeded evidence towards a diagnosis.
Furthermore, this type of searching, denial and dismissal causes a severe decline in self-esteem and confidence in one’s own tracking of symptoms.
There were many times where I felt giving up to those types of feedback was my only option and I would just have to survive it. This means that all of us who despair silently are trying to live normal lives while pushing through one of the top 20 most painful diseases in the world, similar to that of a heart attack.
Finally, it is crucial to mention that this is not only reserved for endometriosis.
Things like PCOS, infertility and menopause/HRT are other topics that are beginning to get traction, but still suffer at the hands of dismal training in medical school and research representation.
Finding a solid voice and way to communicate these intense needs helps many patients regain their voice, confidence and navigation within the medical world.
It takes a lot of time, trial and error alongside painful emotional episodes.
It is my experience that we are some of the most resilient human beings I have ever met, but we did not have a choice in such strength. That is the difference between these medical experiences that have led to long-term and complex trauma.
Identify Medical Trauma Diagnosis
Make an appointment with a trusted medical professional to discuss your own symptoms that may be connecting to PTSD/cPTSD:
Flashbacks
Irritability
Irrational overreactions
Nightmares
Mood Swings
Screening Resources for Trauma
These resources below are recommended for provider use and individual screening purposes. These are amazing tools to help give feedback to those that may need to bring appropriate data to a family doctor or gynecologist to get started on confirming one's diagnosis.
PTSD tool DSM5
PTSD Child Tool 3-6
Decide on Therapy
Selecting therapy is very much like finding a comparable work atmosphere, friendship and doctor combined. You want to feel comfortable and challenged all at once. It is important to search outside of your comfort zone but not so far as to fall into a place of panic each time you are having a session. That will be counter-intuitive to the healing process overall.
Screen for Therapy Providers
Many times a search like this can have obstacles like financial, insurance and time constraints. The biggest factor for me as a chronic illness patient was also finding telehealth that did not cost hundreds of dollars. All of these combined constraints can pose a challenge. The articles below give amazing feedback on how to locate one that works around all of the variables one can face. Categorizing your needs and finding a successful search engine/system for therapists is the magical ticket to therapeutic happiness.
Therapy Schedule
I often hear from many people that they are too busy for therapy. But I find even if I have to miss one or two sessions it is still effective and supportive for me to go to my therapy session(s). Carving out time to follow a therapy schedule, journal and practice things like meditation while doing other listed tasks is super important to recovery. For example, I will often meditate in the bathtub or shower to double up on necessary tasks. It may not be optimal to some but it is the reality of life with a busy family and work schedule.
8-12 weekly sessions
The Power of Journaling
Evaluate your Progress
Progress is often not linear in retrospect. When we see our peaks and valleys it looks as though we are backtracking. However, valleys are the periods of time when we are feeling our emotions the most and not masking them to pretend to survive. I am constantly learning to allow the valleys during my healing process because it often means I am expelling the stressful load of cortisol that traps itself within my nervous system. Without EMDR I wouldn’t be able to walk through that appropriately. For me I notice successes when I practice appropriate coping skills and do not take my rage or despair out on family and friends in the process of projection.
Provider Screening Tools
Symptom management
Include GYN/Endo Specialist
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