Can trauma and stress cause alopecia? I don’t have that answer, just my own experience and allot of questions.
When my alopecia was in the early stages , there was not a wealth of information on the topic. My doctor attributed to stress, my dermatologist denied that conclusion but didn’t actually give me an answer. I later discovered it was an autoimmune condition, what does that mean? No clue! ok so why do I have this autoimmune condition? …
As I started to write about my experience with alopecia, it has forced me to really think about how I was feeling in each stage of losing my hair. This definitely brought up some emotions that I never acknowledged before, feelings I can’t remember having 20 years ago when It was starting to happen. well that’s weird! why would I be feeling this now, hmmmm…. oh I know! because I never dealt with any of it before!
And so the emotional spiral began, but instead of sending me into a nose dive of despair. It actually gave me a series of uhuh! moments that I wish could have come earlier in life, but whatever… better late than never!
I’m fine, I can deal with anything.
I started putting a time line together of events that I should have taken some time to deal with emotionally. When something would happen in my life, I would always think , well other people have had more traumatic things happen to them. Which is true. As I am discovering for myself now, that comparing experiences doesn’t lessen my trauma. Thinking like that actually caused me to feel that my emotions weren’t valid. So I put on a brave face and didn’t deal with shit!
I was19 years old when my house burned down, while everyone was asleep. We didn’t lose any human family but did lose our family dog. She alerted us to the danger and saved all of our lives. I remember trying to pull that damn dog out the window with me, but as she weighed the same as I did at the time, I couldn’t save her. We lost everything we had in that fire, but lived to tell about it .
It’s a Girl!
Skip ahead to 22 years old and pregnant, I went through the cesarean delivery from Hell! My labor was mild , but lasted 30 hours without progressing. when the doctor told me that I needed a cesarean, I was relieved to not have to do all that pushing! What I didn’t know was that I have an unusually high tolerance to anesthetic, my doctors did not discover this until they started the procedure and couldn’t stop until my daughter was delivered. The operation did not go as planned, I had what they called a patchy block, meaning I wasn’t frozen completely
I actually thought I was being dramatic as I screamed on the operating table, until I saw the doctors faces and knew , this was not normal . I thought I was going to die. Of course I didn’t and took my beautiful baby girl home. I thought to myself ok that sucked , but I have a child to raise now, no time to dig deep into that whopper of emotional trauma.
At age 24 I suffered a miscarriage just after the first trimester. This was devastating in of itself, but what made it worse for me was the guilt I felt afterwards. I was surprised by the pregnancy and initially was not happy about it. For a long time I thought maybe I willed the miscarriage to happen, realizing later that may have been a little irrational. Again I never sought out any help for the emotional trauma.
And there goes my hair.
At age 28 my hair started falling out, I blamed it on stress . Not really understanding what that actually meant. My hair had all fallen out as I reached my 30s. I decided to move forward and not dwell in the past. As I know better now, I realize I skipped a step…. In order to move forward in a healthy way, I should have dealt with the past first.
Did all this trauma cause my hair loss? I still have no clue, but as I start to deal with it, I’m wondering now if alopecia was my bodies way of saying…Hey Tammy, deal with your SHIT!
Ok , I’m finally listening .
English 