Breakthrough by Ahmed Hankir

Author:Ahmed Hankir [Hankir, Ahmed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857089670
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2024-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Wounded Healer

This chapter is intense and does cover suicidality, so please prime your hearts and minds and brace yourselves, and by all means skip it if you feel you are not emotionally equipped to read it at this moment.

Trauma can be so overwhelming that your thoughts can become scattered. To be honest, it has been difficult trying to organise my thoughts and feelings after my mind was torn asunder by traumatic events. I, however, gave it my best shot and tried in earnest to be as coherent as possible.

According to scripture, ‘Persecution – the denial of freedom – is worse than death – the denial of life….’ Might that help explain why people who are tormented by paranoid and persecutory delusions are often driven to end their lives? Being a prisoner of your own mind can be an unbearable situation to be in. There are, however, other types of captivity that are equally if not more unbearable. Being in medical school, in a way, can be a form of captivity. It sounds extreme and dramatic I know, but please bear with me whilst I try to elaborate and explain.

As a medical student it is your dream to become a doctor. For you to realise that dream, you need a medical degree. The university has the power to confer that degree upon you. It also has the power to deny you that degree. So, the nature of the dialectic can be framed in the following way: you, the medical student, basically want something (the medical degree) from them, the university. That places you in a position of vulnerability that they can easily exploit.

If you've been labelled a troublemaker, any form of protest to unjust treatment and/or non-conformity is considered deviant behaviour and is used to legitimise punitive measures against you. In other words, they can do whatever they want to you and you can do nothing about it. You have no other option but to put up with the abuse until you are no longer under their power, that is, until you qualify, which can literally take years. You are afraid to blow the whistle or lift your head above the proverbial parapet because we all know what happens to whistleblowers. That was certainly the case with me.

As soon as you graduate from medical school, you leave one machine and enter another. But that's a different beast altogether. You can choose to rage against the former machine now that the restraints and restrictions have been lifted somewhat and the shackles have been removed.

Metacognition has been defined as ‘thinking about how you think’. How did I end up thinking like this? I'm aware the language I'm using is loaded and layered. But that's what happens to you after you've been ‘held captive’ for so long. You feel unable to express yourself due to the fear of the draconian consequences and what will happen to you. You are terrified that they would sabotage you, abuse you, deprive you of a medical degree, shatter your dreams and, in my case, psychologically torture you.

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