The dim lights allowed the projection to show up more clearly. I struggled to hold my head up to watch the gruesome video. I hate horror movies and never watch them, never will. But here I was, just out of a three-week stint in the hospital watching an educational video that featured huge magnifications of bed sores. Though physically still while my mother and I watched the video, the whirlwind of events that changed our lives forever left us reeling in shock. My valiant mom stood behind my wheelchair so that I could rest my head against her. We were both trying to take in all that would need to happen for us as a family to manage my newly paralyzed legs.

Continual weight shifts were the message of the dreadful video that clearly illustrated what would happen if we didn’t take this advice. I feebly placed my hands on the armrests of my wheelchair and tried to lift my bottom off the cushion. No go. I would need weeks of physical therapy to regain my upper body strength. At that point, it looked like I’d be doing weight shifts the rest of my life.

Bed sores, also called pressure sores, are one of the hidden enemies for people who sustain spinal cord injuries. With no pain signals conducted to the brain, continual pressure causes skin breakdowns, which often require skin grafts and months or years in bed to heal. Like many problems, they start small and then go wide and deep. Along with preventing urinary tract infections (UTIs), injecting blood thinners by myself into my thigh to prevent clotting, learning to dress myself, and navigating through life in a wheelchair, I had much to learn.

No matter how awkward or frustrating these lessons were, my good nurses and therapist daily pounded the message into my brain: “You can do this. Don’t let anyone help you. You can be independent!”

Survival Sarah responded to the call to action: “I have to keep Sarah alive. Everything depends on me.” I was now in two parts. There was Survival Sarah and the body/burden she had to carry. All other normal teenage parts of me faded into obscurity. Survival Sarah acted hyper with her list of things to do. “I need to go to therapy, I have to exercise, I can’t forget to take my meds on time, I have to do weight shifts, I have to get to all my appointments, I WILL manage this new life. We might not have much fun….but we will stay alive. Oh yeah, I have to go back to high school too.”

Now, at the time, I didn’t realize that a strong part of me, Survival Sarah, was born back in that dimly lit room while viewing a horrifying movie that described my new reality so accurately. Mercifully, the video wasn’t in high definition. I don’t think HD existed back then.

Survival Sarah, the faithful life manager, did her job well and kept me going. Though I did end up back in the hospital with a number of UTI’s over the years (a dismaying hardship of SCI patients), she has kept me alive. I even learned to ride horses again, strengthening my body using my “barrel horse,” creative designed by my riding teacher! I’m so grateful I learned to live again, but, looking back, it seemed like Survival Sarah was all that was left of the normal teenager who exited the stage with a broken back on Jan. 19, 1992. Now every single thing was difficult. Every step.

Eventually, Survival Sarah took on new projects like moving to India, getting married, and raising/homeschooling 5 kids. She was quite competent (impressive actually!) but did not know how to stop, slow down, or rest. Once out of danger, the “I have to keep Sarah alive, I have to keep going no matter what” mantra needed to change, and it wasn’t changing. That message was hardwired in my brain. My body started to tell a different story. I couldn’t keep carrying such a heavy burden. Chronic pain entered my life like a bully, but I still couldn’t/wouldn’t stop and listen.

I imagine Survival Sarah taking up residence in my shoulders, the faithful part of my body that took over all the heavy lifting during rehab. This makes perfect sense for me since my arms needed to take over all the work of making me mobile in the wheelchair and then had to support the crutches as I learned to walk. My shoulders never seemed to stop working. Sometimes I’d find them hiked up to my ears when standing in line to pay for groceries or some other tasks that doesn’t require their expertise. I had so much tension that I didn’t even know what it felt like to not have tension. Positive, relaxed muscle memories were long gone, and I felt like a potato chip that could easily snap in two (or ten!). The constant neck, shoulder, and back tension fed my migraine headaches for over 30 years.

Maybe this sounds a bit crazy to some of you reading this but hang in there with me. According to IIFS theory, when we are faced with extreme situations in life, parts develop and start to carry burdens.

It makes sense: Extreme situations lead to extreme burdens.

These burdens are more commonly known as lies. These extreme beliefs serve the purpose that helped them develop. I really did need to stay alive, and it would take heavy learning and hard work. My survival part had good intentions. But as Survival Sarah got old and weary, all she could say, with a touch of bitterness, was, “I’m just trying to survive.”

Life feels very low when survival is our highest goal.

Many people don’t realize how much energy mere survival takes for some of us—especially if you have a strong survival part of you. We become more and more isolated: “People don’t know who I really am.” This “I’m just trying to survive” didn’t match with the Sarah who liked to study, the Sarah who loved to teach, the Sarah who was thrilled to be a mom to 5 amazing kids.

“I feel like two different people,” I confessed to my Spiritual Director about a two years ago.

With those words, I began a new journey of healing. Trauma fragments our psyche. Due to extreme situations, some of our parts become super-sized and start to dominate our whole being. This is a normal, protective human response. Extensive reading about IFS has helped me make sense of Surivival Sarah and the many other parts of me. Amazing! I’m normal!! What a good feeling.

For the past few years, I’ve been working with Survival Sarah to get her back down to the appropriate size. She is now a helpful coach rather than a screaming banshee. Once I started appreciating her for her years of effort, she relaxed. She needed updated to know that I’m no longer in danger of dying, but I am still in need of her services to help me manage my responsibilities and my health. I’m learning to live from my True Self, the self God made me to be. Survival Sarah lets me know when I need to rest, do my somatic work on the mat, or just say no to things I can’t handle. She doesn’t dominate, and my shoulders feel much better! I have less headaches. The best part is that I’m not just trying to survive now; thriving sounds like a lot more fun to me.

Maybe some of you are stuck in survival mode like I was—just trying to stay alive. No one understand what you are really facing or trying (desperately) to accomplish. It is a hard place to be. I always clung to John 10:10. “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

The thief comes to kill, steal, and destroy, but I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.

Learning to understand my locked-in responses to trauma has opened so many new doors of abundance. That’s why this whole blog has been created—to try to capture bit by bit this transformation that keeps taking place. In my next post, I’ll talk about True Self. Now, that’s good stuff!

As I end this post, I want to give a shout out to my SCI comrade Lee, a pressure sore survivor. In separate, but very similar accidents, we both faced lives we never expected. Every day, he has made the choice to keep living.

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