When my fabulous DD grazes her knee caps and starts to cry, I feel nothing. Of course I go cuddle her and clean her up etc. but I don't care that she hurt herself. I feel nothing and this is why.
I had a horrible birth - 22 hours, much of which was spent thrashing around in animal pain. The epidural only worked intermittently, the spinal block failed to get going and I ended up with a forceps delivery under general anaesthetic. I ended up having had a haemorrhage, a punch to the stomach, stitches in two tears and an episiotomy, and had to packed vaginally with gauze to contain the bleeding (all of which I missed of course).
When I came around (a vague process spread over about 2 hours) I didn't know what was happening, where I was or why there was a baby there. It was at this point that my husband was told to leave. So I spent the next 6 hours on my own in a room with a baby that I didn't really recognise as mine. When she cried I tried to flop out of bed and pick her up and breast feed her. Luckily she was pretty into the breast feeding so I didn't need to be.
Eventually a nurse came back and explained amongst other things that they needed to pull the gauze out which was 'not going to be comfortable'. Indeed not. From then on every time the baby cried I had horrible pain in my stomach and pulling on the stitches. Nobody told me that might be normal, nobody told me it was okay for me to be moving around. I was terrified that when I got up and picked my baby up I was damaging myself further. But there was noone else around so I did it anyway.
The pain induced by the baby crying carried on for 8 weeks or so. By this time I was getting recurrent fever and eventually I went into hospital and got some left over placenta removed.
Four months post partum I finally stopped bleeding and it stopped being physically painful to hear DD cry. But the damage was done by then. From then until now, the emotional part of my brain simply shuts down every time DD cries. I get an adrenaline rush every time I think she is going to start crying, like when she rolls over in bed, making it impossible for me to sleep in the same room as her.
I know I should feel empathy when DD is hurt, and the fact I don't makes me feel like a psychopath. I don't know how to fix this. How do I retrain my body to know that DD crying doesn't hurt me any more?