When Nobody Believed You
By Forest Ferns Counseling
There’s a specific moment a lot of our clients describe, and it isn’t the moment they got sick. It’s the moment they finally got the diagnosis, after three years, five years, a decade, and felt, underneath the relief, something closer to grief and rage. So it was real. So I wasn’t making it up. So all of those appointments where I was told it was stress, or anxiety, or my weight, or “just how women’s bodies are” — I was right, and nobody listened.
Being right doesn’t fix that. A diagnosis explains the body. It doesn’t repair what years of not being believed did to the rest of you.
What medical gaslighting actually does
People use “medical gaslighting” loosely, and some clinicians bristle at it. Here is what we mean by it: being told repeatedly, by people with authority over your care, that what you’re experiencing isn’t happening or doesn’t matter, until you start to doubt it yourself.
The damage from that is not primarily medical. It’s that you learn to distrust your own perception. You rehearse symptoms before appointments so you’ll sound credible. You under-report pain so you won’t be labeled a seeker. You apologize for taking up time. You stop mentioning the new thing because the last three new things got you an eye-roll. And eventually you can’t tell anymore whether a sensation is a signal or whether you’re “being dramatic,” because that’s what you were trained to ask.
That is a trauma response. It behaves like one — hypervigilance in exam rooms, shutdown when a provider interrupts, dread for days before a routine visit — and it responds to the same kind of care.
Why it’s worse for some people
If you’re a woman, fat, Black or brown, disabled, queer or trans, neurodivergent, or carrying a psychiatric diagnosis in your chart, you already know the odds were stacked. Your symptoms were more likely to be attributed to your identity than investigated. That isn’t paranoia; it’s documented, and it’s part of why we don’t treat “fighting for care” as a side issue. For many of our clients it is the chronic condition: the exhaustion of self-advocacy layered on top of the illness itself.
What therapy can and can’t do here
It can’t get you a better rheumatologist. We wish it could.
What it can do is help you separate the illness from the story you were handed about it. We work on rebuilding trust in your own read of your body. On the grief, for the years, for the version of you who didn’t have to plan everything around energy and pain. On the relationships that strained when you got sick and the ones that strained when you got believed. On how to go into appointments as someone who is informing their provider, not auditioning for them. And on the caregiver side, if you’re the one holding someone else’s illness: the fatigue that doesn’t count as “real” tiredness, and the guilt about resenting what you chose.
A note on what we don’t do
We don’t tell you to think positively. We don’t frame your illness as a teacher. We won’t suggest that stress caused it; you’ve heard that enough. Your body is not a metaphor. It’s a body, and it has been through a lot, and so have you.
If this is you
You don’t need a confirmed diagnosis to start. You don’t have to be “sick enough.” If you’ve spent years being told it’s in your head, the last thing we want is to make you prove it isn’t.
We see adults across Michigan by telehealth, which, for people with chronic illness, is often the only format that’s actually sustainable. Reach out when you’re ready.
Forest Ferns Counseling works with chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, medical trauma, caregiver fatigue, and pregnancy and postpartum transitions. Telehealth across Michigan · BCBS, BCN, Aetna, Priority Health, private pay · Text (810) 394-8921 or request an appointment at forestfernscounseling.com/get-started.
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