You know the drill. You’ve been rehearsing your symptoms in the car on the way to the appointment. You’ve trimmed the details, chosen your words carefully, decided which parts of your pain feel “credible” enough to say out loud. You sit in that waiting room with a quiet, practiced calm that took years to develop, and underneath it is something much older than this appointment. Something tired.

If you have ever been told your pain is “normal,” that it’s “just stress,” or that what you’re experiencing is simply part of being a woman, you are not alone. For high-achieving women of color navigating a chronic pain journey, this experience is not rare. It is, heartbreakingly, routine. And it has a name.

When the System Fails You: What Medical Gaslighting Actually Is

Medical gaslighting happens when a healthcare provider downplays, dismisses, or outright ignores what a patient is reporting about their own body. It is not always malicious. Sometimes it is the product of implicit bias so deeply embedded in medical education that the provider doesn’t even realize they’re doing it. But the impact on the patient is the same regardless of intent.

For BIPOC women, this plays out within a very specific and painful cultural script. The “Strong Black Woman” trope, which society has long romanticized, tells healthcare providers on a subconscious level that Black women can handle more pain, need less intervention, and are more likely to be exaggerating. The research bears this out in devastating ways. Studies consistently show that Black women experience significant delays in receiving an endometriosis or adenomyosis diagnosis, often waiting nearly a decade while their symptoms are attributed to stress, weight, or anxiety. This is diagnostic gaslighting functioning as a structural feature of healthcare.

Culturally fluent care recognizes this history. It asks providers to hold their assumptions accountable. Racial bias in healthcare is not an abstraction for the women sitting in those waiting rooms. It is the reason so many of us learn to shrink ourselves just to be taken seriously.

The Wound That Medical Gaslighting Leaves Behind

Here is what doesn’t get talked about enough: what happens inside a person after years of not being believed.

Medical trauma is the psychological distress that accumulates from medical experiences, whether that’s a painful procedure, a dismissive diagnosis, a surgery you weren’t emotionally prepared for, or the grinding cumulative weight of being dismissed over and over again. Medical Trauma (also known as Medical PTSD) is real, clinically documented, and profoundly underdiagnosed in BIPOC communities.

It shows up as hypervigilance before every appointment. It looks like a somatic response to pain so deep that your body learns to brace before it’s even touched. It sounds like the voice that says “why bother” when a new referral comes through, because your nervous system has already calculated the emotional cost of hoping again. Intergenerational trauma compounds this further. When your mother and grandmother also learned not to trust doctors, your body is carrying their mistrust alongside your own.

The experience of feeling like your body has betrayed you, what some clinicians call “body betrayal,” is especially acute for women living with endometriosis. When the very organ systems designed to sustain life become sites of chronic suffering, the disconnection from one’s physical self can be profound.

Why the Distinction Between Medical Gaslighting and Medical Trauma Actually Matters

These two things are related but not interchangeable. Medical gaslighting is the external harm, something done to you by systems and providers. Medical trauma is the internal result, what your mind and body do to survive that harm. Understanding the difference matters because treatment has to address both.

Systemic medical harm creates the conditions for medical trauma to take root. And when it is layered onto intergenerational trauma in BIPOC communities, the healing required is not simple or linear. Naming it clearly is the first clinical step toward not being buried by it.

When Your Faith Makes It More Complicated

For women of faith, there is often an additional layer that therapists without a faith background might miss entirely. The quiet, guilty fear that your illness is a test. The well-meaning church members who suggest you just need to pray more, believe harder, or “claim your healing.” The spiritual dissonance of loving a God who heals while living in a body that doesn’t cooperate.

This is where spiritual bypassing, using spiritual language to skip over legitimate psychological pain, can cause real harm. Faith-integrated therapy creates space for something more honest than that. The practice of lament, found throughout the Psalms and deeply rooted in Christian tradition, is not doubt. It is faith that is honest enough to say “this is too much, and I need You to see me in it.” For women navigating Christian counseling for chronic illness, learning to lament without shame can be genuinely transformative.

Your faith does not require you to perform wellness you don’t feel well.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Therapy for medical trauma requires specific tools. EMDR for medical trauma, helps clients to process distressing events and the nervous system dysregulation they create. These approaches work at the level of memory, body sensation, and belief, which is exactly where medical trauma lives. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps women build a relationship with their pain that isn’t defined by fighting or surrendering to it, but by moving toward what matters (i.e.: your values) even while the body is struggling.

And then there is the piece that credentials alone cannot fully replicate. Working with a trauma-informed Christian therapist in NY who has lived experience with Stage IV endometriosis changes the room. Not because shared experience is required for good therapy, but because there are things you will not have to translate. The look on a provider’s face that made you feel like a burden. The way you’ve learned to apologize for your own pain. That knowledge shapes the therapeutic relationship in ways that go beyond technique.

You Deserve a Sanctuary

Your deserve care that treats both medical gaslighting and medical trauma with the seriousness they require.

If any of this resonated with you, I invite you to book a consultation with Cheerful Heart Mental Health Counseling PLLC or join the waitlist for the Endo Kin Collective, a structured group therapy experience designed specifically for women living at the intersection of endometriosis, medical trauma, and faith. You’ve spent enough time convincing people to believe you, now it is time to be heard so you can heal.