Tracey Chester: SurfSister Story
The story of a mother with trauma and chronic pain through the eyes of her daughter Sarah Carney, with an introduction by our new surf therapy intern, Tracey Chester
Being a surfer with chronic pain and inter-related trauma is a challenge, but the healing it has brought me has always outweighed any additional pain and fatigue I might suffer after a paddle-out.
To this day, EVERY time I am about to get out, I get a fluttering of my stomach, a quickening heartbeat; a nervousness that I recognize to be the long-held fear that has been borne unto me and taken hold of me mentally and physically since I was a child.
The fear I have is at times vast, nameless and deep. But the one thing Mother Ocean has done for me is to focus on the moment, and that fear gets tucked far away in a part of my brain, out of immediate access.
Because I am about to confront a force of nature that once scared the living daylights out of me, and still scares me.
As every experienced surfer knows, mother ocean can be so healing; and so scary at the same time,
For me, every paddle out is a small triumph, one of many that build up and help me heal.
And so, in the moments I park and start gearing up, my mind is about surfing, and surfing only. And in this context the fear I have, I think, is that this may be the day Mother Ocean would turn on me and say “you don’t belong here anymore”. Your body is too broken and tired. And I would have to say back over my shoulder as I fled, yet still somehow curled in shame at the same time,
you don’t understand me at all.
As you get to know me, I hope I can offer lessons learned from a life that oftentimes was a lonely and isolating experience. And how mother ocean helped me more than any other thing in my life
Today, my pain and trauma have the power to lead me down a dark path and lose access to many, if not all of the other parts of who I am as a person. This happens, much less often now, because I am getting the psychological and medical treatment that I need.
This year, the week preceding and now after Mother’s day has taken on a new meaning, I am taking time to reflect on one very important part of myself; being a mother to two children.
And how I made Mother Ocean such a huge part of bringing up my children.
I’d like to introduce you to my oldest and only daughter, Sarah who is my ultimate favorite surfsister.
Recently, she had an assignment for her medical anthropology class at NYU, where she is a junior, and she chose to write about me and “my illness narrative”. I was honored she would choose me to write about. It had of course occurred to me that my pain and trauma affected her,and led to her own struggles with anxiety. But I’d never heard it spoken in her own words.
When I read these beautiful words, I was stunned, and I won’t lie, tears were shed for what she has gone through, and how well she was able to capture it in writing.
I have never been more proud as a mother, for her insight, her compassion and her ability to cope with her own anxiety.
In honor of mothers everywhere and mother ocean, I’d like to get her help to tell my story today.
“If you looked at her [my mom’s] medical history, you would see a long list of diagnoses and treatments: interstitial cystitis, congenital stenosis, kidney stones, kidney surgeries, eight toe surgeries due to staph infection, sinusitis, sinus surgeries, neck surgeries, chronic Migraines, C-sections, myofascitis. These all contribute to the diagnosis she most consistently refers to: chronic pain. She explains her experience of chronic pain as hypersensitivity. One stimulus might be painless for one person but could feel like a knife for another. In the same way, the source of pain (the stimulus) can be the same for two people, but the one with chronic pain will experience it more. The problem as she explains it, lies in her nerves. They are primed to be extra sensitive to stimuli. This sensitivity also comes about in other ways; a self-proclaimed super-taster, she can detect any amount of bell pepper in a dish and will refuse to eat it because the taste is overwhelming.
I think of it like a microphone- if you turn the sensitivity up, you can pick up the quieter sounds, but louder sounds become overwhelming noise. This sensitivity can be positive and negative. While it makes pain and bad tastes more unbearable, it also makes laughter and empathy deep and more enjoyable.”
To Tracey and many of her patients, chronic illness is an experience of invisible suffering. Without an injury to point to, it can be hard for other people to understand. She illustrated this with examples of how she was treated by in-laws and other family members. SHe explained that when she was recovering from her toe surger(ies), people were more sympathetic and understanding. They had a physical injury they could point to and that they could understand. The daily struggles of chronic pain, however, are less clear to outsiders. “You’re always fatigued,” she explained, “everybody gets annoyed [with you].” As an outsider myself, it is hard to understand what exactly she is experiencing because I don’t have as much of a reference to compare it to. My only reference was the temporary pains we all have, which would make me ask, “is this how she feels all the time?” I saw the effects of the illness and pain more clearly. Seeing her limitations and comparing her to parents who were “well” made it clear to me how being in pain affects your life. While I couldn’t feel her pain physically, I could empathize because I could feel the emotional ramifications of the illness. Not only did she experience the physical sensation of pain, she also experienced judgement, shame, and a loss of ability to do things she loved.
My mom couldn’t be active all the time like the other moms. She didn’t have the energy to take us out as often as we would want to. She couldn’t sit in restaurants very long because of the uncomfortable chairs. She couldn’t hang out with friends all night like they wanted to. I saw these things, and I saw their effects. Sometimes, despite her best efforts, it affected me, and I too would grieve her loss of mobility for her sake and my own. With every surgery, I would never worry if she was going to die. I worried that she would never be the same as she used to be. I saw her at her worst: when she was bed-ridden and taking medications with awful side-effects, smelling like that awful pain balm I hated. I saw her at her best: when she appeared like anyone else, surfing again and playing frisbee with us and the dogs. I also saw her at all the in-between times. It was frustrating. She grieved the loss of her ability to do things she loved, and so did I. Even her care contributed to a loss of life: when on opiates, she couldn’t drive places, and the constant medicine changes and dealing with insurance and pharmacies made her frustrated. When money was tighter, we felt the strain of paying for surgeries and medicine. It was an added stress on top of the other stresses of life, and it was one that was hard to quantify or see. It wasn’t going to go away. She had to grieve the potential future she was missing out on. She could no longer do everything she wanted to; she was limited. What was worse is that we couldn’t understand it.
The invisiblity of her chronic pain and trauma lended itself to being hidden even from herself. For the longest time, she thought that her experience was universal and that everyone else just handled it better. She wondered what was wrong with her, and spent much of her life trying to figure it out. She asked everyone about themselves and their experiences. “I was absolutely fascinitated in other people and how they coped with life” she said. She became a therapist to help others like her. As she trained for this career, she didn’t fully grasp that this period of self-discovery, she would finally find names for what she was going through. She found comfort in diagnoses because it meant that she wasn’t just weak; she had something she could name that was wrong. It meant she wasn’t “weak or crazy.” She could point to a diagnosis (, and other people that have it and say “it’s real.” It was so invisible, she thought she was making it up: that everyone experienced pain and anxiety, they could just cope with it better. In a strange way, knowing something was wrong with her on a biomedical level was a comfort. Even with these names, which changed over time with new research, more appropriate diagnosis of “Why me?” Understanding the mechanics of her experiences was helpful, but the “why” was still a missing piece. What caused all these issues? Why did it have to happen to her?
The missing why, as she explains it, was trauma.
She was never beaten, under-fed, or sexually abused. She didn’t experience any of what her abused patients had, yet she resonated much of what they were going through. With therapy, she realized that she had experienced trauma, but unlike the official descriptions of adverse childhood events (ACEs), her trauma was primarily emotional trauma. It had a name; Complex Developmental Trauma. (Complex Developmental Trauma is a particularly severe “type” or PTSD related to being exposed to trauma between the ages of 0 and 3, when the brain is rapidly developing and making neural connections that can cement a brain in the survival mode developed to cope with the surrounding environment. She described her trauma a series of “emotional bombs,” , which cause PTSD similarly to the bombs that soldiers are subjected to.
Her emotional bombs started when she was in the womb. Her older sister, Liza, was actively dying. She was born into an environment of stress and grief. There was an assumption that Liza would die and Tracey would be her replacement. My grandmother expressed this numerous times: “you should feel grateful, without Liza’s condition, you wouldn’t have been born.” Liza didn’t die, but her illness resulted in mental retardation which, as it was explained to me as a kid, meant she would not get past a 5th grade reading level. Though she was younger, Tracey matured faster than Liza. This was hard on her: she received less attention and had to deal with the stigma and difficulties of having a handicapped family member. My grandmother had a difficult childhood herself and an attitude that since they had money, unlike her at a young age, everything was fine. Why should Tracey complain when she had all her basic needs met?
She responded to this stress and lack of attention in many ways when she was a kid, and much of this would carry into early adulthood until she would find the treatment she needed. When Tracey finally got fully into the therapeutic process, and finally able to trust a psychologist and psychiatrist. In one session, she exclaimed “it’s all about my mother? How cliche!” This revelation became an essential part of how she explained her illness. She applied the models of how ACEs affect all kinds of health issues to herself. Though literature on ACEs tends to focus on different kinds of abuse, she saw that her own experiences had similar impacts. Thus she extended the definition to apply more broadly to many kinds of emotional trauma.
An essential piece of her story is that her terrible experiences of pain, trauma, and grief led to her ability and drive to help people. She draws on her experience to help as a therapist to people with similar problems. Fortunately, our socioeconomic class allows her to treat her illness through medicine, massages, physical therapy, and the ability to afford luxuries that make life fun. Most people do not have that, which is why her passion project is to open a clinic that combines mental, physical, and medicinal care for people with chronic illness in one place. This aspect adds an important level of meaning to her illness. Her suffering helps her ease the suffering of others. It helped her feel a deep sense of empathy for people, that helped in her job and in her parenting. The illness is part of her story, and even though it is hard, some good
Tracey, in Waikiki, October of 2017. After recovering from multiple surgeries and rehabilitation. She told me that she felt absolutely triumphant in this moment, and how appropriate to have this moment at the break where she surfed her first wave in 1994.
Summer of 2003 Tracey and her daughter Sarah, and son Ben
Christmas 2019, Tracey and Sarah getting the stoke in Costa Rica
Tracey Chester, M.S., M.A.,Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT 93387) and Founder and Clinical Director of an Diego Medical Pain and Trauma Institute. Her mission is dedicated to educating and providing trauma-informed mental-health modalities using an integrated model, one that is based on collaboration of mental health providers and medical doctors to treat the whole person. She is amongst a small professional community that studies the relationship between grief, trauma and chronic illness/pain. Her research primarily focuses on the treatment of trauma through state-of-art new modalities such as ketamine-assisted-therapy and the effects of THC/CBD on symptoms of pain and emotional trauma.
Tracey first fell in love for surfing when she was obtaining her Masters in Geology at Stanford University. At Stanford, she played on the Women’s Ultimate Team, and this led her to many trips to Hawaii for tournaments. While there for a tournament, she was convinced by one of her best friends, another geologist who lived in Hawaii, to take a surf lesson, and she never looked back. She had popped up immediately, first try. In her 20s, she tried to translate what she learned from her lesson from the warm water of Waikiki bay to the cold awe-inspiring, powerful wash board of the pacific in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that, combined with an hour long drive to the ocean, just seemed to intimidating. She had very little knowledge of Mother Ocean other than the Jersey Shore and the gentle beaches in Miami, where there were no waves to surf. She had to settle for surfing on vacations, which were few and far between.
At 31, after the birth of her second child, her relationship with Mother Ocean blossomed when she and her husband relocated to san diego with no job, taking a leap of faith. Surfing became her touchstone. She would drop her kids off at preschool and go to Cardiff for the two hours she had before she had to pick them up. She injected her love of surfing by coordinating surf lessons with other moms, with relatives, with groups of friends;. Every person who ever came to visit was duly indoctrinated into surf culture and dragged to the beach to let her husband push them into a wave, so they got a taste at least.
because that’s how much she loved it and wanted to spread that love.
Sarah Carney is Tracey’s 21 year old daughter , a junior at NYU studying Anthropology, Linguistics, Education and Graphic Design. She is also a writer, an artist, a brick master-level Lego Builder, a drummer, an animal lover, a gardener, a roller-coaster enthusiast, a sailor, a dog-lover , a DC Universe connoisseur, a Broadway Lover, a self-proclaimed nerd, a deep thinker, an old soul, a good friend, a sister, and a surfer. Recently she has been dipping her toes into the improvisational and stand-up comedy community whilst in NYC for school. Don’t ask her what she is planning to do after college, because she doesn’t know, and that’s okay.