Why do some people hide and push through injuries and illnesses, while others milk them for attention? What leads to these personality traits?
Why do some people hide and push through injuries and illnesses, while others milk them for attention? What leads to these personality traits?
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I grew up with 9 kids and didn’t have a choice if I needed help. So I stopped needing it. Overly spoilling someone will have inverse effects
A lot of it has to do with how a child is raised and whether they get the emotional support they needed when they needed it. Resilience is learned largely from adult teaching us how to cope with difficulties, but so many parents don’t know how to do this themselves and subsequently fail to teach their children how.
Was a child neglected or given attention
i think it depends on how people cope with stress or pain. some hide injuries to avoid appearing weak, while others seek attention for validation or because they feel unheard. personality traits are shaped by upbringing and personal experiences
Well personally, I have no health care and simply can’t afford my illness. I need testing in the thousands of dollars for diagnosis and have no money for a payment plan.
I live alone. I don’t have anyone to take care of me and I sure as hell don’t want my coworkers knowing how often I’m in pain or how much My children are grown and moved out and I refuse to be a burden on them or my family so I don’t talk about my daily pain to them. Would they help me if I needed it for like surgeries and stuff most definitely but why should I put a mental burden on others just because I’m in pain or sick, I don’t like attention I don’t want to be the center of attention
Did they get attention previously? If they’ve always been fawned over, they’ll keep doing it. If they’ve learned they won’t get the attention and/or been told they need to suck it up, they’ll hide it.
Plus some is just literal personality. I know someone who basically sees the world in how it relates to them, so yeah they tend to be very dramatic when sick/injured. Their world view is skewed so much on how they are that they don’t necessarily then see the impact they have? If that makes sense. Whereas someone who hides it is often trying to hide it from impacting others (at least in my experience).
Attention
I think it’s also worth noting that the way the injured/ill person acts around you is not necessarily how they act around everyone else. For example, someone who grits their teeth at work all day and then asks their partner to play nursemaid at home. (I do this to an extent: I have a chronic illness/pain condition that I try to conceal as much as possible at work, but around my partner I let my guard down a bit and ask for them for help out of necessity and comfort.)
I wasn’t raised right
I can only answer for me. I have RA and went a year with crippling pain before finding the right meds. I showed up to work everyday and still took care of my kids. Why? Because I have no one and they only have me. No point crying when no one’s coming to save you.
Child abuse and neglect made me someone who never acknowledged weakness of any kind. So I hide pain. It’s lonely sometimes, but I learned early that people will exploit weakness.
Venting releases emotional pain, and venting is just a less stigmatized form of complaining. Attention is a human need, and as long as they aren’t hurting themselves or others to get it, we need to stop shaming people who seek attention. A shared sorrow is half a sorrow, a shared joy is twice a joy. Asking for sympathy makes one feel better.
Now, if you have someone in mind and they don’t fit that above description, then maybe they’re hurting themselves or others (emotionally) to get attention. It usually stems from childhood trauma if it’s that bad, but it’s not fully clear why some people respond to trauma in one way while others respond in another. Similarly, refusing to ask for help or sympathy is also often a result of trauma. “Trauma” can have a variety of severities as well, it doesn’t have to be major abuse.
Notably, sometimes I’m complaining to myself, but it’s aloud and other people are there. “Oh, everything hurts” while I stretch is not that big of a deal. I actually struggle to ask for help with major issues. I’ll go to a doctor/therapist, but I am unlikely to tell my friends. For physical health, they just couldn’t help, and I have high enough of a pain tolerance that it doesn’t bother me that much. For mental health, they just wouldn’t understand. Some people understand, my therapist and one of my friends (who is unfortunately in prison rn), but most of them can’t understand. It’s not their fault, but when I tell people about my trauma, they usually are so horrified that I have to start consoling them instead of them consoling me.
For the milkers, I think some are looking for nurturing that they didn’t/don’t get enough of. Others want the attention to be on them in a greater amount than they get as their healthy selves.
Some of us hide types don’t really seek to call attention to ourselves in normal circumstances, and/or don’t want to be perceived as weak/needy/attention seeking. Kind of introverted, healthy or ill.
Both of my parents had addiction issues and were… volatile, to say the least. I hid from them and wouldn’t even consider approaching them for help, no matter how much I needed it. Now, I still withdraw into myself and hide things
People have different pain thresholds. My wife gave birth to our daughter via C-section but never touched her pain meds at home, and she’s the type to tough out a headache. I’m running for the Tylenol the second I feel one coming on.
I have a neurological condition that causes me to have abnormal pain responses.
I’m in the first category and it’s how I was raised. Weakness is bad, never let them see you bleed. Strength, resilience, and self-reliance are everything. I wish I could say it made me into an emotionally healthy adult, but in a lot of ways it hasn’t.
Illnesses and pain have always been a competition with the people I’ve been with. If my back hurts, their back and neck hurt. If I have a headache, they have a headache and a stomachache. If I have a cold, they have bronchitis. Eventually you just stop telling them that they’re hurt because it doesn’t matter what you have, they have to have something worse. This has happened with my parents, with siblings, with romantic partners.
And it doesn’t just happen with illnesses. Happy moments in my life, they have to make themselves the center of it. When I invited my family to an ultrasound of my first kid (the only ultrasound anyone got to see) my dad showed up and revealed to my grandparents that he had divorced my mom, which he hid from them for 4 years. My dad’s best friend died the night before my birthday. Every single birthday since then, everyone’s celebrated his life instead of my birthday. That was 11 years ago. They haven’t celebrated my birthday since then. When I gave birth to my daughters, my mom turned it into a fight chip with my dad because she flew out for the birth and he didn’t. Right before I graduated college, my sister swallowed a whole bottle of IBU profin in a suicide attempt. Nobody cared that I graduated college because they were focused on her. My mom and my stepmom got into a fight on my wedding day that made the wedding reception so awkward that nobody spoke. Granted there were only 8 of us, but my wedding reception in my hotel suite was a silent dessert before everyone awkwardly dipped. They sour everything I do. So I don’t tell them what I do anymore. I’d rather push through it alone than to have one of them try to one up something I do.
TLDR: my family consistently ruins important things for me, so I don’t tell them about things anymore.
I don’t like people to know I’m hurt, physically or emotionally:/ I don’t have a great answer why. It just feels unsafe
I was always made to feel ashamed and like an inconvenience if I was sick or injured, so I learned to just never do anything about it and deal with it.
To this day, even as a full grown adult, I ignore my symptoms or try to figure them out of my own because going to the doctor feels like a source of shame to me.
I would love to know so I could decipher why my partner acts like he’s dying of the plague for weeks every time he catches a little cold. 😂
At some point they got attention or praise for either being sick or injured, or the opposite, for toughing it out. It cemented a theory that that’s how you get that positive attention.
In some cases I can imagine that they might have gotten punished or ridiculed if they DIDN’T tough it out which could also lead to that habit.
I think there’s a third option here too. There’s people who are in pain and ask for help. They’re not milking it and they’re not hiding it. They’re simply just trying to get through it
I have chronic pain. I’ve had it since I was probably 12, in my shoulders, neck, back, and wrists. I went to doctor after doctor only to be told I was young and healthy and needed to get over it, basically. Eat better, exercise more, so on so forth.
I was 22 and it wasn’t any better. I had to play it up. I had to make a bigger deal out of it to finally get a referral to someone who knew more. Ten years and no one ever made any effort to look into it until the second I made a big deal about it. Had a spine X-Ray done…
I had scoliosis, an extra vertebrae, an M1 vertebrae fused to my skull and my tailbone fused to my sacrum.
Ten years, probably a dozen doctors, and no one even tried to look. Ten years with 2 fused bones, an extra neck vertebrae and congenital scoliosis.
You would be amazed to hear how many people with chronic conditions are dismissed outright if they’re not dramatic enough. If you minimize your pain, you’ll never know why you have it.
I have had chronic health issues since the first day I was born. I hate bringing attention to any time I feel ill because it’s just a normal day to me.
My husband does have a tendency to milk it. Not on purpose, but he never really had any health issues growing up, so he’s not used to having pain or being ill. He always feels bad about it, though, because he knows I’m in daily pain.
The problem is trying to find the balance between me resting when I actually need to and him needing to just suck it up and keep pushing through.
My father hides his illnesses. He was beaten and yelled at for getting injured badly enough to need medical care. He grew up in poverty. My mom milks illnesses for attention. Her parents were medical professionals with good health insurance. She was used to receiving the best care.
My ideas of milkers and hider comes from the fact I grew up with a man who did have medical problems, but was also a lazy f*ck of a man child who couldn’t handle being told no or what to do. Because of this I had the joy of meeting many kinds of sick and disabled people who fell into both categories.
Milkers -some had fallen into depression and just given up. A pity p[arty was they ‘best’ they could have in life and they didn’t try and fix it. Some of them didn’t have the means to fix it. Others revelled in the attention because it made them feel special. And there were those who wanted the money and free stuff that came from being long term sick or injured.
Hiders- They don’t want to be a burden of their friends and family. They want to prove that their problems haven’t made them weak or useless. Some spent their whole live being told they were liars who were just after benefits and desperately want to prove everyone wrong.
Personally, my parents were hiders and they were bad at it. I would hear my mom puking her guts up and she would try to lie to me and say she didn’t, and like, put on a weird, bad fake smile. It creeped me out even when I was little and made me feel like I was living in a weird dystopia. So I’m honest as fuck when I’m not feeling well, but I wouldn’t say I milk it.
Neglectful parents who gave no shit about me made me just stfu about anythin. That plus watching my sister do the opposite and get absolutely babied and coddled. That behavior sickened me, I never wanted to stoop to her level. I remember seeing some scientific paper or something that was basically, ”kids learn to stop crying when their crying doesn’t get them the help they need.”
So I stopped crying.
Everyone keeps talking about I’m a milker this and that and that’s why I do this blah blah.. but why do people who don’t milk their issues hide things? What exactly do you get out of it?
Like many others chiming in, I have chronic illness/pain. In my experience, matter how much someone initially sympathizes with me and wants to help me in the beginning, they all inevitably end up exasperated when i never “get better.” I learned to minimize my pain/discomfort/symptoms until I absolutely cannot go without help any longer, so that people around me don’t get tired of me and leave.
I think that some people do the opposite because they think that others will leave them if they don’t earn their sympathy/pity, or their self-worth isn’t enough to believe that people will stick around unless they feel “needed.” But I’m not sure, since that’s not the way I feel about it.
I think it comes down to experiences. A few comments here cite the way they were raised, which obviously has a huge impact, but I think either behavior can be learned/unlearned in adulthood too.
My struggles are my own, nobody else’s. While I do have a support network they’ve got better things to deal with than what I can handle on my own.
At least part of it probably comes down to how you were treated when you were sick as a child.
If a sick day meant being coddled and fed crackers and soup and watching all your favourite movies, you’re probably gonna grow up to want/expect someone to take care of you when you’re sick. But if you grew up in a “too sick to go to school, to sick to enjoy anything at all” type of household where a sick day was treated like a huge inconvenience or a personal attack on your parents, then you’ll probably grow up to view illness as a moral failure