“When a body’s in trouble”
by
Nancy Wesson

Trauma prevents so much

“you just want to push somebody and a body won’t let you just want to move somebody and a body won’t let you”

Mary Margaret O’Hara released the album “Miss America” in 1988.  Her song “body’s in trouble” touched me deeply.  She may not have meant all that I heard but she identified something that I had never been able to articulate fully, that I also was a body in trouble.  Something – I didn’t know exactly what, but something – was wrong with my entire being in the world.  I wished her lyrics had told me more about myself but I felt the melancholy in the music.  I had no words for myself, no questions to ask.  I didn’t even know this was odd in itself – to have no idea whatsoever.  And this was after almost ten years of therapy!

Anyone paying close attention when I was a little girl would have labeled me a victim of abuse.  Sadly, no one was paying attention or I wouldn’t be writing this now.  I had to take care of myself and I did that by withdrawing – vanishing and burying my troubles so deep that no one (including myself) could find them.  My body became numb, limp and unfeeling.  My passivity made it all too simple for the abuse to continue and even harder for anyone outside my family to know what was going on.

I had no way to speak about my life.  Outward shows of emotion, pain, wants, desires or needs were not allowed since everyone in my family was supposed to be fine as they were.  And so I had to make doubly sure to hide or else reveal my failure.  I was the silent little girl in the background – watching.  Gradually the little girl learned through her watching some of how to be in the world.  Unfortunately this method could not teach her how people think, what people think about themselves in the world.  So the little girl picked up much misinformation and plugged up information gaps with guesses.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I’d finally latched onto one question I could ask about myself.  I was looking for a global answer to my life so I needed an enormous question.  By the early 1970s I had it: was I a lesbian?  Only now do I see that I really was on to something about the size and complexity of my problem.  Remember, this was way back when the word lesbian was rarely spoken out loud but I was prepared to go that far in questioning my existence.  I would accept that frightening word for my own if it could possibly provide some relief.

From what?  Relief from my profound confusion.  From knowing that what was going on inside my head didn’t match what I saw in the outside world.  I was afraid of most everything and everyone, including my own family.  I had learned to hide my thoughts, feelings and reactions while inside I knew that I did not make any sense.  Nothing added up, except that my experience was so much in left field – or outer space as I called it – that I couldn’t find the words to speak or the questions to ask.

Someone must listen

“who do you talk to … who?  who do you talk to …   when a body’s in trouble?”

With the help of a friend, I began psychotherapy – this was about 30 years ago – ostensibly to answer the lesbian question, but I was hoping for so much more.  I was hoping (I realize now) for a blissful eureka moment brought on by a kindly psychiatrist that would make clear my entire life.  That didn’t happen.  Instead I was told straight away that “obviously” I had been abused.

Shock and relief at once.  Relief since it’s always nice to have an answer even if you hadn’t asked the question.  And shock because I hadn’t had a clue.  I had so few memories of my early childhood.  But please don’t rush in with “false memory” or anything like that.  It was also a shock because I knew it was true.  And it was pretty simple to believe that my father was to blame and my mother an unwitting bystander.

The therapist was a doctor after all and she had as good as said to me, Just look at you!  Obviously you were abused.  But don’t dwell, don’t stay a victim!  I was to move on and get over it.  The implication was that apart from having been abused as a child I was otherwise okay.  Or I should have been otherwise okay if only I could change how I presented myself to the world.  I must look to the future.  At least you’re alive.  Which was true, I was alive and have stayed alive though little of what has been said to me over the last twenty or thirty years ever helped.  In fact, I was only wounded further and confused even more.  One psychologist recently told me that I’d had too much therapy and she couldn’t help me – as she went ahead and booked my second appointment.  How was I supposed to get better?  It was meant to be simple now that I knew I’d been abused.  But I didn’t get better and I was ashamed of that failure.  Again a failure.  Still a failure.  Always a failure.

But I wasn’t merely looking for facts.  I didn’t yet know there was so much more to be learned.  I had hidden my symptoms for so long I didn’t know they were there.  No one really believed anything was wrong.  That anything could be all that wrong with me.  Including myself.  I needed someone to listen and instead became attached to various therapists who were doing me no good.  I continued to hope for change.  Change?  What would that mean?  Feeling better.  Feeling normal.  Fitting in.  Being able to speak.

And now, finally, having been lucky enough to get connected to the programs at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, I find myself in the midst of learning and recovery.  Let’s say that recovery is happening and that for the past few years I have been engaged in trauma therapy.

Now, is that a coincidence?  That I am only now growing so much in trauma therapy?  Contrasted with my first psychotherapy experience thirty years ago when I was told that obviously I’d been abused.

They are only words after all: abuse, trauma.
And here’s one more: body.

If you look in a dictionary, the first definition of trauma is something like “bodily injury.”  The second will be psychological and about emotional shock.  The word abuse is defined as wrong or improper use, bad or improper treatment.  Of course I know these words are used interchangeably, but I also know that I never heard the word trauma applied to me before this century.

Trauma therapy seems to me to be a huge shift towards a more global approach to treatment.  Part of this means including the body.  I may be making too much of the distinction but it’s vital to me.  Thirty years ago I was told that I’d been abused – it was somehow visible in my body!  But my treatment only served to bury my experience even further – which astonishingly was all too possible.  Now I’m in trauma therapy and I am recovering and healing.  I can feel it – yes, in my body!  My body is coming into the present.  I know, it can’t be anywhere else.  My body is what I am – who I am.  Now.

Trauma therapy acknowledges the enormous complexity of the problem.  The trajectory of my life was completely altered.  Period.  I know this fact forever now.  It can not be refuted and this knowledge is such a relief.  Of course it’s horrible as well – but it’s not my fault.  I have not failed to learn enough.   I have not failed to buck up and get over it and get on with my life.  How could something as profound as sexual experience before kindergarten not alter my life forever?

Inside and outside were never in sync but now information and insight and healing can come from my body as well as my mind.  From me.  My “embodied experience” which is not a trick of language.  It’s true.  I am the one who needs to change and heal and I hold many of the answers in my hands, in my heart and mind.  Yes, I need guidance but I don’t need anyone to tell me the total meaning of me.  How could that be possible?  I need someone to listen.  I need a lot of people to listen.  I have a lot to say.

The impossibility of connection

“you just want to run somebody and a body won’t let you, want to let somebody and a body won’t let you, want to kiss, feel, take, hear, ride,    stop, start somebody and a body won’t let you.”

Mary Margaret O’Hara is speaking of the difficulty of making meaningful connections – a common enough problem but after trauma it is a chronic and all but insurmountable one.  Critical attachments are betrayed when a child experiences abuse.  In reality I grew up trusting no one.  Why should I?  I was alone inside a glass bubble.  That’s how it felt to me – that I was living behind a glass wall with no connection to people in the real world.

Looking back now it’s interesting to me that I was drawn to tai chi not long after starting therapy – almost as if my body knew that it needed more than talk.  Since then I’ve tried many techniques and all have something to offer – tai chi, the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, tai chi chih, Nia, yoga, Feldenkrais and meditation.  Gradually there has been a shift inside me toward the present.  Being more in the present has helped calm my panic attacks – which focus on the past or the future.  Because all you have is now.  All you have is your body now.  Something was visible to that first therapist.  Visible in my body.  Look at you! she said.

Of course both are needed to heal – mind and body.  As my numbed body is coming alive, I’ve needed to be in a relationship with someone else.  The therapist.  My words are becoming a dialogue, a conversation.  I am gradually becoming someone who can have a conversation, someone who can be in a relationship.  I mean, gradually becoming someone at all.  Some kind of differentiated and separate individual.  It’s very scary at 55 to know this is necessary and possible.

Abuse is one thing and trauma covers so much more.  That’s the difference.  Treating so much that’s wrong.  Telling me I was abused did nothing but make me feel guilty for not getting better with the news.  I was otherwise normal.  It was all in the past.  Complex trauma is a much broader term.  No one would question the many-faceted impact of a car accident.  But it has been incredibly hard to get understanding of the tragic consequences of trauma.  Even physical problems can arise such as stress disorders.  I have suffered from, among other things, headaches, migraines, panic attacks, poor sleep, nightmares, teeth grinding and an immune system disorder called Sarcoidosis.

I’ve also been in groups specially designed for trauma survivors.  Very early on I had a deep and sudden realization – that while my whole life has been derailed by trauma, only I could make the necessary changes to get my life back on some kind of track of my own choosing.  This is another way of saying that the healing comes from within my body.  There is no split.  This is me.

Heal in relationship now

who do you talk to … who?  who do you talk to …when a body’s in trouble, when a body’s in trouble?

If I hear one more group facilitator say, “How does that feel in your body?” I’ll scream – because my honest answer usually is, “I don’t know!”  My body has been numb most of my life and I don’t even know the words needed to describe how I feel.  I have to learn.  In therapy groups I’m given lists of words that might apply.  Perhaps I feel – happy, hated, helpless, hopeful, hopeless, horrified, humiliated or hurt?  Pleased, popular, powerless or proud?  I go by trial and error.  Oh, is that a burning pain?  Is that an ache?  Where does it ache?  I find sadness the easiest to name.

In meditation whatever happens is okay and the same is true now in therapy.  Whatever comes into my mind is okay and I’m learning to say it.  Same body, same mind.  Inside, outside.  My body brings me to the present.  Here and now I might have a relationship – for now, with a psychotherapist.  I have so much more to say.  It’s spilling out all over.  Of course the word ABUSE is still used.  Sexual and emotional abuse in my case, incest and neglect.  I have spent so many years searching.  Drawn to tai chi in the mid-1980s a few years after starting therapy.  Unable even to name my confusion.  Not knowing who I was, what I am – why I am.  I had to figure all this out through my body.  In the present.  Now.  The answers are in the body.  That’s true.  Who you are and where you’ve been.  I only need to get over the incredible fear to find it there.

Because the problem is not “simply” that my father chose to use me sexually.  It is so much more complicated than that.  Imagine the problems for a girl before school age betrayed in such a way.  Broken trust at such a critical time for a growing child.  But in addition, my father terrified and controlled me until the day, only a few years ago, when he died.  Add on a frightened and ineffective mother who seems to have seen and heard nothing.  The words are incest and neglect.  And yes, the barrier is fear – because fear has protected me.  All this time, fear is what kept me safe.  Made me shut down and hide myself – in order to survive.  It’s not easy.  No more secrets.  And I’m not yet done.  I wonder, can I change enough or will I only begin to know what I’ve missed?

It’s an odd thing that mental health is even less talked about now than sexuality.  The awful early days when I was searching for signs of “deviant sexuality” are now being repeated in the shame of “needing help.”  Ironically, we are also in the midst of an explosion of mindfulness and also personal blogs and streaming video.  Everyone walking around with their yoga mats is part of that same thing, the need to connect again with themselves and others.  I am the canary in the mine.  I am the extreme case and I say – keep going to the yoga studio or listening to meditation tapes or whatever you prefer.  This is the only moment and your next breath is your first.  I’m the outlier but I’m on the same continuum as everyone else.  Body and mind really are one.  Around about now some of you might be thinking, "That sounds a bit like me – but I’ve never been abused".  I can only repeat, it’s a continuum.  I may be an outlier but I’m not off the chart.  So go ahead, get out your yoga mat, or just sit under a tree, and breathe.

Lyrics to “Body’s in trouble” quoted from the cassette & CD “Miss America” by Mary Margaret O’Hara.  Cassette: Words and music ©1988 Yet Courier.  p & c 1988 Virgin Records Ltd.  CD: All songs written by Mary Margaret O’Hara ©Yet Courier Music/BMG.  All rights reserved.