Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (5 page)

Anne Wilson Schaef writes that “anything can be used addictively, whether it be a substance (like alcohol) or a process (like work). This is because the purpose or function of an addiction is to put a buffer between ourselves and our awareness of our feelings. An addiction serves to numb us so that we are out of touch with what we know and what we feel.”
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Schaef renamed patriarchy the “addictive system” and described the characteristics of societies that squelch people’s inner knowing and emotions—thus favoring the use of addictive substances or processes to keep them going. (See
table 1
, “Characteristics of the Addictive System,” page 19.)

Whether you call it patriarchy, the addictive system, the dominator society, or the mind-body split, it is abundantly clear that the way in which our society functions is harmful to both men and women (men die on average five years sooner than women) and that both genders participate fully in keeping it going. Yet the good news is that when we acknowledge our needs and release the emotional pain that results from denial, we are put immediately in touch with our hearts, our feelings, and our inner guidance system. Our intellects and thoughts can now assume their rightful role: being of service to our hearts and our deepest knowing, not the other way around. This shift puts us in touch with the unmet needs behind our pain. And that is the first step toward healing.

FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS OF THE
DOMINATOR SYSTEM

Marshall Rosenberg, Ph.D., the founder of the Center for Nonviolent Communication (
www.cnvc.org
), says that all human behavior is an attempt to get a need met. I wholeheartedly agree. This begins by listening for our needs and the needs of others—and believing that it’s okay to have needs in the first place! In order to flourish, we need to learn how to be in compassionate dialogue with ourselves. The first step in doing so is to get a handle on how we personally participate in the beliefs and behaviors characteristic of a dominator society. As you become more conscious of your own role in this feedback loop and then change your thoughts and behavior patterns, both your health as an individual and our health as a society will improve. See if the following descriptions of our cultural attitudes toward women and health ring true for you. They may help you become more conscious of your own body and health issues.

Belief One: Disease Is the Enemy

Dominator societies have been properly described as societies that are either preparing for war or recovering from war. Such societies elevate the values of destruction and violence over the values of nurturing and peace. We have only to look at what our society spends on defense to see where its values lie, since the amount of money spent on something is considered a measure of its worth. The sum spent on weapons every minute could feed two thousand malnourished children for a year, while the price of one military tank could provide classrooms for thirty thousand students.
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It’s no mistake that the medical establishment describes our bodies not as natural systems homeostatically designed to tend toward health but rather as war zones. Military metaphors run rampant through the language of Western medical care. The disease or tumor is “the enemy,” to be eliminated at all costs. It is rarely, if ever, seen as a messenger trying to get our attention. Even the immune system, which works to keep us in balance, is described in militaristic terms with its “killer” T cells. Recently, at a conference on a patient’s tumor held in our center, one of the radiologists said, “The previous bullets we’ve fired at that area [the pelvis, in this case] have failed to sterilize it from disease.”

The modern medical preference for drugs and surgery as treatments stems seamlessly from the ideology of our culture. That which is natural and nontoxic, such as the use of high-dose vitamin C as a well-studied and effective treatment for infection, is seen as inferior and ineffective compared with “real medicine”—the “big guns” of powerful antibiotics, drugs, chemotherapy, and radiation. Drug-free, natural methods of treatment with well-studied, well-documented benefits, such as massage, therapeutic touch, and prayer, are ignored at worst or tolerated as “probably not harmful” at best.
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A classic example of this in the field of obstetrics and gynecology is the impeccable research of Marshall Klaus, M.D., and John Kennell, M.D., on the effect of continuous labor support by doulas (women whose job is to sit with laboring mothers and provide emotional support). In a series of six different studies, Dr. Kennell found that the mere presence of a doula shortened laboring time in first-time mothers by an average of two hours and reduced the need for cesarean delivery by 50 percent. It also decreased the need for pain medication and increased the chances of successful breast-feeding.
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Back in the early 1990s, Dr. Kennell estimated that having a doula to support birthing mothers would save the health care system more than $2 billion per year in unnecessary medical costs from epidurals, surgery, fevers, and so on. Dr. Kennell quipped, “If the doula effect were a drug, it would be considered unethical not to use it.” But the effect of one caring human on another—which costs about $400—falls outside the paradigm of standard medicine, where the current rate of cesarean birth has now risen to an all-time high of about 32 percent (in fact, according to a 2009 report issued by the CDC, the cesarean rate has increased for eleven consecutive years).
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The medical literature is loaded with similar examples. Given these benefits and the total absence of side effects, a true scientist would be fascinated and want to study the ef fects further. Bernie Siegel, M.D., the famous Yale pediatric surgeon and author of
Love, Medicine and Miracles,
once told me that when he posted a study in the doctors’ lounge about the beneficial effect of prayer on heart attack sufferers, within a few hours one of his colleagues had written
BULLSHIT
across the front page.

Our culture considers the body to be inferior to the mind and its dictates of reason. It often teaches us to ignore fatigue, hunger, discomfort, and our need for caring and nurturing. It conditions us to see the body as an adversary, particularly when the body is giving us messages we don’t want to hear. I saw a T-shirt the other day that said it all: “Pain is weakness leaving the body—U.S. Marine Corps.” We’re en couraged to try to kill the body—as messenger—along with the message. Though it’s important to stretch and challenge the body to keep fit and healthy, it’s also important to know the difference between stretching yourself and overextending. A dead giveaway that you are overex tending, rather than stretching yourself, is the inability to nurture yourself or rest without a drink, a smoke, or overeating.

Belief Two: Medical Science Is Omnipotent

We have been taught that our disease-care system is supposed to keep us healthy. We have been socialized to turn to doctors whenever we have concerns about our bodies and our health. We have been taught the myth of the medical gods—that doctors know more than we do about our bodies, that the expert holds the cure. It’s no wonder that when I ask women to tell me what’s going on in their bodies, they sometimes reply, “You tell me—you’re the doctor!” Doctors are au thority figures for some women, right up there with their husbands and religious leaders. Despite the fact that each woman is more knowledgeable about herself than anyone else could be, most women are trained to look outside themselves for answers. We live in a society in which so-called experts challenge and subordinate our own judgment and in which our ability to heal or stay healthy without constant outside help is not honored, encouraged, or even recognized.

As a physician, I was trained to be the paternalistic, all-knowing outside expert. The public, in turn, is conditioned to believe that doc tors are paragons of healthy behavior who are entitled to judge them for their shortcomings. It always astounded me that my patients feared that I would yell at them for missing an annual Pap smear or mammogram appointment when missing appointments is something I and my colleagues also have done!

Medicine itself has a very pathological focus. Scientists rarely study healthy people, and when people with chronic or terminal conditions manage to recover completely, defying the statistical medical prognosis, health professionals too often think that their initial diagnosis must have been wrong, instead of investigating why these people have done so well.
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In medical school, I practiced on sick or dead people. I was trained in what could go wrong. I was taught to anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong and to plan for it. As an ob-gyn, I was taught that the normal process of labor and delivery was a “retrospective diagnosis” and that it could randomly become a disaster at any moment without warning. When this kind of training goes unquestioned by doctors, the fear and tension that the doctor carries into the room of a laboring woman can increase her anxiety, resulting in hormonal changes in her body that, if not interrupted, favor a cascade of physiological events that ultimately lead to a high rate of dysfunctional labors and cesarean deliveries.

Our culture and its conventional medical system believe that technology, testing, and more research will save us, that it is possible to control and quantify every variable, and that if we just had more data from more studies, we’d be able to improve our health, cure diseases, and live happily ever after. Back in the 1970s, the famous futurist Buckminster Fuller said that we had all the information we needed to wipe out poverty and hunger in the world, but what we lacked was the will to apply what we already know. Unfortunately, instead of applying what we already know, Americans and their doctors equate doing more with improving care. We believe that we can “buy” an answer by throwing money at it or doing more research. Again, we ignore or don’t trust our inner guidance system and our own healing ability.

Physicians order lots of tests because we are taught to be uneasy about being uncertain. Health care consumers, for their part, are just as uncomfortable with uncertainty as their doctors are. They want to know things in absolute ways. When people ask me about genital herpes, for instance, they want to know, “How did I get it?” “How do I know I won’t give it to anyone else?” These questions are essentially unanswerable with absolute certainty. And, of course, doctors also do a lot of procedures and testing for fear of lawsuits. This is one of the reasons why caesarean deliveries have skyrocketed.

When it comes to ourselves, doctors know all this. And it leads to a “Do as I say, not as I do” attitude. A very telling report from the University of California found that 50 percent of female physicians don’t do monthly breast self-exams even though they tell their patients to do them (more on this in chapter 10, “Breasts”). The samething is true with immunizations. Many docs don’t give their own children the same shots they feel compelled to recommend to everyone else. My personal experience with both myself and my colleagues bears this out. I believe that the discrepancy between what doctors tell patients to do and what they themselves do is a matter of insider knowledge. We’re far more clear on the limitations of medical science than are our patients. But we don’t dare let on lest we destroy the placebo effect of our patients’ faith in us! The answer to this dilemma is for both doctors and patients to acknowledge the unknown and also heed the message behind the symptom. This awakens inner guidance and is compatible with any and all treatment choices.

Belief Three: The Female Body Is Flawed

Because being male has always been considered the norm in our culture, most women internalize the idea that something is basically “wrong” with their bodies. They are led to believe that they must control many aspects of their bodies and that their natural odors, shapes, and processes such as menstruation are simply unacceptable. Women are socialized to think that their bodies are essentially dirty—requiring constant surveillance for “freshness” so that we don’t “offend.” Females naturally have more body fat than men, and because of better nutrition than in past decades, women today are also bigger than were their mothers and grandmothers. Yet the average fashion model, our cultural ideal, weighs 17 percent less than the average American woman. No wonder anorexia nervosa and bulimia are ten times more common in females than in males and are on the rise.
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This denigration of the female body has made many women either afraid of their bodies and their natural processes or else disgusted by them. Many never touch or get to know what their breasts feel like, for instance, because they’re afraid of what they might find. They may feel guilty for touching them, equating this with masturbation, since breasts are erotic for men—another sign of how thoroughly we have turned our bodies over to men. This also helps to explain why so many women feel uncomfortable breast-feeding their babies despite overwhelming evidence of the health benefits for both mothers and babies.

Health practitioners and women alike have been acculturated to view even normal bodily functions such as menstruation, breast-feeding, menopause, and childbirth as medical conditions requiring treatment. The attitude that our bodies are accidents waiting to happen seems to get in ternalized at a young age and sets the stage for women’s future relationships with their bodies. Given what we are taught, it is no wonder that so many women feel ill prepared to deal with and trust ourselves. Our bodies have been “medicalized” since before we were born.

Our culture fears all natural processes including birthing and dying. Daily, we are taught to be afraid. When my older daughter was seven, she was out with her father chopping down some brush in our backyard. Suddenly she started to cry and came running into the house with a bleeding finger. She had cut herself on a blade of grass. As I calmly held her finger under some cold water and saw that it was only a tiny cut, she looked up at me and uttered what I consider a major healing principle: “It didn’t hurt until I got scared.”