Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (6 page)

Many procedures that have been routinely performed on women’s bodies in particular are not based on scientific data at all but are rooted in prejudice against the body’s innate wisdom and healing power. Some procedures have their origins in emotional views of women handed down from previous generations. Routine episiotomies at delivery (cutting of the tissue between the vagina and rectum to make more room for the baby’s head) are an example. Despite the fact that studies have shown for the past ten years that episiotomy is usually unnecessary and increases blood loss, pain, and risk of long-term pelvic floor damage and tears (something that midwives have been saying for years), episiotomy is still too common. It wasn’t until 2005 that a study published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
on the outcomes of routine episiotomy was widely publicized, leading both women and their doctors to question the procedure more thoroughly.
³³

The reason this practice has persisted so long despite scientific data to the contrary is that obstetricians have truly believed that the birthing female body required the procedure to protect the pelvic floor and also to ensure a suitably “tight” vagina postpartum. One of the first things I was taught in my ob-gyn residency was how to place what was called the “husband’s stitch” in the episiotomy incision.

RECLAIMING THE AUTHORITY
OF OUR OWN FEELINGS

Ultimately, I’ve found it enormously empowering to realize that no scientific study can explain exactly how and why my own particular body acts the way it does. That is because we each comprise a multitude of processes that have never existed before and never will again. In the end, our connection with our own inner guidance and emotions is the most reliable indicator of how well we’re doing. Science must acknowledge truthfully how much it doesn’t know and leave room for mystery, miracles, and the wisdom of nature.

My father used to say, “Feelings are facts. Pay attention to them.” Yet in my scientific training I quickly learned that feelings, intuition, spirituality, and all experiences of life that cannot be explained by the logical, rational parts of our minds or measured by our five senses are suspect or discounted as “magical thinking.” Because our culture places such emphasis on our intellects, we learn to fear our emotional responses. Women in particular are seen as emotional and thus in need of management. It took me years and years to break out of my own pattern of fearing emotional responses! In his groundbreaking book
The Biology of Belief
(Hay House, 2008), cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., who has done pioneering research on the effect of consciousness on cells, writes, “Bio-scientists are conventional Newtonians— if it isn’t matter . . . it doesn’t count. The ‘mind’ is a non-localized energy and therefore is not relevant to materialistic biology. Unfortunately, that perception is a ‘belief’ that has been proven to be patently incorrect in a quantum mechanical universe.” Our entire society functions in ways that keep us out of touch with what we know and feel.

Remaining unconscious about our innate needs takes an enormous emotional and physical toll on our bodies and spirits. Not acknowledging our needs for rest, intimacy, touch, good nutrition, acknowledgment, and so on—and not knowing how to get these needs met directly—prevents us from being connected with our inner guidance. This disconnection, in turn, keeps us in a state of pain that increases the longer we deny it. It takes a lot of energy to stay out of touch with our needs. And we often turn to acculturated habits, such as the use of addictive substances, to keep us from confronting the unhappiness and pain that result from unmet needs.

Almost everyone understands that physical destruction results from abusing alcohol and drugs. Fifty percent of the accident victims in most emergency rooms are there because of alcohol abuse. As one of our staff anesthesiologists once said, “If it weren’t for cigarettes and alcohol, I’d be out of a job!” What many people don’t appreciate, however, is the enormous and equally deadly toll taken by compulsive behaviors such as overwork and overeating, used to avoid or deny one’s feelings.

Sexual and relationship addictions have gynecological implications and result in the epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, such as venereal warts, herpes, and cervical cancer. A former patient of mine was married to a recovering alcoholic and was suffering from chronic vaginitis, for which I could find no cause. She finally came to the realization that her husband had been “medicating himself through sex with me every day for years. I saw that my body was his bottle—he was using it and sex the same way he had used alcohol, and I thought it was my duty as a wife to comply.”

My experiences in my own practice and life have led me to believe that health promotion and education won’t do athing to decrease health care expenses unless we as individuals and as a society acknowledge our basic human needs and commit to fulfilling them compassionately. Only then can we begin to participate in our own recovery and truly flourish. Every overweight woman I know is clear about what she “should” eat. She doesn’t need more nutrition information. She needs first to
feel
the pain of her unmet needs for intimacy, recognition, grieving, and acceptance, which the excess food is preventing her from experiencing. This can happen only when she is encouraged to name those needs and learn how to meet them skillfully and compassionately. Her body and its state of health will always be a reliable barometer, letting her know how she’s doing in this regard.

The Power of Naming

A first step toward making a positive change in your life or your health is to name your current experience and allow yourself to feel it fully—emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Back in the 1980s, it was crucial for me to see how often I used the caretaker and rescuer role as a way to get my need for recognition and reward met. It was crucial for me to name this behavior “relationship addiction.” Before I did this, I looked to others to affirm me and tell me that I was okay. I took their cues for how to act, feel, and look; I was always seeing myself in terms of other people. I believed that if I said no to someone who needed me, I wouldn’t be valued and loved. Looking back over my life, I see not only how persistent this pattern has been but also how much it has improved through insight and behavior change. My own life and health have improved enormously as a result of naming and changing this behavior. Simple. Not easy.

I came to see that my tendency to rescue people in need, my acquiescence to others, and my saying yes to everyone came out of my attempt to exercise a form of control: I believed that if I said yes, I would earn their love and approval. This wasn’t good either for me or for them, since by putting myself in the position of being other people’s rescuer, a substitute for their own higher power or inner guidance, I allowed them to remain out of touch with their own strengths. My behavior actually helped to create victims who needed me. Now when someone says he or she needs me, a red flag immediately goes up. I wait, check out the situation, and see what my inner guidance tells me before I decide how to respond. I’ve learned that if my answer is not an immediate and joyful yes, then almost always it should be a no.

One of the most common characteristics of people in our addictive society is dependence. “Dependency is a state in which you assume that someone or something outside you will take care of you because you cannot take care of yourself,” writes Schaef. “Dependent persons rely on others to meet their emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual needs.”
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For centuries women have relied on men to meet their economic needs (not that they were given much choice, since in many cases they were owned like property), while men have relied on women to meet their emotional needs. As one patient of mine said about her former marriage, “Our agreement was, he would make the money and I would do the emotions.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes points out that one of the reasons women have not been more in touch with their creative instincts is that they have spent so much time succoring others who have been at war—either on the battlefield or in corporate America.
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The problem with this way of relating to others is that it prevents true intimacy. Intimacy can take place only in a partnership relationship, not in one based on intersecting dependencies. My parents once cau tioned me, “If a man ever says, ‘I need you,’ run the other way.” It’s good advice.

Naming the ways in which we participate in the dominator/addictive culture offers us a way out of the culturally induced trance that affects almost all women. Far too often, the culture’s definition of what it means to be a “good” woman is one who meets everyone’s needs but her own. Though being self-sacrificing for others earns love and acceptance in the short run, it always backfires because our bodies were designed to be healthy to the extent that we follow our hearts’ desires—not meet the needs of others at our own expense.

When you name an experience intellectually, be aware of how that experience actually feels in your body. Allow yourself to feel it physically. Otherwise, your own behavior—and your health—will not change.
Once an experience
is consciously named and internalized, physically and emotionally, it
can no longer influence us unconsciously.
When we change our perception, every cell in our bodies changes. We then begin to see how we have been influencing and perpetuating our own problems. Naming something that has affected us adversely—and also articulating the unmet need associated with it—is part of freeing ourselves from the negative influence of past trauma. Many times healing cannot begin until we allow ourselves to feel how bad things are (or were in the past). Doing this frees emoational and physical energy that has been stuffed, stuck, denied, or ignored for many years. When we can allow ourselves to feel exactly how we feel, without judgment, we begin to free our energy. Only then can we move toward what we want. Table 1 can help you name your addictive characteristics.

One of my former patients had a chronic and painful vaginal and vulva herpes condition that didn’t respond to conventional drug therapy or even to alternatives such as dietary changes. After three years of unsuccessfully searching for a way to stop her recurrent outbreaks, she came to the following conclusion: “Maybe I just need to walk around for a while saying that my vagina hurts. I was never able to say that to my mother when I was little.” From the moment she spoke this truth out loud, she began to heal. She told me that her father had sexually abused her for years and her mother hadn’t believed her. Layer by layer, she began to uncover her wounds, name them, and heal. With great compassion for herself, she acknowledged the pain of her past, her unmet need to grieve and have her pain witnessed, and moved beyond judgment of herself and her parents. As she did this, her pain gradually decreased while her creative life as a writer began to blossom. Today, she no longer has herpes outbreaks.

Over time I have come to see that what society calls being a “good woman” or a “good doctor” or a “good mother” came dangerously close to an invitation for me to lose myself in serving others at my own expense. I was reminded recently of how insidious this message is when I read the obituary of a woman who had died in her early fifties. Among other things, it said: “She was a tireless worker for the rights of women.” Anytime you see the word
tireless,
substitute
martyr
instead. We all get tired. And we’re supposed to rest regularly. Thinking that
tireless
is the equivalent of
good
is a setup for resentment, anger, and eventually illness. I’ve learned that I am able to provide optimal service and friendship to others only to the degree that I’m also tuning in to what I need to do for me. Over time I’ve created a life in which my family, colleagues, and loved ones have all committed themselves to living in balance as well. As a result of learning how to care for myself and listen to my own inner guidance, I have become far more effective at helping others than I ever dreamed possible.

Part of flourishing is allowing others to go through their own learning processes. No one can create health for another person. I have realized that I don’t have the answers for everyone—and neither does anyone else. Only the individual herself can gain access to her inner guidance when she is ready. After years of feeling that I was responsible for having all the answers for others at the expense of myself, I no longer try to convince anyone of anything (most of the time).

Many women are not in jobs and families that fully support their health. But if we can learn to value ourselves deeply, name our addictive behaviors, and commit to living our lives fully and joyfully, our jobs and circumstances will begin to change. Changing our thoughts and consciousness is always the first step toward healing. To help you in this, please read through the table on pages 19–20 and honestly assess which of these characteristics apply to you.

Naming and Healing Emotional Pain
and Its Physical Consequences

Our emotions and thoughts have such profound effects on us because they are physically and energetically linked to our bodies via our immune, endocrine, and central nervous systems. And new research has shown that the connective tissue throughout our bodies functions as a continuous crystalline matrix in which a change in one area is immediately communicated throughout the entire system, because crystals are well-known energy transmitters and transducers. That means that the slumped shoulders associated with sadness and grief transmit the biochemistry of “sadness” instantaneously throughout the entire body. On the other hand, the very act of smiling sends the opposite message. All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation.