Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (7 page)

A culture that is unsupportive of women and the feminine sets the stage early on for health problems because the context of a woman’s life contributes greatly to the state of her health. When I first got my period, for example, I developed astigmatism and myopia and had to get glasses. It is very common for girls to need glasses around puberty. The eyes are in what’s called the “liver meridian” in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and the primary emotion associated with the liver meridian is anger. Because many young women lack the support necessary to identify the unmet needs fueling their anger, let alone a safe place to express anger in a healthy way, it’s no wonder their eyesight is adversely affected. I myself truly resented having to get glasses—no one else in the family had them. I now know there was something I didn’t want to see. I was unmistak ably a girl in a family and a culture where male pursuits reigned supreme, and I was angry about this—but wasn’t aware of it.

TABLE 1

C
HARACTERISTICS OF THE
A
DDICTIVE
S
YSTEM

Sources:
Anne Wilson Schaef,
When Society Becomes an Addict
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 72; Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel,
The Addictive Organization
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).

Millions of women suffer from chronic pelvic pain, vaginitis, painful intercourse, ovarian cysts, genital warts, endometriosis, and cervical dysplasia (abnormal cells on the cervix that are picked up by a Pap smear)—all diseases of organs that are unique to females. These conditions are the language through which our bodies speak to us. Often they are telling us that we need to heal from a deeper, often unconscious wounding—the ingrained belief that we are never enough and that we are somehow tainted.

A forty-one-year-old executive came to see me because she was having uncomfortable hot flashes. She was on four times the normal dose of estrogen and was still getting no relief. In addition to being related to decreased estrogen levels, hot flashes are a neuroendocrine problem and increase with stress. When a woman feels that she is under stress, the frequency and severity of her hot flashes increase both objectively and subjectively. My patient had already had a hysterectomy and removal of her ovaries for uncontrollable pelvic pain as a result of severe endometriosis two years before. Now she seemed beyond relief. It took this patient two years to tell me that when she was six, she had been sexually molested in the basement of a candy store by the man who ran the store. While this was happening to her, she had felt frozen, unable to speak. She said, “I just went numb. He told me never to tell anyone, because if I did they’d never like me. I felt completely ashamed.” On the day she did tell me, she still felt that she had done something wrong and that she was bad. She later said that she drove away from the office certain that once I knew the truth about her, I’d never like her again.

My patient, trying to redeem her shame, had continually worked two jobs since high school and earned an MBA. Very successful in her career, she had used work, constant striving, and earning more degrees as a way to “prove herself” and to keep at bay that early emotional pain and the feeling that she was unworthy and bad. When I last saw her, she still hadn’t shed a tear about her experience, an emotional release that I know will help her once she’s ready.

The seeds of my patient’s physical problems were planted by her childhood traumas. I am not saying that her childhood sexual abuse “caused” the endometriosis or chronic pelvic pain. What I’m suggesting is that her early abuse, common to so many women, inserted a set of destructive beliefs about her worth and her lovability that persisted well into adulthood, creating discomfort in both her mind and her body. Regardless of whether or not we’ve experienced childhood trauma, the truth is that every one of us was imprinted in the womb and in early childhood by our parents’ beliefs and behaviors—as were their parents before them. This is inevitable. We become programmed with a set of upper limits for what we believe we deserve in life. That includes how healthy, how prosperous, and how well loved we can expect to be. These beliefs operate in our subconscious, under the radar of our everyday consciousness. But they unerringly attract to us experiences that reinforce what we already believe.

One of the primary ways of transcending those upper limits and starting the healing process is to consciously affirm our own worth and lovability while simultaneously allowing ourselves to feel the old unhealed emotional pain. The human heart has an almost endless capacity to transform emotional pain through the process of grieving, forgiving, and letting go. This isn’t an intellectual process. It happens in the body. And, as Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, Ph.D., points out, the soul comes to us through the body. When one of my friends was going through a very difficult divorce, she started a meditation practice. One day, while in meditation, she had the realization that to doubt the beauty within herself was to doubt God. This was a turning point in her health and her healing.

Only by tuning in to how we feel in our bodies can we appreciate our inner guidance. Yet we look to our schools to tell us what is worth learning, our governments to take care of our communities, and our doctors to immunize us against the latest germ. We’ve been taught that we will be okay if we follow the rules. One of our patients who developed vulvar cancer said, “I can’t understand how this happened. I’ve come in for an exam every year, had normal Pap smears, and yet I still got cancer.” Like this patient, we’ve been misled into believing that screening tests alone will prevent us from getting ill.

In first grade my younger daughter was told on the first day of school what the acceptable times were for students to go to the bathroom. I went in and told her teacher that in my practice I regularly see adult women with constipation and urinary problems who cannot move their bowels in public restrooms because early “rules” from home and school like these had damaged their ability to know when their bodies needed to perform a normal function. I didn’t want this to happen to my daughter. I made sure she heard my conversation with her teacher so that she felt supported in going to the bathroom when she needed to go.

Healing Means Leaving Wounding Behind

We can’t make a new world for ourselves as long as we hold on to old self-destructive beliefs about ourselves and our worth—or about the worth of others. If we fail to notice the ways in which we daily cooperate with the system that’s destroying us, we’re in danger of operating in perpetual-victim mode, always blaming someone “out there” for our problems. Much like the battered woman who finally gets out because one day she realizes that if she stays she will die, each of us must recognize when and where we’re cooperating with our own oppression.

One of my friends who was brought up Catholic in the 1950s describes the effect of confession on her body. “I remember having to go to confession,” she says, “beginning at age seven, searching my conscience for crimes and misdemeanors, feeling caught in the horrible dilemma of being unable to speak the unspeakable—about sexual won derings, masturbation. Who had the language for that? And were girls even capable of it? Was I the only one in this dilemma? It was suggested on a plastic card that guided the confessional process that these failings fall into the category of ‘impure thoughts and deeds.’ Even given this sanitized version, I could not confess to some man, semivisible behind the confessional grille, whose breath smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, the sensual dimensions of myself. Without a complete confession, how ever, you were not allowed to take Holy Communion, or if you did, you would be condemned to hell, with a mortal sin on your soul. (They sort of had you coming and going.) This was my first encounter with an ethical dilemma.

“And so I unconsciously and ingeniously devised a way out. When I was at the entry of adolescence, around age eleven, I began systematically to faint during mass, right before Communion. I had to be carried out of church, and there on the entryway steps I remember being able to breathe, to hear the birds and feel the sun. This went on for over a year. I had no control over these fainting sessions. I was embarrassed by them and bewildered by what my body was doing—cold sweats, ringing in my ears, and the inevitable blackness closing in on me. (I have ever since felt oppressed in the confines of a church.) The intolerable and contradictory demands simply knocked me unconscious.”
³⁶

Many women have been knocked unconscious by the conflicting demands of our culture. And women all over the world are waking up to it. Healing from conditions such as pelvic pain, PMS, and chronic fatigue syndrome is almost always enhanced when we realize that we are not alone in our suffering and that our problems occur in a cultural context that is often unsupportive of us. Recovering our health involves naming our experiences for what they are—no matter how painful—and then learning that the motor for our lives is within us, regardless of our past. Only then can we decide to truly flourish in spite of the health-eroding beliefs we’ve inherited from our culture and our parents.

Though it is extremely helpful to have a physician or health care provider who acknowledges the mind-body connection, it is even more important that we ourselves appreciate that our bodies and their symptoms are part of our inner guidance. They have a message for us. Always. We can free ourselves from our overdependence on the medical system by seeing the ways in which our own beliefs and behaviors perpetuate the parts of this system that do not help us create health. If we persist in thinking that our dis eases and symptoms, such as endometriosis, fibroids, and PMS, are “just medical” and not related to the other parts of our lives, we are participating in and thus perpetuating the addictive system in medical care.

On the other hand, when we learn how to tune in to the language of our bodies, we’re more able to make informed decisions about medical testing and technology, which can lead to more satisfactory relationships with our health care providers. We must begin to trust ourselves and our experience as much as we trust laboratory data. One of my patients who had infrequent periods came to see that she always got a period whenever she was “in love.” She came to trust that she didn’t need a lot of hormonal testing every time her period ceased for several months. Instead, she became interested in the meaning behind those periods and what emotions were associated with them.

TABLE 2

T
HE
B
ODY AS A
P
ROCESS
V
ERSUS
M
EDICAL
W
ORLDVIEW

When doctor and patient acknowledge our respective areas of expertise, our areas of ignorance, and the unknown that lies beyond, a true partnership becomes possible, which is a joy for both.

As you read this book, remember that we all have choices—and we all have inner guidance and spiritual help available that can help us move toward optimal health and fulfillment. Recovery from the mind-body split means learning to live fully from the inside out in a culture that often negates this way of being in the world. Our bodies and their symptoms are our biggest allies in this endeavor, because nothing gets our attention as quickly. Our bodies never lie. They are impeccable barometers of how well we’re living in the present and taking care of ourselves.

To become healthy and whole, you must have enough courage to be in touch with the wisdom of your female body, and to follow the desires of your heart. Nothing is more exciting than knowing that our bodies and our feelings are a clear, open pathway toward our destinies.

2
Feminine Intelligence and
a New Mode of Healing