Transforming Pain into Power: Reclaiming Your History — & Your Future
What is hurting you? Where do you feel pain?
I've been doing some psychological testing recently to help people who have been denied their disability but who are entirely broken down in body, mind, and spirit. I have read and re-read the psychiatric and medical reports. These patients receive diagnoses. They also have many physical ailments. Mostly ailments that can't be seen. There is no cancer or heart disease. But there is unbearable physical pain. Some people cannot walk. People have fibromyalgia. People have inflammation. People have migraines that last for weeks. People's feet suffer from pins and needles, so alarming they cannot stand or shower without a team to help them.
Who Is Not Listening to You?
They have been denied their disability because society has not yet woken to the truth of the psyche. Psyche here is another way for history. No bridge has yet been created between peoples' injured histories and ther physical suffering. The disability officers, by adjudicating "NO, you can't have your meager disability check," conclude that these suffering people are LYING about their pain. “Get a job,” they might as well be saying. Or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” It’s ageist. It’s racist. It’s sexist. And it’s anti-psychological.
Have you located the voice of your Inner Attacker yet?
I often like to remind myself of the story of how the science of psychoanalysis was developed. Psychoanalysis, as a theory of mind and society, is the bridge between the past and the future. The so-called "hysterical" young Viennese woman treated by Sigmund Freud presented with neurological symptoms he discovered did not have neurological problems but psychological ones (sexual ones?) that had been converted into acute anxiety or physical pain. Written around June 1894 and published on January 15, 1895, after Josef Breuer had read it, the article "On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description 'Anxiety Neurosis'" earned Freud considerable recognition by suggesting, in one way or another, that people were getting ill because they were suffering in regards to something traumatic that happened to them in their histories. No one in their circle had listened to the middle-of-the-night whimpers. The baby would be all but murdered. It's heart frozen. Its body is wrapped in a straight jacket. Its mind is fuzzy, volatile, anxious, and grouchy. This soul murder, aided and abetted by repression, created a "symptom," a "compromise formation." Over time, the voice of the inner attacker repudiated the person for being sick. The baby cried only further. The inner attacker is punished even harder. History had been censored and murdered, too. The new history was false. It told lies. It said, "Love your mother and your father, even if they abused you." We are all victims of childism, whether we like it or not.
How is your psychic baby? Do you know its history?
I have been trained to think--and feel--as a Freudian, albeit a postmodern one. People say stupid things about Freud. But the basic "rule" is to keep talking. The basic idea is that our problems today have an ancient root. That root can be uprooted. Its rot illuminated. I can't help but ask these very sick patients if they can tell me about their past. Can they try to give me a developmental history, starting from birth? How were they raised? Was their physical punishment? Were the parents permissive, authoritarian, or authoritative? What was the culture, religion, and ideology of origin? How did the parents soothe their pain? My own birth was traumatic, and I have learned how to FEEL its pain in my own private suffering and agony. I have written an entire manuscript about this time.
Do You Cover Your Eyes or Risk Poking Them Out?
One woman with severe inflammatory disease said she had had a lovely childhood. I refused to take her no for an answer. She was too sick. I wanted to help her get her disability. I asked her to ask her siblings about what they thought. Little by little, we learned that her mother beat her, that her mother was hospitalized with alcoholism during the pregnancy, and the child was born at 2 lbs and was in an incubator for a great deal of time. This woman had lived her entire life under the false impression that her childhood was lollipops and fairy tales. She unconsciously believed that the illness was her fault. She learned at 55 that she was a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. Not only did this knowledge help me write the report that would award her her long-denied disability, but it also rewarded her with a new lease on life. She could reconstruct her history as a survivor rather than as a victim. She gave up alcohol. She stopped smoking. She started to feel her pain. She grieved for her long-lost infant. She began to partner that premature infant in her imagination and give her the health and love that had been denied this premature baby. She started writing her memoir. She wrote it for all the people suffering from the breakdown of the immune system to help FEEL INTO the denied pain and denied release.
A Permission Slip to Be Creative
This is what we do in therapy if the client will allow it. Most clients come to treatment with a thin description of their lives. They repeat what their parents have told them. If they are gay, they repeat what society tells them, which is that being gay is only related to "liking guys" and does not contain a history and a spirituality. So the fellow who does not know why he feels that everyone in the club is judging him has forgotten that he has grown up in a Southern Christian church where everyone WAS judging him. The young lady who cherishes her African American history and criticizes the few lesbians as "weird" does not yet recall that (a) She is seeing her community through the lens of her mother and (b) no one taught her about the rich history of lesbian muses, such as Sappho and Sor Juana and Audre Lorde. But when they are invited to see that it is essential to rewrite their histories from THEIR QUEER EYES rather than those of their homophobic societies, they can ameliorate the unconscious self-hatred. When they are invited to learn about the rich line of homosexual transmission that stretches back into deep history, they can inscribe their fight for truth, beauty, and freedom as an ancient one. They learn from its history and learn to create a new history.
Some Idealized Ancestor Asking Me to Redeem Him As One of Us
All my
I started out with a lot of pain in my life. I learned how to create unhealthy situations in which I numbed that pain. I learned over time—through therapy and crativity—tell the story of this pain and release it from being part of my ego. A new friendship, between my shadow self and my creativity, creates the friction of mutuality that has propelled me to this moment, and whose fruit is called a new stage for me as I enter my middle 60s.