My body is keeping the score

The perils of reading

One of the purposes of making my doll was to see if I could effect an energetic shift for myself. I’ve written about how I discovered in one of my therapy sessions that I had neatly hived off my feminine self and popped it outside of me. About a foot in front of me, off to the right to be precise.

The thing about growth and change is that in my experience they are never entirely painless. It was too much to expect that I would begin to reintegrate parts of myself that I had exiled and not feel it in some way or other.

I bought the book The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk a long time ago now. I’d heard someone talking about it and it seemed like exactly the sort of thing I needed to read. Of course, because I needed to read it, I buried it deep in a pile of other, more interesting things, like revisiting Georgette Heyer.

Since the beginning of January, so many people have mentioned the book to me that I could no longer ignore the fact that I needed to read it. I have made a start and am slowly making my way through it. It’s entirely fascinating but not particularly easy reading for many reasons, not least of which is that I have been wrestling with the fact that once I know this stuff, there is no way of me unknowing it or claiming ignorance. Once I know it, I will have to do something with it and that will mean more work and more change and probably a fair bit of pain. I am good at emotional pain. I am not good when it invades my body.

I wanted to type ‘the’ body there rather than ‘my’ body, but I am trying to be mindful of the fact that I need to own my body. Much like the feather that Timothy gives to Dumbo, this is about manifesting physical evidence of whatever is needed. We do not live in our heads, as much as I wish that we did. We live in this world, with jam and trousers and strangely unbiddable bodies that will do their thing regardless of what we want. I have to learn to find a way to honour myself in every aspect of self, not just the ones I find most comfortable. I need to stop thinking of myself as a brain in a jar.

The book is about trauma and how we understand and process it, or not. The author looks at the bodily and biochemical effects of unresolved trauma and attempts to unpick the connection or at least smooth it into something workable. It is about understanding and treating the mind and the body as a single system and healing all of it, not mistaking the part for the whole.

Part of the reason that I pushed my feminine self away is, I am coming to realise, because I have always found it extremely challenging to be a woman; socially, culturally and biologically speaking. I have scars, emotional and physical and there came a point, or perhaps many small points where I unconsciously made the decision to hive off the most painful bits and fully dissociate from them. Pretty much all those painful bits are about womanhood.

Motherhood, when it came, was a relief because it was an acceptable form of being female that I could learn to do. I used to feel so lost when people at parties or social gatherings would ask what it was that I did. Which of course, in most people’s parlance means ‘who and what are you?’ Until I had kids I never had an answer. When I had them, it was easy. I was a mother. Job done. No more difficult questions.

Of course, that brought its own issues because I wasn’t just a mother. I am myself and resentment and grief set in from time to time as I realised that I had created a monster and it was gradually consuming every other part of me. At my sister-in-law’s wedding, where my husband gave his sister away and my children all had jobs, speeches, poems, songs etc - someone came up to me afterwards and said: ‘Your family are so talented. What is it that you do?’ I didn’t say: ‘I wrote my husband’s speech actually.’ I didn’t say: ‘I raised three children to have the confidence and creativity to do all those things.’ I said: ‘I made the sandwiches.’ Then I got really mad with myself and with the person who asked me. It still bites. I sold myself down the river and the mother monster accepted my sacrifice.

After my hysterectomy I started again with my life and picked up the outward signs of being a woman. I lost a tonne of weight and I changed my love of dressing up into a business, sourcing and styling preloved and vintage clothes. It wasn’t very successful for all kinds of reasons, not least of which I now understand is because my insides didn’t match my outsides. I decided that I could reinvent myself but only on the outside. Of course, there wasn’t any heft to that. Nothing to hold myself down. During that time I was playing at being a woman. I was dressing up and showing off. I am not sorry about that. It was great fun while it lasted, but it wasn’t right for me and other events conspired to cut that lifestyle short.

It was then that I started moving away from presenting myself in a public space. Being a mother and a daughter and dealing with crisis after crisis meant that I shut off more and more of myself. It was the only way I could cope. I was too exhausted and too stressed to do anything other than go into survival mode. That lasted through a teenage eating disorder, a lockdown during which my dad had a stroke, two house moves, money worries, business worries, a new job, my son’s friend’s suicide and my son’s subsequent spiral into depression and grief. Oh, and six months of intensive downsizing for a move onto a boat.

By the time we moved here, I was living in the shadows all of the time. It’s not just that I had hived off my female self, I think I’d whittled it down to whatever in me that was still standing and most resembled a human being. I was utterly dislocated from myself. Here, on the boat I keep myself to myself. I dress in men’s clothes. Apart from keeping clean, I don’t spend any time on my appearance at all. I have gone full circle from outside to inside. I have been hiding.

The move here didn’t happen overnight. We bought the boat in the spring and gradually moved ourselves. I came first and there were times at the beginning when I was here alone for days at a time. I hadn’t been on my own for so long. I couldn’t remember the last time it happened. It felt like a gift because it was a gift. I walked and walked, which is where some of you might have started your journey with my Substack. I started walking myself back into the world.

Once I got here, I could begin to assess the damage, which is where the doctor and the therapist came into my life and I started a different journey. I had physically mapped my territory over the summer. In the autumn I started to walk myself through the therapeutic landscape until I got here.

Here is where all the different aspects of me are meeting for the first time in forever. Here is where I begin to integrate and interrogate what my future looks like and walk into it as a whole person. Like any birth, it is proving painful and the most painful bit to date is the understanding that coming back into the physical body that I have emptied out and held at bay for so long, is not going to be a wave of a wand moment.

I had therapy yesterday morning. We talked a lot about the doll and what she meant and I left the session feeling quite euphoric. I had had a letter from the NHS earlier in the week which I had been putting off thinking about and because I was feeling so good, I decided to tackle it. It said that I was now eligible for a mammogram and they had made me an appointment to have one at the end of February. As soon as I read it, I started to panic. I squashed it down and went to grab my diary to write the appointment in. Jason asked me what I was doing and I found myself saying: ‘I’ve got an appointment for a mammogram, but I’m not sure I can go.’

He asked me why not, at which point I burst into tears.

One of the reasons that I vacated my female body is because it has been a site of tremendous trauma. Four regular miscarriages, one that required a D&C, one ectopic pregnancy and ensuing surgery, three deeply traumatic c-sections and their complicated aftermath have left their scars, physical and emotional. The unbecoming of my physical life as a mother was equally surgically and emotionally traumatic.

My experience of my body in its rawest physical sense is riddled with trauma. This has been compounded by unreliable doctors and nurses who have promised to help but so often hurt and damaged me and then washed their hands of me. Alongside all the physical scars, there are the repeated emotional scars of not being believed or listened to, of being accused of being hysterical or lying about what they were too lazy to take the time to understand. My body has been seen as a nuisance, an affront and a challenge.

My body has been an object for so many people. For my sexual partners, for my children and most of all, for the medical profession. It has never, I realised, fully felt like it belonged to me, and whenever I have shown it to other people, they have all taken their pound of flesh. Sometimes literally.

My husband said: ‘There have been times when those people have saved your life. Surely it’s important to let them help you? What if they found something and could stop you dying? Would it be worth the pain then?’

My initial answer and the one that came right out from the soul of me was: ‘No. I don’t think so.’

It shocked us both. But there it is. There is a soul deep part of me that would rather die than let anyone hurt me like that again. I don’t trust them. I don’t feel safe with them and I don’t want them touching my body any more. We discussed it a little more and I thought about what would happen, for example, if I had a mammogram and they discovered something nasty. It didn’t change my answer. I am aware of how fucked up that is.

In the last few months I have had a real issue with being touched - by anyone. It has been bothering me, because I love my husband and it would be nice to share my body with someone I love again, but I haven’t been able to do that. I thought it was because I have been actively dissociating from myself. Then I thought it might have something to do with the fact that I have put weight on and I haven’t been looking at myself at all recently. I just throw clothes on and get on with my day. It is those things, of course. It is also that I am exhausted by sharing myself with others and I need to know who I am before I go about offering myself up to people again.

But deeper than all of that is this fear, absolute, primal panic about what other people have done to my body when I have trusted them to help me.

While my female self was ‘over there’, I could ignore it. Now that it’s back home, that isn’t happening any more. My body has kept the score and I feel that I have lost whatever game we were supposed to be playing. I just feel lost.

Yesterday’s conversation was a revelation. My brilliant, beautiful husband listened to everything I had to say through a lot of sobs and the fluttering hands of a trapped bird, and has vowed to do whatever I need from him to help me navigate my way through this. My initial thought was to put a big slab over it all and walk away. That’s what got me living in the shadows. Then my thought was to pull myself together and go and deal with the mammogram and swallow down all the fear. That will just compound the trauma.

So now there’s something different I have to do. I don’t know what it is, but I need to do it as a matter of urgency. This morning as I was emptying the fridge, I pulled something in my pelvis that has meant that my entire pelvic girdle is on fire. I have been creeping around the boat all day in agony. It is not lost on me that this is where the injury is. My mind is in turmoil and I am quite, quite afraid, but I am tired of the way things were. I invited this in, so now I have to learn what to do with it all.