In my basement home gym, mid-way through a yoga practice — my attempt to catch-up on all of the stretching I blew off after jogging this week — I peek at my phone. My eyes scan over a new message. My body reads the message before my mind can understand it. I’m immediately rocked to the core. A hole is punched directly through my illusion of control and certainty. Reminding me life is full of unexpected moments, where everything is fragile and held together in the most tenuous way, and at any moment could break and shatter all over the ground.
A small part of me is relieved because I’m good at responding to crises, despite never knowing where I left my car keys. There is a clarity about the big things where my intense felt sense of the world finally matches the moment. I’m familiar with the pain of pain when everything falls apart into something unimaginable. I sit in this space with clients as they hold stories that you’d write off as too far-fetched if they were movies and we try to figure out how to continue when it feels impossible to endure.
I feel the shock wash over my body as the reality I thought I knew evaporates. I witness my own moment of drowning, getting pulled under by my autonomic nervous system. Knowing better than to resist it, I surrender to the tide. Nothing is permanent or pervasive. Nothing is ever only one thing, even pain. The only way out is through, and my higher consciousness shepherds my way.
As the cortisol spread throughout my body, what struck me was that my response was congruent to the situation. Historically my responses didn’t align with the situation. Growing up my body remained dormant for months and years at a time. Eventually a crack would form in the walls around my emotions and desires dissolving me into grief, leaving me sobbing for days. Then everything would be promptly tucked back inside to go dormant again. A lack of response was my default safety response.1
In Deborah Tolman’s hauntingly validating book Dilemmas of Desire, she describes the ‘silent body’, where girls disappear themselves and dissolve their desires, feelings and responses, to manage the constant threat of violence or negative repercussions for refusal to comply with the restrictive norms or normalcy and femininity.2 Reading the words — silent body — stopped me in my tracks. It’s the most concise description of my baseline state.
My silent body exists between the world and my anger, desire, pleasure and sexuality. My silent body exists between my words, impulses, choices and reactions. It’s the heavy metal waterproof airtight doors that seal off sections of a submarine, everything safely inside yet nothing can escape. It’s the mechanism that keeps me in compliance with compulsory heterosexuality — the systematic dehumanization of folks through sexuality, and the denial or denigration of pleasure and agency of folks who do not identify as cis white heterosexual male.3 A system that has ignited and perpetuated the incessant shame fueled whisper in my mind — is it me?
In my twenties, I sat at the end of the exam table, on a giant paper napkin which couldn’t possibly provide any sanitary value, wearing a cotton gown that felt soft and grimy in a way that only comes for being worn every day for years. I sensed my OBGYN was wrapping up our appointment, so mustered up enough courage to raise a topic that nobody had ever raised with me before. I asked my doctor about supporting organisms during sex. I didn’t ask her about pleasure during sex because at the time I wasn’t aware that I was entitled to sexual pleasure as a woman. She instantly waved a hand in the air, swatting away my question. And without a single follow-up question, she said, ‘have a glass of red wine and relax.’ She gave me a smile that conveyed her lack of availability and left the exam room. I slid off the exam table, got dressed and took my prescription of silence with me.
After our exchange, I had three unnecessary medical procedures and took antibiotics like candy, before accidentally finding my way to somatic therapy which helped me to untangle the pain, fear and shame of compulsory heterosexuality bound up in my body. Providing relief from my chronic pelvic pain through uncoupling intimacy and danger. My silent body was a survival response, catching me between the relentless push of oppression and pull for safety.
And even as I write this, I hear my mind whisper… is it me? Am I the only woman unable to tolerate the daily transgressions against me and not get sick? In reality, there are nine million woman who are living with undiagnosed or misdiagnosed chronic pelvic pain.4 Nearly half of whom report having experienced sexual, physical, or emotional trauma.5
So sitting on my yoga mat in the basement, staring at my phone screen, the adrenaline rushing through me, I’m undone. Rage filling my core, warm and comforting, like meeting up with a childhood friend, I have longed for and missed so dearly. Sitting with my rage, I wonder what might have happened if I said, wait! before the doctor breezed out of the exam room. If I said no to men, while my entire body was locked frozen and my disembodied voice squeezed out yes. If growing up, people talked to me openly about female pleasure, desire, orgasm, and masturbation. If eighth grade sex education class taught me that all sex is queer sex. If Disney movies showed me I could love whoever I wanted, regardless of gender. If I was referred to pelvic floor therapy for the stretched muscles, prolapsed bladder, torn flesh and broken tailbone I suffered during childbirth instead of sending me home with a pat on the back and instructions to work harder at breastfeeding. Perhaps I wouldn’t have begun the doctor’s prescription for ethenol induced silence ten years before our conversation.
My privilege and special interests have allowed me to claw back as much body autonomy as is possible for a woman in our culture. As I built a career — becoming a licensed counselor, yoga therapist, trauma specialist, somatic experiencing practitioner, sex therapist, and relationship therapist — education became my weapon against numbness, stripping away each layer of silence held in my body, like a million layers of wallpaper, to have this moment of fullness in my response while sitting on the floor in my basement. I inhabited learning spaces and hoarded knowledge to awaken my dormant body and push back against the constant pressure to comply and perform.
It’s silly to celebrate this moment of feeling something other than vast nothingness and at the same time it’s a victory — and then comes the burning rage I feel about that statement, followed by the anxiety I feel about how people react to a woman’s anger — and here we are again. This is just one story of so many stories of silence and the significant cost of reclaiming some body autonomy and the full spectrum of feeling inside a system designed to make us feel isolated, numb, ashamed and like we are too much. So if you have wondered, is it me? You are not alone.
While I have used the term woman throughout this post, I want to acknowledge that the themes of this post also impact female embodied individuals, non-binary, gender non-conforming and trans folks and have a disproportionately negative impact on minority groups.
Resources & Community
Tight Lipped - Grassroots community organizing by and for people with chronic vulvovaginal and pelvic pain
Boston Pelvic Physical Therapy
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Lack of response is a reference to my felt sense of nervous system freeze, which is a valid and important survival response to threat and danger.
Tolman, D. L. (2005). Dilemmas of desire: Teenage girls talk about sexuality. Harvard University Press. (pages 17-23)
Tolman, D. L. (2005). Dilemmas of desire: Teenage girls talk about sexuality. Harvard University Press. (page 16).
Stein, A. (2009). Heal pelvic pain. McGraw-Hill.
Speer, L., Mushkbar, S., & Erbele, T. (2016). Chronic Pelvic Pain in Women, American Family Physician. 93(5):380-387
Kate, yet again you are willing to tackle a taboo subject with vulnerability and integrity. Thank you for this share