James Coleman
News, Updates, Musings
The Story of Our Bodies12/29/2019 “What is body? For Saint Paul, in moments of grace, categories dissolve. Words like body and mind do not hold. The “where” of where one is, is ineffable.” -Michael Eigen My mother recently said to me on the phone, after I had been encouraging her to find a therapist to help her through a difficult time; “I want to find out if my dystonia was caused by my trauma. Is that where all this began, when I was just a little girl?” And if it was, it should be noted it is killing her. Dystonia. Trauma. As she prepares to undergo a high risk brain surgery that could extend or take her life, I pause to wonder, dystonia, trauma. “What is body” and why do we lack such adequate language for its ephemeral, ever changing borders? Recent grief, loss and stress brought shingles to bear on my body, a nerve ending signature of physic overload that was too much for one body to carry, day to day. Then an internal staff infection constellated so close to my blood, nearly ending me. “What is body?” I wonder. A well know book on the topic bears the apt title; The Body keeps The Score. The body remembers everything we don’t. How can we tend to something we may not want to remember, when remembering could be more dangerous than forgetting? It seems our bodies tell us otherwise, to forget is to pass it on to the body. Michael Eigen describes the bodily experiences of one of his patient’s physical ailments in such attentive, loving language; “Kirk rubbed his shoulder and spoke of a pain he felt just under the joint ball, where it meets torso. After a time the pain spreads into chest and he speaks of heart pain, now rubbing his chest. I am aware he is under treatment for elusive physical difficulties and wait it out. He said something hard to hear about “ghosts”, pains as ghosts, as they slid from shoulder to chest. Pain as ghosts of emotional trauma, mute impacts seeking-resisting acknowledgement. Ways the stress of feeling from infancy on pinch nerves, bones, muscles, organs. Bion says the core of a dream is an emotional experience. Our body is an emotional body and language an emotional experience. We lack capacity to work with feeling well and tend to suffer from partial emotional indigestion. We do not know what kind of pain is being dealt with how.” Had my mother’s body twisted and deformed, moved bone, nerve and tissue around to suit an internal occupancy of shadows? Can we ever know for sure? “We do not know what kind of pain is being dealt with how.” Does the body rearrange its borders to make room for the unspeakable? In the throes of my grief and the grip of stress of an upended world, my body just broke down. It refused to fight anymore. Had some part of me given up? What room had I left unattended? We do not know what is doing what to us sometimes until something in us gives. For the moment, my mother is curious (and for how long, perhaps longer than I have known, she has wondered if maybe it was not perhaps her trauma that brought on her Dystonia) she wants to find out what she has forgotten how to say. “We breathe around the pain, contract, find ways of surviving. For the moment everything is in a breath… There might be ways we stop breathing, never breathe again. Feeling has breath as well as taste buds. Our literal body might go on breathing in restricted ways, enough to get by, but emotional breath and taste may be damaged. Can you imagine a person who has stopped breathing emotionally? I know places in myself where this is so… Attention can be placed on body surfaces and insides in ways that open infinities of feeling. The more one focuses on body areas, inside or out, the more nuances of being one discovers.” Ibid Do we forget to breathe even while we breathe? But of course, there are things we must forget to familiarize our routines in life. And there are things that if left unattended too long become ghosts in our blood, beckoning, rattling chains. What happened will not unhappen but it asks us to acknowledge its happening, to mourn its loss. A lot can go wrong when we bury our curiosity. What is doing what to us and how? “The body visible is mostly invisible. Feeling touches us from unknown places or no place at all. It is not easy to pin ourselves down and undulating waves of body feeling are part of life’s elusiveness, a sense including the rise and fall of spirit that is part of the rhythm of faith.” Ibid A faith that includes infinity, not knowing, the navel/untieable knot of the dream. How does the body bear it? It sends us post cards from nowhere land, the dark tunnel that sits between the spaces we’ve dug to draw fire away from where we live. But the fire reaches us. Perhaps curiosity is water. Not enough to put it out but maybe enough to work with it. A little bit of anything, after all, goes a long, long way.
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An Unhealable Wound, An Alright Life12/28/2019 "How much aliveness can one take?" -Michael Eigen For much of my life I have felt an intractable sense of inner deadness, a stuck point, where the uncomfortability of the wound does not necessarily make leaving the grounds of the wound any easier. Therapy, over the years, has helped the dead thing to come alive and to light, but inevitably it persists in the background of my life, this feeling of nowhere and everywhere, a hum, a buzzing, that no matter how much I may want more of life, more life just will not do the trick. Are there such unfortunates? Are we all, in one way or another, one foot in and one foot out of life? I remember being distinctly moved (and a bit horrified, because there I was) reading R.D. Lang's account of the person who can only take little nibbles of life, but never the whole thing. A few bites and then a retreat. For those of us whose lives were not pleasant or safe I think it's probably a form of reality testing that never goes away. And yet, we can and do live okay lives, not great lives, not the one's we would have wanted, but lives nonetheless. It wasn't until I found the work of Michael Eigen that I began to feel my life make sense. It can be horrifying to think that one will never turn out the way one would have hoped. Yet it is not hopeless. Not entirely. "A little bit of anything goes a long way", a phrase Eigen uses repeatedly, feels very true for me. Growth happens, even if I feel dead inside, I don't just feel dead inside, no one living does. Yet to deny the reality of deadness won't make it go away. There are people for whom what happened early in their lives was simply too much to bear. A kind of on-pause but a yearning forward, risking and opening happens, it happens for me now in ways it never did before I was 30. Eigen's tenderness with people for whom what happened simply will not go away or be ignored has helped me to feel less alone. I read his words and almost feel him in the room with me, and who's to say he's not. I've often thought of trying to set up an appointment to see him, but his words have felt like more than enough for me. Contact with the depths, from afar. Holding the pages in my hand, feeling my heart press forward. I've been helped immensely by my therapist of the past decade. Unfortunately, there have also been many painful abandonments and ruptures in our work together. It's a not often talked about phenomenon in therapy; the ghosting of a patient by their therapist. We survived two of those, which lasted for almost a year and a half, and now we are there again. I imagine it can be overwhelming, at times, to think that the progress we are making with somebody inevitably gets swallowed up again and again by an unforeseeable, inner black tide. I know how hard the work is and I imagine my therapist has often felt overwhelmed by where we are and aren't able to go in our work together. Or by how undone our steps sometimes become by the lashing of the tide. I don't blame her, she has gotten me this far, I am still here because of her and I am certain I would not have been otherwise. I am only sharing this because I think it might help, in some small way others, who've experienced these kinds of ruptures with their therapists also. It's confusing. Very confusing. It takes us right back to our early and very real repeated abandonments. But unlike those early abandonments, we know we were really seen and held this time around, many of us, for the first time in our lives. More good than bad has happened. A good-enough therapist says, without words, "take me there" and stays the course even when the story is so dark and frightening it seems it could annihilate the very room in which it is being told. Sometimes we come up against our own limitations and we are stopped from going any further than we can in that or in any moment, we have to, it's the psyches road sign. A moment can be forever. Eigen says that "patients and therapists who must deal with persistent deadness are partners in a psychic evolution that is very much alive." We go through many deaths in a lifetime, internal funerals. Something happens when we stay with something, Eigen says. Even the deadness one feels inside. If one can feel their dead insides, one is feeling something more than death itself. Life gets mixed in with death and much as we'd like to separate the two, their roots will not come apart. Can I live with my dead spots? Do dead spots sometimes also glow? Recently I spent some time with a person who's own story, very much like my own, (poverty, abuse, trauma, transfiguration) ignited a spark of something (I want to call it recognition) for when we feel really seen it's because we are also really seeing another. I think that is the root part of therapy work, of healing work in general; the ways in which we see the there there, where before, we knew only numb. Dead spots do in fact glow. Two people who've both known what it's like to be buried alive also have known what it's like to dig one's way out. We sometimes find each other, and that finding, however briefly, brings a glow to what has died in us, is always dying in us in immeasurable measure. We aren't saved in those moments, we're just sharing a glow, dead spot to dead spot, yet alive. It must be said. We are alive in our dead spots. There are things I've managed to do with my life that was unimaginable ten years ago. I joined a revolutionary movement and was able to do good things in it, to help people, who, like me, were at the very bottom. I went to college, however briefly. I published a book of poems. I started a literary journal which has kept me and many others alive for nearly five years. I was able to provide end of life care for my Grandmother, helping to ease her suffering and guide her gently into death, the most difficult and daunting experience of my life. I made peace with my parents who had both abused me horribly and I've been in touch with more of myself than ever before. Risking more skin than I thought I had on bones that have been, and still are, broken. I know the roads by which I travel. No small feat, to learn how to drive through the dark country of ourselves. Parts of me will always be dead, I know that now. I'm making peace with that now. I'll never stop wanting or reaching for more of life, but I'll also never stop drawing back when the black tide in me rises. I make due with the life I have and I am grateful that it is not just death. I feel that I've been able to make some small bit of difference in people's lives, despite my psychic disabilities. Making a space for those who have nowhere to go - to go, when they need it, a place to process and share their traumas and their emotional corpses; it feels very much like a healer's work. I may never be a therapist, (or live the life I would have imagined) but in some small way, I'd like to think that I've helped others, stranded along the road, find some safe ground. And that draws me into life alongside the tide of death. The water doesn't discriminate, it's all one thing. But there are moments, and they are precious, when we sometimes rise above, just long enough, to catch a glimmer (the way a dead spot glows) and we are grateful for that small bit of joy. Author“Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.” ― Cheryl Strayed Archives
August 2023
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