Finally Able to Cry

I’ve written a lot here on Medium about my childhood. I’m disinclined, at this point, to detail that horror show yet again. Suffice it to say that it was marked by both sexual and emotional abuse and there was a lot of both… it took place over the course of about 16 years.

Thanks to the rise to power, in this country, in recent years, of a man who embodied the type of men that had played a significant role in the unfolding of my early years, I was compelled — by my body — to embark on a journey that she seemed to have been longing to take.

My most dramatic physical issues post the 2016 election began with significant digestive problems; that seems to me, logical: I had been unable to ‘digest’ the emotional information that the cells of my body had been holding onto and the current administration was calling it all up for review.

Bodies do that. When something hurts them, they remember. They remember because they need to protect themselves. They need to be on guard. They need to stay alive. What may go on might be that, via any number of means and modalities, your mind may well learn over time that, generally speaking, you are ‘safe;’ consequently, you may be leading a pretty pleasant life… then, something reminiscent of whatever bad thing happened to you may show up in your world in a very physical way and your body then might very well go on high alert and begin to manifest some kind of strangeness.

Your mind may try to re-mind you that all the bad stuff is behind you, but your body doesn’t have that luxury. Your mind can reason. The mind deals with information. It recognizes feelings and emotions and can alert you to their presence but the feeling information itself is physical in its inception, it rises up from the consciousness of the body. Job Number One for your body is keeping you safe. Period. And if you have been the victim of sustained physical abuse of any sort then it is highly likely that your body may spend more time than is healthy for him or her on high alert. Sometimes you might sense this as a kind of anxiousness, but sometimes it works undercover.

That’s what happened for my body mid-2016. She had been reading the body language and the voice tone of the candidates and she — my body — sensitized by abuse — felt that she knew who was going to win. I couldn’t bear to dim the lights of my optimistic friends so I kept quiet, while my body grew more and more uncomfortable. By 2018 my digestive tract was just one aspect of a very personal shit show and I knew, because I had grown up with doctors and hospitals as an integral part of my life, that no ‘regular’ MD was going to be able to help with this. I needed someone who could untangle the weft that my deep-seated anxieties had woven into the warp of my intestines.

Having spent about four years — from 1988 to1992 — playing hardball with a disease from which there is generally no escape, I had made the acquaintance of many types of alternative approaches to medicine and had grown to value many of those approaches. So, I decided, based on my various experiences, to find me an acupuncturist… and I did. The acupuncturist had what seemed to me the unlikely name of Dixie. She also had a remarkable reputation. One visit and I was back to normal.

At the end of that session, Dixie had asked me if anyone had ever performed acupuncture on my hands which are fabulously crippled. (The tip of my left index finger has the biggest range of motion of any of my fingers… about 1/8”.) And, yes, I’d had experience; that’s how I’d known to get in touch with an acupuncturist. But no treatment I’d ever had that had dealt directly with my hands had accomplished anything other than hurting like hell, so I felt a tad cautious… but I was also feeling something very different coming from Dixie than I had from any of the other practitioners I’d worked with. I didn’t know what that feeling was but it was a good feeling and so, I thought, Yes! I trust my gut implicitly and my gut was trusting her.

We set up an appointment and I was delighted to find that, as with my first session, pain was not an issue. She was like a genie.

The night following that second appointment, though, I came face-to-face — in a dream that was physicalizing right there, in my bed — with some of what my body was holding onto. I found myself — dreaming that I was pulling my sister along by the hand — physically running in place while I was still lying down in bed. I was running through dark woods, screaming and crying, trying desperately to get us away from the men that were after us as my sister fought against my attempt to rescue us. She would always fight against anything that was happening to her, even if it was good.

My husband, startled and distressed by my thrashing, threw his body over me gently, calming me, stilling me, as the dream released its grip on some long-suppressed feeling from my childhood.

That entire event was unexpected. The session with Dixie had been very straightforward. No strange memories had surfaced; no emotions had been triggered… well, none that I’d known about. My body, though, had obviously felt a need to “let go…” and what do healthy hands do so well? They hold on. My hands were apparently conflicted. Something deeper than simply restoring flexibility to my fingers seemed to be underway.

Needless to say, I returned the next month for another treatment and we established my appointment as a regular thing. I’ve had a few other abuse-related dream events but, thank heaven, nothing as potent as the first dream had been. I also had a sort of non-event on the table once while Dixie was working on me. I hadn’t felt anything unusual until I noticed her voice asking me where I was. I had to pause. I seemed to have been in a kind of a trance. I actually wasn’t sure where I was… I tried to suss it out and ended up by determining that my body was on her table but that, somehow, my consciousness seemed to be up on the ceiling, observing us.

“You’ve disassociated,” she said as she began coaxing me back.

“Oh, that’s what that is,” I commented quietly. I used to do that in the woods, during the abuse. I called it “leaving my body,” I would go up into the trees and watch from up there.

So, little by little, Dixie and I have been sort of making me into a more contiguous whole. And sometime within the last year I began to notice that I seemed to be crying at the drop of a hat. Happy things, sad things, cute things, distressing things… that had never happened before… or so I thought. Then, one day, as I was tearing up in response to some mundane event, as if out of nowhere, I ‘heard’ the following words: “Don’t be so labile.” They were words my mother had often spoken to me… or, more accurately, snapped at me.

At the time, because I didn’t know what the word, “labile,” meant, and because I knew she didn’t approve of my crying, because I’d heard that command so frequently, I took her directive to mean that I shouldn’t cry… apparently ever.

The word, labile, literally means ‘unstable,’ but I wouldn’t find that out until I was in my 70’s. I never bothered to look; I thought I knew.

At any rate, I had received numerous times what I took to be my instructions for life: don’t cry. So, I didn’t. Not even as an adult. Not even when situations would have seemed to be very much appropriate for crying. I watched my husband walk my kids out the door and down the walk, taking them away from me… I didn’t shed a tear. My whole body knew not to. She had her orders.

It would seem that I am now making up for lost time. Dixie and I have gained access to my natural inborn response to being moved by many, many things and I will now cry over damn near anything just as I had used to do when I was a kid… and I can’t begin to put into words how happy I am about that… I am crying a little now just typing about it.

So content.

PS: for those with an interest in astrology: My Moon is in Cancer in the 9th house.