Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (139 page)

It has been my experience that women with histories of trauma recover most effectively in a type of group therapy known as cognitive behavioral therapy. This form of therapy focuses more on helping people develop the skills necessary to live productive, healthy lives in the present than on the traumas of the past. It is generally not helpful to spend a great deal of time revisiting the past, where it is too easy to get stuck in pain and immobility. Instead, women with trauma histories need to learn the coping skills that they never developed in childhood. Cognitive behavioral therapy training teaches women to answer the following questions and then to take effective, balanced action.

What am I feeling?

What is the purpose of this feeling? What unmet need is it signaling?

What do I need to do for myself to get this need met?

I have seen more improvement in women’s lives with this model than with most others. These skills are practical and helpful for everyone, not just for those with histories of trauma, because they reprogram old subconscious programming.

Many people with chronic or life-threatening illness also come together regularly to share not only their tears but also their joy and their laughter. This grassroots movement of support groups throughout the country has been a source of growth, comfort, and hope to many. I reg ularly refer people to support groups of all kinds in our community, and have participated myself. Dr. David Spiegel has clearly demon strated that women with metastatic breast cancer who participated in a support group characterized by emotional openness and sharing lived twice as long as those who didn’t participate.
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If a drug had been shown to have this effect, you can bet it would be widely used. But to date, most women diagnosed with breast cancer are not encouraged to seek the health benefits of this group model.

For many women, it is important to spend time regularly in women-only settings. When we gather together as women, we each hold a piece of the whole story. Together we heal faster than we would if we remained isolated and separate, and group members hold up a mirror for us so that we can see ourselves more clearly.

In the early stages of self-awareness, women often don’t tell the whole truth if there’s even one man in the room. The same may be true for men. We’ve been socialized to tailor our conversations to accommodate the other gender. In order to become self-aware, we need environ ments in which we can truly be ourselves. For many, that means women-only settings until you can tell the truth about any given experience without changing your story to protect the men who are present. This process has taken me years to master.

Annie Rafter, a nurse-practitioner colleague, tells the following story: One summer she and a group of women friends crewed together on a sailboat and participated in races. They began to notice that if a man came on their boat, they automatically deferred to him—handing him the tiller or expecting him to chart the right course—before they even knew whether or not he was a good sailor.

Noticing this behavior in themselves, the women decided that for one season, they needed to sail with no men on the boat so that they could become a cohesive crew. So for that one season, they stuck by their agreement and learned to trust one another. By the next sailing season, it didn’t matter who came on the boat—the women crew trusted themselves, one another, and their sailing skills. They no longer automatically deferred to men.

In the early days of Women to Women, we often referred back to Annie Rafter’s story about “no men on the boat.” Like her crew, we needed to learn to trust one another and to learn how to maintain that trust, no matter who came into the building. Back then, I found that working in a women-only environment gave me the time and space to talk out my problems in a way that simply didn’t work with my husband. We women have been mistakenly taught that our mates should be our best friends and our primary source of emotional support. Occasionally this works, but not often. When we rely on men to support us emotionally, we often end up disappointed. I’d find that when I’d had my “process” time with other women, I didn’t need my husband to be there for me to go over the details of my day and give me advice or support. When I went home, we met more as peers to share the events of our day in a way that was totally different from the way I shared them with one of my women friends. By having plenty of women-only time and support, I learned not to burden my primary male-female relationship with needs that probably weren’t meant to be filled in that relationship in the first place.

Meetings and support help people to get out of denial. Twelve-step and other programs have helped millions of people recover inner strength and serenity—this should be the first step in moving on in their lives. In order to heal fully, however, each of us must get to a point in which we’re not overly identified with our wounds. This is not easy, because “we learn the language of wounds as our first language and we use our wounds to create intimacy,” as Caroline Myss says. People don’t heal fully and move on with their lives as long as they continue to take what has happened to them too personally and identify themselves solely as victims. When a woman’s identity becomes bound up with her role as a victim, she may lash out at anyone who dares to suggest that she has the inner wisdom to change. Be careful of your language. Though it may be appropriate to label yourself as an in cest survivor or breast cancer survivor initially, eventually this identification with your wound may prevent you from becoming the healthy, whole person you were meant to be. At some point, you’ll find that you’ll be better served by something like “I am a woman who has experienced breast cancer or incest”—this expands your options, while the label “survivor” may limit them. Be sensitive to when it’s time to leave your group and move on. Eventually each of us must take respon sibility for our own lives and stop laying the blame for our circumstances on external factors, whether they be incest and abuse, illness, addiction, the political system, or the environment. Seeing our dysfunctional patterns, working on them, and letting them go is a process.

STEP NINE: WORK WITH YOUR BODY

For most of us, talking things out is simply not enough. “I know all of the things that happened to me as a child and with my husband,” said one woman, “but talking about it just doesn’t change a thing. I seem to be going in circles.” When this happens, we often obsess and seem to spin our wheels. It’s easy to get locked into “thought addiction”—a kind of gerbil wheel in the brain that keeps us going around in circles.

Much of the information we need to heal is locked in our muscles and other body parts. Getting a good massage will often release old energy blockages and help us cry or get rid of chronic pain from “holding the world on our shoulders.” There are many types of bodywork, ranging from polarity therapy to the Feldenkrais Method, that are beneficial. Bodywork can be divided into two different types: physical bodywork (like Rolfing, classical os- teopathy, and massage) and energetic bodywork (like Reiki, acupuncture, and therapeutic touch). Though I will not be dis cussing these separately, I wanted to make this distinction.

Working on and with the body can be an opportunity for understanding and experiencing the unity of our bodymind. These therapies are often deeply relaxing and give our bodies a chance to rest and sleep, a time when much of the body’s repair work goes on. Acupuncture works well for all kinds of problems that aren’t easily treated through conventional means. I would like to see it and the many other kinds of physical and energetic bodywork used in conventional hospitals.

I’ve referred hundreds of patients for bodywork of different kinds over the years and am very gratified with the results. To help find the right body practice for you, I recommend Mirka Knaster’s
Discovering the Body’s Wisdom
(Bantam, 1996), a guide to more than fifty forms of bodywork that also explains beautifully how and why these ap proaches work. I personally get a full body massage once a week. I regard it as part of my general health maintenance program.

Schedule at least a shoulder or foot massage sometime this month. You can also trade massages with a friend. Eventually, work up to a full massage regularly.

STEP TEN: GATHER INFORMATION

Currently, more books of interest to women are available than at any other time in history. I recommend going online, to your bookstore, or to your local library and using your inner guidance to help you make a choice. Acknowledge that you have the wisdom to choose the right book at the right time. Just sit with the books for a while and look over a few titles. See which ones speak to you. Choose the ones that feel right and have appeal. You cannot make a mistake.

It is a powerful experience for women to begin to reclaim our forgotten history by reading about our bodies, menstruation, childbirth, goddesses, and women’s lives, all written from a woman’s point of view. One of the greatest gifts of the feminist movement of the 1970s was the deconstructing of the patriarchal mind-set, which was seen for centuries as “the truth” or “just the way it is.” Ursula Le Guin, for example, points out that 50 percent of writers are women, but 90 percent of what we call “literature” has been written by men.

Books ranging from
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which heralded a much-needed reevalu ation of women’s health care, to
The Chalice and the Blade
(Harper, 1990) and
Sacred Pleasure
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) by Riane Eisler have helped a whole generation of women rethink our history and how it has affected our lives.
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Through the power of the pen, we receive support for our journey together.

The many new volumes on the mind-body connection are also of great help to women in reinforcing their own experience.
The Biology of Belief
(Elite Books, 2005) by Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., a cellular biolo gist and former research scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine, is particularly relevant and helpful as it documents the science of how thought and emotions affect cells in an easily understood manner that is both convincing and entertaining. (For more information on Dr. Lipton’s work, see
www.brucelipton.com
.) Everything by my friend and colleague Louise Hay is also very helpful, particularly the classic
You Can Heal Your Life
(Hay House, 1987). Books are great companions for many otherwise-isolated women who have not yet found one another or come together in communities. Reading and gathering information is a very nonthreatening first step on the journey to flourishing. Many women spend years secretly reading everything that they can get their hands on before they feel ready to join a group or seek other support and sisterhood. Of course, once they do, they find many others who share their beliefs!

A word about discernment and media literacy: When you’re gathering information, take a careful look at who is making what claims and how they are backing them up. After all, even M.D.’s get fooled! Case in point: In 2009, it was revealed that Wyeth, the drug company that makes Premarin and Prempro, paid a medical communications firm to write twenty-six papers emphasizing the benefits and minimizing the risks of synthetic hormones. The papers—which did not disclose that Wyeth initiated and paid for the work—were submitted and eventually published in eighteen different professional journals between 1998 and 2005, influencing untold numbers of researchers, doctors, and the public in favor of Wyeth’s products. Wyeth’s investment initially paid off—in 2001 alone, the company’s sales of hormone drugs reached nearly $2 billion. But the party was over the following year when the government suddenly halted its famous Women’s Health Initiative study on hormone therapy because the women in the study who took Prem-pro ended up with an alarmingly higher risk of heart disease, stroke, and invasive breast cancer.

Fast-forward to 2009, when a personal injury lawsuit against Wyeth revealed evidence of what had gone on behind the scenes. Court documents revealed that after being hired by Wyeth, the medical communications company outlined the articles, drafted them, and then sought prestigious doctors to sign their names to the studies, despite the fact that many of these doctors did little or none of the actual article writing. Wyeth insisted that the papers were “scientifically sound” and had been subjected to rigorous review by outside experts, claiming that this was common practice in the industry. Yet the
New York Times
quoted Joseph S. Ross, M.D., an assistant professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and one of the professionals who did research on the medical ghostwriting, as saying, “It’s almost like steroids and baseball. You don’t know who was using and who wasn’t; you don’t know which articles are tainted and which aren’t.”
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The practice isn’t confined to Wyeth—court documents show that the same thing has happened with many drugs made by other pharmaceutical companies as well. As the
Times
notes, the incident reveals “that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.” This isn’t anything new; it’s just that people are starting to wake up and smell the deception! Back in 2000, the editor-in-chief of the famed
New
England Journal of Medicine,
Marcia Angell, M.D., stepped down from her esteemed position when she could no longer tolerate the degree of drug company interference in the practice of medicine and the research that supports it. Her book,
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us
and What to Do About It
(Random House, 2004), points out that Big Pharma spends more than $12 billion per year on tactics designed to get both doctors and patients to rely more and more on drug solutions.

Here’s another example. In their book
Spontaneous Evolution
(Hay House, 2009), Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., and Steve Bhaerman point out that “When the pharmaceutical industry needed to increase the profit margin by selling more and more blood pressure medications, it simply got the medical industry to change the definition of high blood pressure. For years, hypertension was considered to be blood pressure that measured above 140/90. In 2003, however, a new condition called pre-hypertension was introduced to describe patients whose blood pressure lies between 120/80 and 140/90. Voilà! The world now has a new condition that can be treated with the same old drugs, and the pharmaceutical industry has a brand-new market with many more new customers.”
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