Whose body?
When I was a young girl, my mother and I had a battle for “Whose body is this?” Mother felt the need to control all aspects of my life: what I ate, how I ate it, what clothes I wore, and how much space I deserved in family interactions. She decided my body was her body and controlled me based on how her parents raised her. Her behavior led to regular battles for control.
Leave my Body Alone!
This story showed up a few months ago when I was facing some medical issues. Questions of “whose body is this” emerged when I needed to have someone else decide whether some part of me needed to be removed or not. I woke up and started preparing for my upcoming visit with my surgeon. I had oral macular cancer in 2017. One of the side effects of the radiation was cancer of the tongue from these harsh treatments. A few months earlier, I had a lesion removed from my tongue where the radiation was strongest.
I quickly took a look at my tongue to do a check like the surgeon told me to do. Unfortunately, I saw something new where the cancer was removed from my tongue. I contacted my surgeon, made an appointment, and went on with my day. There was a black dot in that space. It looked like a poppy seed was stuck in the area where the surgery was performed. It’s a poppy seed until I hear otherwise. I’ve learned from my three bouts with cancer, “It isn’t cancer until the biopsy says so”.
Asking my Body!
I had a session with my shaman partner, Susan. We held space for what was at the root of this new disturbance. What came to me was something that had shown up before. A focuser partner and I found that the dinner table was where we learned to be ourselves. It was a place of constant reinforcement of our roles in the family: This is where we were trained to be who we “should” be. My wholebody sense was directing me to revisit that place; my childhood dinner table experience. I doubted that this had anything to do with my new illness. However, I have learned to trust that my body knows more than I do.
One of the rules in my family was that we had to eat all the food on our plates. My grandmother, mother, and father all lived through the Depression of the 1930’s and had deep wounds from going hungry over a long period of time. My Italian-American family treated food as a gift that could not be wasted. They often ate things that were eaten in Italy but unknown in the US. For example, there were meals of Lamb’s brain and Cow’s stomach offered as a special delight. One needed to eat every mouthful on our plates.
When my Body finds me!
As young as 5 or 6 years old, I developed a fear of these non-American meals. I feared that these meals were poisonous. My mother viewed these thoughts as belligerence. She was incensed that any of her children could reject the food set on the table after the family’s experience during the Depression. There were no alternatives offered. On a particular night when a more normal meal was presented to me, I noticed that I had developed that same fear of poison, even though I might have previously eaten that particular food successfully.
This time, I felt a definite NO. It seemed like my fear of food was starting to extend to everyday foods. I told my family that I could not eat the food on the plate because it would make me sick. My mother was beside herself. She picked up my plate and dragged me to the stairway that led to the basement, where my family ate dinner in the summertime. I was sitting on the top step, face-to-face with my mother. She held my plate, demanding that I put the food in my mouth and swallow. I told her again I couldn’t because it would make me sick. She demanded that I put the food in my mouth and swallow.
I did what she asked. The result was that my body rejected the food. After a few minutes, I involuntarily vomited the food onto my mother’s face. She was initially really mad, but something shifted in her. Mother realized (maybe) how inappropriate she was being. She never forced me to eat anything again!
My 5-year-old emerged
When I finished describing what happened, Susan suggested I ask my earlier self to tell the story. Susan’s words shifted energy in my body. My arms and hands rose and moved violently, my voice shifting to a deeply disturbed, almost growling sound, and I began the story again from an inner place I had never felt before. In general, my mother was very controlling over many aspects of my life. My younger self let me know this interaction was about ending my mother’s control of my body.
The physical depth of the growling sound helped me understand why this moment was so important. This was an act of bravery by my younger self that led to my mother having less control. I was grateful to meet this powerful part of me that knew what it could and could not tolerate, given the lack of adult support. Unfortunately, the fear of food continued to show up deep into adulthood, and once in a while, it shows up again when I feel threatened with a possible new medical diagnosis or other threats. For example, as Trump’s violence against immigrants gets more intense, that fear emerges, and I have to be more patient with myself about what I eat.
Susan told me that when my younger self was present, I was surrounded by an extraordinarily bright white light. I am so inspired by my 5-year-old self that successfully fought against being forced to eat things she feared by a traumatized, out-of-control mother. My five-year-old self’s steadiness, bravery, and body wisdom in that moment changed the course of my life. It limited my mother from trying to control me in all sorts of ways. She may not have wanted to suffer that moment again. While she was never able to treat me with kindness, my mother seldom tried to impose her will on me from that point on. How much to control children?
NB
Many years of Wholebody Focusing and Method Acting training have given my body the capacity to connect physically and emotionally, expressing long-lost experiences. Susan’s words and energetic presence gave my body permission to show me what I experienced in that moment and how it would influence the rest of my life. It also convinced me that I have the power to live more authentically.
NB2 The problem with my tongue was quickly resolved. It was a small suturer placed in my tongue during surgery that broke through: thus the black dot. The Surgeon removed it quickly. The final result is that the black dot was not completely removed. The extraction led to a reduction of pain.
