The Myth of Normal 24

You are not left compelled either to aggrandize yourself or to efface yourself for the sake of gaining acceptance or to justify your existence. It does not impair your capacity to experience gratitude for the beauty and wonder of life. If, on the other hand, you do recognize these chronic constraints in yourself, they might well represent trauma’s shadow on your psyche, the presence of an unhealed emotional wound, no matter the size of the t. Trauma Separates Us from Our Bodies “Once somebody has invaded you and entered you, your body is no longer yours,” the writer V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, told me, recalling her sexual abuse by her father as a young girl. [*] “It’s a landscape of dread and betrayal and sorrow and cruelty. The last place you want to be is in your body. And so, you begin to live in your head, you begin to live up here without any ability to protect your body, to know your body. Look, I had a tumor the size of an avocado inside me, and I didn’t know it—that’s how separated I was from myself.” Although the details of my past diverge wildly from V’s, I know whereof she speaks. For many years the most difficult question that could be put to me was “What are you feeling?” My customary response was an irritated “How should I know?” I faced no such problem on being asked what my thoughts were: on those I am a tenured expert. Not knowing how or what one feels, on the other hand, is a sure sign of disconnect from the body. What causes such a disconnect? In my case, the answer requires no speculation. As an infant in wartime Hungary, I endured chronic hunger and dysentery, states of acute discomfort threatening and distressing to adults, let alone to a one-year-old. I also absorbed the terrors and unrelenting emotional distress of my mother. In the absence of relief, a young person’s natural response—their only response, really—is to repress and disconnect from the feeling-states associated with suffering. One no longer knows one’s body. Oddly, this self-estrangement can show up later in life in the form of an apparent strength, such as my ability to perform at a high level when hungry