The Myth of Normal 25

or stressed or fatigued, pushing on without awareness of my need for pause, nutrition, or rest. Alternatively, some people’s disconnection from their bodies manifests as not knowing when to stop eating or drinking—the “enough” signal doesn’t get through. In whatever form, disconnection is prominent in the life experience of traumatized people and is an essential aspect of the trauma constellation. As was the case for V, it begins as a natural coping mechanism on the organism’s part, and a mandatory one. She could not have survived her childhood horrors had she stayed present in and aware of her moment-by- moment experience of physical and emotional torment, fully taking in what was happening. And so these coping mechanisms ride in on the wings of grace, as it were, to save our lives in the short term. Over time, though, if untended to, they become stamped on the psyche and soma, indelibly so, as conditioned responses harden into fixed mechanisms that no longer suit the situation. The result is chronic suffering and frequently, as we will proceed to explore, even disease. “What was so remarkable about my encounter with cancer,” V told me, “was that the whole journey from waking up after a nine-hour surgery and losing several organs and seventy nodes—I woke up with bags and tubes and everything coming out of me, but for the first time in my life, I was a body . . . It was painful, but it was also exhilarating. It was like, ‘I’m a body. Oh my God, I’m here. I’m inside this body.’” Her account of a sudden at- home-ness in her physical self is emblematic of how healing works: when trauma’s shackles begin to loosen, we gladly reunite with the severed parts of ourselves. Trauma Splits Us Off from Gut Feelings For the average person in V’s early predicament, Nature’s best recommendations would be to escape or to fight back against the misuse of her body and the assault on her soul. But therein lies the rub: neither option is available to a small child, for to attempt either would be to put herself in further jeopardy. Therefore, Nature defaults to plan C: both impulses are suppressed by tuning out the emotions that would propel such responses. This