The Myth of Normal 45

me that I looked very disheveled—my mother never let us go out disheveled —and that my whole body was shaking.” As if that scene weren’t intense enough, Glenda’s intuitive understanding, now emerging into awareness after a lifetime of self-protective submersion, produced an additional visual layer. “As soon as I recovered the memory of being in the bathroom,” she said, “I saw my body, I was transparent . . . I saw my entire digestive system from mouth to rectum. There were red blistering ulcers throughout my entire digestive system. There was a flaming, flowing hot lava, adding fuel to the fire. It was just raging, and that to me was a guide telling me that these two things are connected, the rape and my Crohn’s.” It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst or a poetry professor to see the image of the “raging” fire as a powerful analogue for the rage and pain Glenda had to bury away in the deepest parts of herself, given her mother’s utter inability to be there for her emotionally. Glenda’s “visual” is apt not only metaphorically but scientifically as well. To quote just one survey of research among an ever-growing trove, there is “strong evidence that childhood traumatic events significantly impact the inflammatory immune system . . . offering a potential molecular pathway by which early trauma confers vulnerability to developing psychiatric and physical disorders later in life.”[18] None of Glenda’s many physicians, nor even her psychiatrist—in her depiction, “very science-and-medicine”—ever once asked her about the possible childhood antecedents of her psychic turmoil. Candace Pert envisioned the mind as involving the unconscious flow of information “among the cells, organs and systems of the body . . . occurring below the level of awareness.” Thus, she asserted, “the mind as we experience it is immaterial, yet it has a physical substrate, which is both the body and the brain.” By “immaterial” she did not mean the word’s usual connotation of insignificant or irrelevant but—on the contrary—that the mind, unlike the brain, is not a material thing: we cannot get a hold of it, put it in a test tube or petri dish, or even “see” it directly. Its impacts and consequences, however, are material indeed.