July 17, 2006
Torture and me
So last week, for those of you who follow my every word, you may remember that I was inundated by references to torture, which I wrote about as synchronicity, just as if it had nothing to do with me.
I also neglected to mention that I sat with a woman last week who had been brutalized by a lynch mob as a child, while her family looked on. Since she was probably only three at the time, she had no ability to understand the experience, no language with which to frame it's horrors, and no way, but dissociating from her body, to tolerate the terror and helplessness she experienced. In one way or another she has been reliving the experience (sadly, one of many) her whole life. Sitting with me, she finally felt what had so shocked and terified her. She heard herself scream the most blood curdling screams. At last, she understood that she was tortured, and to what degree she was tortured. This week she is much more able to be present in her own life, with empathy.
Did I ask myself what was resonating inside me to be attracting so much material on the same subject? Of course not.
I have had a lifelong struggle with continence in the area of feeding myself. I find it especially hard when I'm tired, and my will is weak. I saw my nutritionist on Friday, and she thought my difficulty has some relationship to sucking. That made sense, since whatever the problem is, it has been exacerbated since I stopped smoking-- the ultimate in wonderful sucking experiences. We have already addressed my mother's repulsion for breast feeding (even though she did it). So we moved on to thumbsucking.
The story of how my thumbsucking habit was "broken" . You must remember, I was quite a wreck as a child, eager to please and appease a mother who was dissatisfied with the imperfect child whom she had birthed. She worked relentlessly to correct the situation. Thumbsucking, mine in particular, wasn't her thing. I can imagine tha it was mine, a much needed comfort in a disapproving environment.
Now that I'm writing this I remember that I always had a great deal of difficulty getting to sleep as a child, and would lie awake for hours, flailing myself with trangressions of the day. I was ultimately saved by learning to read, and reading myself to sleep. A thumb would have come in really handy.
Here's the method my mother used. At age three or four, I was introduced to a pair of leather cuffs, that extended from my wrist to my upper arm ( I couldn't find a good picture of them on the net, even on James Dobson's website). They were brown, laced on, and had decorative little holes in them for ventiation (like old fashioned kid's shoes). I can still smell them. I remember having them laced over my elbows before bed, so that I couldn't bend my arms and suck my thumb. Later in life, when I questioned my mother about the cuffs (I can't even think what to call them), she said that they were recommended by my pediatrician.
Even though it seems almost inconsequential to me as I describe it, when I tell the story, others seem horrified. I am definitely dissociated from my own experience. As I imagine trying to get my thumb in my mouth, straining around the cuffs, I can duplicate much of the body tension that plagued me for years.
In contrast, a dear and close orthodontist I know has a thumbsucking secession program that involves a complex interview with the child (never under age 6), in which the child is asked of he or she wants to stop, what the current stresses are in his or her life, whether he or she is still finding comfort in the habit, or feels embarassed to suck thumb in front of friends. If the child wants to try to stop, a chart and a list of suggestions and reminders is provided. The child is asked to call the orthodontist daily for a month and chat about his or her progress for a few minutes. A material reward awaits at the end of the month.(no, not the chair that goes up and down, but something neat). The orthodontist also shares with them that he sucked his thumb until he was twelve.
Another dear friend spent several excrutiating hours the other day searching with her nine year old son for "William", the special rock he holds in his hand when he sucks his thumb. He was completely despondent without William. Fortunately after a thorough search, which included the baseball diamond (you can imagine how many William look alikes were out there), William was located, to everyone's relief.
So was that my torture? I must say that I have felt more able to be continent after acknowledging how hard it must have been for me to give up thumb sucking in that way. Maybe it did have an effect on me. Maybe it wasn't torture. Maybe it was.
Petit torture for a sensitive child. Why is it important? Because when the pain of that little child is split off from my consciousness, it repeats the original trauma, in one variation or another, over and over again, until I understand how much it hurt. Now that really sucks, so to speak.
Oh I have gone on and on.
Photo note: Shadows and decorative holes -- a shot of my unconscious