My Body Is Shouting About Something

My Body Is Shouting About Something
Sunday July 08, 2007

Dear Alice Miller,

I have written to you before and I appreciate your responses so much. Thank you. I have made much progress in my therapy, or so I thought. I cannot remember when I was a very small child. I have enough from my dreams, my body, my writing and my fears to know that sexual abuse is blocking my memories. I have felt the anger. I have felt it because I believe myself about what has happened to me.

This past week I have had to work very hard to put my miseries away and not dwell on these things. I had no practicle choice but to find a way to force myself to concentrate on my present life due to specific urgent duties. I thought I was doing well, but I have arthritis and I began to have little aches even though I have not had these pains in a long time.

Yesterday something upsetting happened that reminded me of the trapped feeling of being powerless, unable to have any control over my own body and being at the mercy of ruthless others. The fear that I normally would have had in response to such a thing was diminished and distant. I thought that meant that I was handling things well, but this morning I woke up with a lot of pain and stiffness in my joints. I haven’t felt this level of pain since before I acknowledged the abuse and there isn’t any recent physical thing that would have caused this.

Now I am thinking about the incident that happened yesterday. I am left with the feeling that it is both bad and dangerous to be a human being. Maybe I have so much fear and anger because of predatory people that I don’t even like myself anymore just because I, too, am a human being. Maybe humanity is destined to be evil. I know this may not make sense, but it is how I feel right now and I hope you can understand. This is very distressing for me.

I KNOW what has happened to me. I cannot change it. I have felt the abandonment, the fear and the anger. This latest problem has taken the hope out of me. There are things I can’t remember, I haven’t been able to fall asleep until morning for a long time, my body hurts and I don’t know what else to do. I am feeling depressed now, but I don’t understand and I feel powerless to fix it. I’m scared now about what might happen to my body. I usually have reasonably good health and I don’t want to be ill.

AM: Maybe your body was “shouting” about “something that had happened the day before”. Instead of speculating about the badness of human beings, ask the body (the child) what actually made her furious. It will answer you.