Bodies in Peril: Assaults on Women’s Rights and the Intrusive Other

For many who have endured trauma, the body serves as a receptacle for that which cannot be formulated or spoken. Different types of traumatic experience – relational, physical, sexual, and societal – can be stored in and repeated through bodily states, with the body serving as the primary or only means of self-expression. By listening to what our patients tell us about their somatic experience, observing their physical postures and states, and tuning in to our own bodily sensations, we can learn something about their dissociated psychic pain.

Bach (2016) described certain patients whose early experiences with intrusive caregivers have left them feeling as though their bodies belong to somebody else. Their early environments were loud, overstimulating, often sexualized; they may have been physically or sexually abused, and they felt emotionally overwhelmed, even inhabited, by those who failed to help regulate and protect them: “The body they are in belongs not to them but to an ambivalent protective figure that is or can suddenly become toxic” (Bach, 2016). In my work with patients with eating disorders, I have found that many have such histories, and that self-destructive acts against the body can reflect both identification with the aggressor and, perversely, attempts to reclaim a body that was taken. Through the misuse of food and other substances, and through self-injurious or self-abnegating behavior, these patients may be trying to differentiate between psychic and physical pain, and also between self and other.

In the US and around the world, women’s ownership of their bodies is under attack. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court represents, to many, a large-scale invasion, an unwanted appropriation by an “ambivalent protective figure” that has, indeed, shown itself to be toxic. For some, this external threat aligns with early intrusive introjects. In my patients’ reactions, I have witnessed the coming together of psychic and bodily pain, through reactivation of old trauma in the context of new violations.

A patient reported the following dream:

I was in college and I had to take a final, but I hadn’t studied. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go to take the test. I was wandering around campus, feeling lost and panicked. I kept trying to ask for help and no one would help me. Then I realized that I had blood on my shirt and I didn’t know where it was coming from. I was trying to wipe it away, I felt embarrassed. When I woke up, I realized I’d gotten my period.

She connected feeling helpless to her childhood. Her mother had been overcontrolling and excessively focused on weight and exercise. As a teenager, the patient had developed a secret habit of buying junk food and eating in her room until she felt sick and numb. Eventually, her associations led to the beginning of her freshman year of college. Shortly after arriving on campus, she’d discovered she was pregnant. This was shocking, as she had never had penetrative sex. In the early hours of the morning, on a basement couch, she’d said no. She’d felt the stickiness between her legs, but he hadn’t been inside her.

Alone, nauseous, and far from home, she’d had to figure out where to go for an abortion, how to get there, how to get back to her dorm. The next day, she went to class as though nothing had happened, feeling numb and disembodied. She told no one, and after a while, she stopped thinking about it. In the session, she wondered: What if that were to happen today, in that state that was now going to restrict women’s freedom to choose? Where would she have gone? How might it have further derailed her life? Gradually, we connected her feelings about the restrictions on women’s bodily choices to the restrictions she had experienced growing up and had managed by “going numb.”

There can be potential for individual growth in the context of societal regression and oppression. Patients who have no words for their personal traumas find words to express their outrage at injustices against women. I have observed and felt a shift in certain patients’ abilities to vocalize sadness, anger, and fear. One patient, with a history of abusive relationships with men, started volunteering as an escort at an abortion clinic, providing support and safety to women entering and exiting the building. This has been a profound experience for her, and it has opened up new avenues for exploration in our work, creating hope in the darkness.