Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Christiane Northrup Read Free Book Online

Recent studies have shown that the expectations that physicians have about their patients’ healing potential are picked up consciously and unconsciously by their patients and do affect their ability to get well. Of course all relationships, including those with our doc tors, are two-way streets. As Phil McGraw, Ph.D., says, “We teach people how to treat us.” When women become more empowered and able to ask for what they need, they find that they can evoke the healer that lives within the hearts of most doctors, whether conventional or alternative. And they get better care.
    All relationships begin with how we treat ourselves. We can begin to heal our lives at the deepest levels when we begin to value our bodies and honor their messages instead of feeling victimized by them. Trusting the wisdom of the body is a leap of faith in a culture that fails to acknowledge how intimately the mind and body are connected. By wisdom of the body I mean that we must learn to trust that the symptoms in the body are often the only way that the soul can get our attention. Covering up our symptoms with external “cures” prevents us from healing the parts of our lives that need attention and change.
    For healing to occur, we must come to see that we are not so much responsible for our illnesses as responsible to them . The healthiest peo ple I know don’t take their diseases or even their lives too personally. They spend very little time beating themselves up about their illnesses, their life circumstances, or anything else. They take their life one day at a time, as it unfolds in its own way and its own time. A young woman stated this attitude beautifully when she wrote, “I take full responsibility not for getting cancer in the first place, nor for ultimately surviving it, but rather for the quality of the way I am responding to this bit of chaos thrown into my life.”
    Healing and Mystery
    The story of Martha, a close family friend, provides a most striking example of the mystery of illness and body symptoms. Though unusual in many ways, her story illustrates the range of experiences available to us when we are open to healing in whatever way it presents itself.
    When Martha was in her late fifties, a series of painful childhood memories began to surface spontaneously. She allowed herself to feel fully how painful her childhood had been. She expressed and released these feelings through sobbing for hours over several days within the space of about a week. During this process she fully remembered the details of being taken to run-down bars by her bootlegger father. While she was at these places she had often watched him kissing women who were strangers. She recalled being left with an aunt for a few days while her mother broke her father out of jail. The aunt kept her and her younger sister in a cockroach-laden room with only crackers to eat and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. As Martha let herself remember those and many other things that she had “deep-sixed” fifty-five years before, she was able to cry and wail for as long as she needed to as a trusted friend sat with her. This cleansing went on for several days, off and on. Afterward, she said, “I realized that there was nothing of beauty in my life when I was a child. It was worse than I ever let myself remember.”
    Once she was able to see this part of her life for what it really was and express her emotions around it, the chronic neck and shoulder pain that she’d had for years and that had been ascribed to “degenerative changes in her spine” went away completely. It has never come back.
    One spring, Martha called me to say that she was experiencing terror of death to a degree she’d never known possible. Based on her past experience of trusting her symptoms, she decided to stay with her feelings and symptoms to see what they could teach her rather than running away from them or trying to suppress or “cure” them with drugs.
    Martha is no stranger