Master of Denial

Many years ago, a therapist named Donna (to be said with the same tone of voice with which Seinfeld said, “Newman”) told me that I was a “master of denial.” I ditched her quick. She was on to me and I wasn’t ready anyway. I was always fiercely outraged at others’ suffering and eerily attuned to someone else who was in pain. When a student walks into my classroom and they are in pain, I can smell it. The denial about which Donna spoke pertained only to my own pain. My best friend would ask me how I “felt” about something and if the response required that I touch something painful inside, she said that a veil would come down across my eyes like a curtain. I’d shut down. Refuse to feel. She could actually see it happening. The students of my evil and suffering course would be surprised at this. I am such an advocate of lamentation, of telling the stories of suffering, of the need to express pain in order to heal it. It is the second stage of Dorothee Soelle’s “new language of suffering.” Breaking the silence is crucial to breaking the power of abuse, oppression and suffering. But, this is now and that was then. 

 

It wasn’t even so much as a refusal to feel pain as it was that I didn’t know how. I could feel other things profoundly; love, compassion, anger, but when the pain was mine, when someone had hurt me, I simply didn’t know how. I’d stare abuse in the face and wouldn’t even know what it was when it was happening. I have a history that explains it. It is all quite explainable. Not feeling one’s pain can become quite destructive after a time and so one year, when the not-feeling got to be too much to bear, I went to another therapist, Peggy, who led me gently to my pain. She never told me what to do, never told me what I was feeling and  she certainly didn’t call me names. She simply, always, infuriatingly asked the right questions. And the tears would come tumbling down. I hated crying. I never cried. But Peggy led me to the place where instead of walking away from the pain, I walked through it, tears and all. I hated therapy. Therapy sucks. Therapy hurts. Therapy is hard. There were days when I walked through Peggy’s front door (her office was on the third floor of her house) and brushed past her with a perfunctory, “hi,” and marched upstairs ahead of her. She laughed a gentle laugh and said, “Well, I can tell you’re happy to be here today.” I was never happy to be there. I’d watch the clock like a hawk and when it struck the 60 minute mark, I’d say, “Time’s up. Time to go.” She’d smile again and say, “ok, Louise.”

 

Learning how to feel my own pain took a long time and will continue to take a lifetime. I still don’t always know what I’m feeling, but now at least, I know when I’ve been kicked in the stomach, or insulted, or degraded (well, most of the time but even now sometimes it takes days). Still, at least now I know something doesn’t feel right. I swear there were days when I was new at this feeling stuff that I would sit on my sofa with my eyes closed, face all scrunched up and fists tight like a five-year old who’s thinking really hard. I’d ask myself the same questions over and over again. “What are you feeling? What is this? What is this feeling?” That’s how much effort it took.

 

Physical pain is something else. I have a high tolerance for physical pain that probably goes back to when I was 13 and had gum surgery and a root canal at the same time without any anesthesia. I had a dentist a few years ago who called me her “masochistic patient,” because I underwent below-the-gum deep cleaning without benefit of Novocain. No big deal. There are times though when I deny physical pain as well. I trace this history directly back to my father and all the men on the Duguay (my maiden name) side of the family. This denial is probably true of many groups, but it seems to me that the men of French-Canadian descent raised pain-denial to an art form. My father would actually tell his friends at his bar, “You’re not sick until you go to the doctor.” And they’d try not to go to the doctor, even when they were vomiting blood, even when they had chest pain, even when they couldn’t breathe.

 

To those who know me then it will come as no surprise that on Friday when I started with a sore throat and a few chills in my classroom I just figured it would go away. I am very rarely sick. I haven’t had a fever in such a long time I didn’t even recognize it when I had it. I am rarely without a thermometer in the house (some throwback to motherhood no doubt), but I couldn’t find it. Saturday I got up at 6:00, worked a four hour shift at Starbucks (chills and sore throat continuing).  I have a little corralled courtyard in back of my townhouse and after the Starbucks shift I went to get some flowers and some cheap resin chairs. I already own a discarded Starbucks’ round, iron table so I started painting that. I swept out the courtyard, re-potted the plants and cleaned out my laundry room that leads to the courtyard. It looks so pretty. I hung a pot from one of the wood panels on the fence but the main joist, the only board to which I could attach the hanger, is positioned slightly over the air conditioning unit so the plant gets a little blown when the AC comes on. I'll probably kill it. Last night I painted more on my little table; all this with strep throat and a fever. Of course I didn’t know this then. I was still in denial.

 

My father may have raised a stubborn girl but he didn’t raise an idiot. When I awoke at 2:00 this morning with shaking chills and throat on fire I knew I couldn’t wait until Tuesday. I went to the emergency room at daybreak. My temp was 102. The doctor took one look at my throat and my swollen lymph nodes and didn’t even need to do a throat swab. Strep. Funny how when there was an actual diagnosis; the thing had a name to validate it; I was suddenly very, very tired. I asked the doctor if I was contagious. He said once I take the amoxicillin I’ll only be contagious for one day. As he was giving me final instructions and just before I left the ER he asked if I wanted a steroid shot for the pain. I bit back the urge to ask, “What pain?”