My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Dispatches on Shame and Reclamation

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Lucy Hall for the Guardian, 28 September 2021: I survived rape, but I didn’t understand what trauma would do to me A deeply important book about the wide, deep ocean that is pain and trauma, about the reverberations through our lives individually and collectively, psychically and physically, that we are only just beginning to understand. How we can’t separate our minds and our bodies; how it builds within us, even, maybe especially, if we try to disregard it.’ Through a blend of memoir and reportage, Osborne-Crowley explores the same subject while indicating her own emphasis: the experience, and grammar, of shame. Acute pain is the feeling that our culture usually associates with suffering. Acute pain is temporary. It is a broken ankle, a sports injury, a sore throat. It is a distress signal sent from a part of the body that is damaged up through the nerves along the spine and into the brain. When the physical problem is healed, the pain subsides. This is how we still, far too often, define and describe pain. For many people who live in pain, this narrative is achingly inaccurate. A lot of the content is very difficult to read and at times it felt like I was being intrusive, as though I was sneaking a peek into the author’s journal.

From Lucia Osborne-Crowley comes a necessary, elegant and empathetic work exploring the intricacies of abuse, trauma and shame.The body is a very lonely place, especially when it is under threat. And some bodies are always under threat.

Brave, unflinching and infuriating, the stories Lucia has collated are ones that desperately need to be heard' Osman Faruqi, award-winning journalist I find trauma a really useful concept for covering all of the grey areas. The more I learn about it, the more I learn that it covers so many different experiences. I think it’s a great umbrella term for understanding the greyer spaces and understanding how they affect us, while we’re working towards having better language for those greyer spaces.Widely researched and boldly argued, this book reveals the secrets our bodies bury deep within them, the way trauma can rewrite our biology, and how our complicated relationships with sex affect our connection with others. Crafted in a daring and immersive literary form, My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a necessary, elegant and empathetic work that further establishes Lucia's credentials as a key intersectional feminist thinker for a new generation. https://meanjin.com.au/blog/what-if-we-never-recover/ -- Lucia Osborne-Crowley * Meanjin Quarterly * When I wrote the note, I was in the middle of a period of (literal) isolation having tested positive for Covid. I slept most of the time, ate pizza, watched a trashy film, then slept again. But once I started feeling a little better, my mind entered its own struggle. Even though we all experience shame in the same way, there are people whom society shames more than others. One of the shame researchers I rely on a lot says that shame comes, in part, from being cast out from society: it’s about rejection or alienation. I think that’s why shame is so structural: it’s the group saying, “Here’s what we want you to be, and you have failed.” So society says: “We want gender to be binary and if you don’t fall into those categories, then we will shame you for it.” It’s the same with society telling you what your body is supposed to look like and how thin you’re supposed to be. For the first time in my life, I understood fully how much time and energy I had spent fighting my own pain. And I saw clearly what I had to do now. I had to let the pain in.

I always thought that by ignoring my assault I could erase it, essentially. But what Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score is that this doesn’t actually work. If you look at the way the brain responds to trauma, it triggers a fight-or-flight response. If you are unable to calm yourself down and regulate yourself after trauma, then your brain will engage this fight-or-flight response all the time – whenever you have anything that triggers a memory of the thing you’re trying not to think about. When that is constant, it has a very physical effect on the body. It breaks down the immune system; your brain shuts down all “non-necessary functions”. Anything that’s not necessary to running away gets paused. It stops working and then has to start up again, and that is really physically stressful for an organ. Osborne-Crowley begins to explore the intricacies of shame and trauma in a way which doesn't shy away from the true extent of the impact that this trauma can have on an individual, but at the same time approaches the issues with sensitivity, and with a feeling of hope that we can overcome feelings of shame, and reclaim our bodies.' * The Owl on the Bookshelf * I want to move on from the men we call monsters because I am tired of talking about them. I want to talk about us. Van der Kolk’s investigation, in part, prompted Osborne-Crowley’s own path of radical truth-seeking and telling. She relays stories about bodies, sex, self-harm, suffering, and survival in the aftermath of abuse — all extraordinary in their frankness but ordinary in how relatable they are. Mine, and others’ perfectionism. I think there is some equivalence between obsession about thinness and beauty and obsession with achievement more generally. I think, at least in my case, that my perfectionism comes from a desperate attempt to prove that I am worth something”.

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Once pain is chronic—and this is the part that doctors are only just beginning to understand—it is not a symptom. It is its own disease. As far as who else is interviewed in the book, there is a chapter on 'girl-adjacent' non-binary people, which ended up feeling token in the scheme of the whole book. The rest consisted 95% heteronormative and cisgendered women. Apart from an extremely short lesbian testimony (which was a lesbian-lesbian power dynamic), there was no mention of how male violence can impact lesbians, trans (m-f or f-m) or gay men. Osborne-Crowley's language and awareness of these other folks' vulnerability to sexual violence seemed to be completely blinkered. Working poor and disadvantaged people were also not included in the book. As this pandemic rages while I write, I am thinking a lot about the language we use to talk about illness and pain. It is always a language of combat, of war. Books Roundup: Small Joys of Real Life, The Things We See in the Light, Lies, Damned Lies, My Body Keeps Your Secrets

It is just at the end, in that clause 'for so many of us' – the author is glossing her white experience, which we already know a lot about, with a person of colour's. I'm not sure if this voicing decision is an editing one, to make the book more accessible, but by the end of the book I had no patience for Osborne-Crowley's lengthy memoir inserts, which came after her interviewees' too-short testimonies. A potent depiction of abuse and transmitted shame – the type of shame inscribed on our bodies, clinging to our insides and concealed deep inside our core.’ As Frances, the protagonist in Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends, says about her chronic illness: I am determined to let myself feel whatever I need to feel, be that pain or joy. And I want to feel joy. I do want to live. Lucia Osborne-Crowleyis a writer and journalist.Her news reporting and literary work has appeared in Granta, GQ, The Sunday Times, HuffPost UK,the Guardian, ABC News, Meanjin, The Lifted Browand others. She currently works as a staff reporter for Law360..But when those pain signals are sent and we do nothing, the nervous system becomes confused. It sends double the number of pain messages, then triple. Before long it is sending ten times as many pain signals to the brain, for the very simple reason that the regular amount is not having the desired effect; it is not keeping us safe. When we are ignored, we speak louder. But the luxury of feeling things requires support. It requires mental health services to be properly funded, so people in my situation have a proper place to go: I shouldn’t have had to rely on a charity to get me through the night when my life was essentially in danger.