A bowel barbed in self-cruelty
“…the most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being.”
If anyone has listened to my previous podcast entitled Discovering the Abdominal Brain, you might be already familiar with the concept in Traditional Chinese Medicine; that is, our emotions are housed in our digestive tract.
Perhaps ‘housed’ is not the correct expression, rather they are expressed or embodied often enough in our gut.
Victoria Harbour, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Spring 2006
From 2003 onward into 2004 and 2005, during periods of recovery, I would return to this idea. Many times, this encounter seemed to be more in my face. While visiting my doctor in Victoria, BC, I noticed there was a Traditional Chinese Medicine poster hanging above his examination table. Over each illustrated digestive organ was a corresponding emotion. While Dr. Harman asked me questions about my progress, I would routinely glance at this poster and, in addition to ‘anger’ and ‘anxiety’, I noted the words ‘self-mercy’ and ‘compassion’ written over the transverse colon. The former I was unsure of yet I felt I’d managed to incorporate more of the latter into my life.
Towards the end of November of 2004, I had embraced the idea I was using the illness to elude the company of others, taking the colitis and applying it as a beneficial shield against engaging in social moments with my peers. Through the wise and intuitive suggestion of my mother, she advised me to seek out others, to understand their lives, their pain and feel kindness towards them. By becoming aware of this nefarious ‘benefit’, I was able to overcome one of the greater hurdles by embracing a universal love of my peers. Following this breakthrough, I experienced four months of being symptom-free and living without medication.
But throughout the late spring and summer of 2005, I suffered minor relapses, mainly because I was struggling financially to find work and a steady income. By October 2005, after finding decent and regular employment, I was able to feel more secure, gut-wise.
Towards a shift
“Wohin denn ich? (Where then am I going?)”
While a sense of routine can be helpful, I experienced stagnation the following year. In 2006, I found myself continually displeased with my life. I was still living in Victoria, which still felt a little isolated on Vancouver Island, distant from the rest of the province. Working minimum wage, getting by, I yearned for more so one day I explored the idea of returning to school. Where? The Lower Mainland? If school was an option for me, then I would need to save money, as it is quite expensive in North America.
Resume revised, I investigated other jobs while also experiencing some minor gut discomfort. Up to that point, I’d been doing some hypnotherapy with Linda, a practitioner at her downtown office. These sessions were helpful with inner relaxation, breathing techniques, in moments of distress though I wanted to work things out on a more conscious level. I needed to steer myself towards becoming more aware of what was holding my healing back. What was still at the core of my emotional distress? A counselor, I thought, would help with that answer.
After a search for a therapist in February, I found one in early March. Jürgen, a sable-bearded German with a soft voice but a penetrating gaze, appeared down to earth and very kind. I spent two sessions with him where he listened, as if apprehensively, a skeptical finger to his chin, arms crossed over his stomach. Though he kept a pad and pen nearby, he rarely made notes. Jürgen blinked, occasionally nodded while remaining attentively quiet. Now and then he adjusted his glasses or cleaned them with the ends of his earth-coloured sweaters.
I wondered if I rambled too much but for him to get a better background on my life, I described my years of suffering, touched upon issues from childhood, my animosity in my teen years, the anger I experienced towards my parents and peers. I talked about my relationship with my father, the struggle from my youth onwards. When I mentioned how my dad spent more time with his work family than with his real one at home, Jürgen nodded and offered some words: “It sounds like work is a means of self-evaluation and self-actualization for your father.”
That aside, I described my frustration in dealing with the illness, how it kept returning in various forms, though not as extreme as 2003 and 2004. In fact, I was getting a better handle on my body, understanding the effects of volatile emotions. Meanwhile, I felt left behind when it came to my contemporaries. With a brother back in Ontario graduating from university and my childhood friend already married, starting a family, in the great race of existence, I considered myself to be the tortoise, tottering along while these ambitious rabbits lapped far ahead of me.
Jürgen made a note of this, pen scratching his palm-sized pad. Though he offered little, it was nice to have his kind ears, his non-judgmental approach and freeing environment to vent myself.
This would change.
The approaching epiphany
During our third session, perhaps twenty minutes in, as I was describing the job search, my doubt, my frustrations, my feelings of low self-worth, he interrupted my monologue with a gruff and audible guffaw. Then, uncrossing his perennially-crossed arms, he threw them up. “That’s it! I can’t take it anymore. Das reicht! No more! Robert…”
I stared at him, perplexed. It was as if an invisible bee had stung him. He shook his head, staring at me with a paternal and disappointed glare, but a glare that suggested I should know better. His kind, gentle eyes of before had become saddened, frustrated, angered.
“I don’t understand. What’s wrong?” I managed to say.
He slapped both his knees and rubbed them, sourly grinning. “What’s wrong? Wha…why… why?” he guffawed, “Robert, I am… I’m sitting here, wondering, I…. I… why are you like this? Honestly? Why?!”
I blinked, head tilted. “… like what, exactly?”
“So unkind to yourself!” he blurted out, and I sat back as if being dealt a blow. He raised his hand, palm out, gesturing to me. “Answer me: why are you so cruel to yourself?”
“Cruel…” I repeated, almost gagging on the word. “I…well….” My lips moved; I tried to utter something – perhaps an excuse, an explanation – but I stuttered, stumped at his question and nothing audible tumbled out.
“Well, why, Robert”? he asked again in his thick accent. I stared into space, unsure while avoiding his glance. He shook his head. A deep breath then he looked at me. I raised my eyes. Jürgen continued: “You want to know what I think? I think you are a fascinating young man. You are obviously intelligent, well-read, well-spoken. I don’t know many people in Canada who have read Schopenhauer or Rilke or Hölderlin. And you are compassionate, so you tell me, that is… but towards other people. You have learned this. Okay. With others…yes…and for yourself… you are… so… critical. So cruel. The whole time you’ve been talking, these past three sessions, you talk of yourself in such an unkind way. The way you frame your life, your negative assessment. Don’t you see it?”
He stood up, grumbling he needed some water. As for me, I continued to sit there, my eyes helplessly fixed on his vacant chair, feeling ashamed, stupefied like a student who should have studied for a test and failed to do so.
Unable to answer him, once he emerged from his office kitchenette, I asked if we might end the session early. He nodded. Grabbing my backpack, throwing it over my shoulder, I thanked him and walked out.
The hallway leading to the stairs, wooden laminate, stretched out. My footsteps creaked and echoed. Trembling, I felt as if I had escaped some potential fight. I hit the elevator button, longing to be far from Jürgen, feeling his question unsuitable. Ridiculous even. Then, as most of us would be like, I was more inclined to protect my own assessment of myself. How could I have been cruel? I looked briefly back on my life. Cruel? If I had been cruel, I would have let the specialists remove my colon long ago. Not cruel. No way. Being cruel would mean being on medicine all the time and not trying to understand the illness. I was far from cruel. No way. The doors opened.
Outside, in the fresh sunny weather (the first day of spring had been three days ago), I waited for the bus, intent on resuming my job search. The bus approached but boarding it, I slumped down in the seat and with the drone of the engine, found myself feeling so tired, so drained. Though I had copies of my CV in my backpack, I had no energy to deliver them. Instead of heading downtown to pound the pavement, I found myself an hour later in my bed, fast asleep.
I slept the afternoon through, waking towards five o’clock. Three hours. Getting up, looking around my room, at my bookshelves, my TV, the dark green Venetian blinds, the earlier part of the day returned: the session, the words lingered. The question: why are you so cruel to yourself? I repeated it and repeated it, stubbornly wanting to argue against it, playing out my potential responses. Despite these inner dramas, I couldn’t answer the question.
The past awaketh
“Crudele? — An no, mio bene! Troppo mi spiace allontanarti un ben che lungamente la nostr’alma desia… (I cruel? Ah no, my dearest! It grieves me much to postpone a bliss we have long desired.)”
I ate a light dinner, wasn’t hungry and in fact, my gut was feeling rested. Content. But still uncertain. I considered writing in my journal. Instead, I sat at my old computer, hitting the on button.
A memory came to me when I opened my Word program. With Jürgen, I had spoken about my father, the idea of self-actualization through work. Earlier, after the session, this sudden heavy weariness had interrupted my intent to search for a job. I was also feeling something freeing, something unique inside me, and like a detective discovering a serendipitous clue, albeit a minor one, I glimpsed at this new beginning. And with the words that appeared on-screen, the tap of the keyboard, I first wrote about my grandfather, my Opa.
My Opa, my paternal grandfather, Jan Broerse as a young sailor
He had died shortly before his 82nd birthday in 1997. I was 17, attending my last year of high school. During the funeral and after, I didn’t cry. In fact, I felt a strange serenity surrounding his death. In the church I wanted to weep, to give into my hidden emotions but at home nothing came. Perhaps this was my stoicism.
But the body expresses what the self stifles. Two weeks after the funeral, I got up as I normally did on a Saturday, around 6 to work for my uncle at his greenhouse. Instead of getting a ride to work in the winter, that morning I had to take my bike in the snow. A bustle of energy welcomed me, along with grim glances and the words from my stern-chinned older cousin, Mike: You’re late. I glanced at the clock, ten after seven. Sorry. The other greenhouse staff members were hurrying to get out Easter orders.
Perhaps it had been the bike ride, going from the cold to the hot and the cold again, or the cloudy scent of diesel after a truck backed into the main garage or the dust from off the boxes as I loaded them, my body was falling apart. Wiping at my forehead, I had to rush several times to the bathroom. I was sweating, aching.
About forty minutes into my shift, I approached my uncle, informed him I couldn’t work. My gut wasn’t doing too good, I said. Looks of disappointment and anger followed me as I grabbed my bike, zipped up, and braced myself for the chilled ride home.
My aunt would call to check up on me, that I got home safe. I went back to bed and slowly recovered. I had nothing to eat, and my stomach settled. Perhaps it was just a minor stomach bug or the stress from the cold weather.
My father came home. Coming to the top of the stairs, he found me in a chair, with a blanket wrapped around my legs, in my pajamas by the window. Red-cheeked from the cold, glasses fogged, point-blank he asked: what are you doing home? I explained or blathered out about the digestive distress, the fever. He gave me the coldest stare. A head shake and, without inquiring if I was feeling better, simply stated: you should have worked.
I shrugged off his assessment. That evening, I considered myself recovered and went to visit friends for a sleepover. We had pizza, but apparently I wasn’t out of the woods: I experienced digestive upset the whole night.
Inheriting the bleak work-ethic paradigm
And writing about these events, reflecting upon them in my basement suite in Victoria, BC, connecting them to Jürgen’s words, I truly understood the origin of this self-cruelty.
First, with my Opa. After all my research, I finally understood that my body back in March 1997 was expressing a latent grief. I thought of a friend’s sister. Jess had got the Crohn’s disease following her grandmother’s hit-and-run accident. The raging sorrow. My gut back then at the age of 17 was crying. It was doing the weeping - for me.
Next, my father’s reaction. This astounded me, as I unconsciously inherited his attitudes about work and life. Instead of regarding myself through the lens of a compassionate self, a self of patience and support, I had unconsciously programmed myself to see my life through the narrowed lens of a disappointed parental figure. My father’s reaction to me being home sick, not working, was based on one he’d learned: the Protestant Work Ethic.
The cruelty came as I sought to initially and mercilessly punish myself, and would continue to do so in varying forms in the following years. When I moved away from my father and brother, this ghost of ‘you should have worked’ followed me. It became another element in the depression I experienced in late 1997 and early 1998. It would haunt me again when I returned to live with my brother and father in late December 1999.
My father reminded me of this during a drive to the clinic in April 2002. At that moment I was in a panic, thinking perhaps, what was yet-to-be-named - the ulcerative colitis - could have been cancer. He said something similar to what he uttered in 1997. As the rain drops pattered on the windshield, my father asked me if I was using my ill-heath to get out of working.
In Victoria, I sat back from my computer screen, dumbfounded but astounded. This was just as important as learning that I had used the illness to shield myself from others.
The healing question
“But we do launch diseases in our bodies.”
The experience with Jürgen became a monumental stepping stone. By bringing to consciousness the past and re-interpreting it from a standpoint of self-mercy, I experienced a relief in my symptoms. It was what I would later call a healing epiphany, a moment of spontaneous healing. It also made me understand and appreciate the power of questioning ourselves, consciously and unconsciously. What drives us and what drives the self to become ill?
We must question everything, I believe. The unexamined life is not worth living. The unexamined illness is not worth having.
And if you are suffering from ulcerative colitis or even another chronic illness, or someone you know is suffering, it should be asked what bleak paradigm has been inherited? We would like to think we are innocent of our ill-health, that we are struck randomly by disease. This universe has laws and I firmly believe the law of attraction applies. To overcome the worst, sometimes we have to ask: why are we cruel to ourselves?
Spring in Victoria, B.C. 2006