Healing Isn't Supposed To Feel Good
Finding small moments of joy in the midst of struggle is an act of resistance.
A dear friend of mine recently had a baby. She’s the last one in our bestie text thread to cross the threshold into motherhood, and the three of us who have lived to tell the postpartum tale are offering lots of support, validation, and encouragement from our faraway locales. It’s a far cry from the village we actually want to form for each other, where we could hold her baby while she showers and do the dishes for her, but it’s already a damn sight better than what I had in those tender, early days of overwhelming change.
One day last week, she shared1 that she was feeling frustrated that her care efforts didn’t feel fruitful: that despite the naps, the cleansing crying, the reaching out for support, the asking for what she needs, she still wasn’t feeling any better.
And that fucking sucks. Haven’t we been told that the point of self-care is to feel better in the moment? Isn’t that what the baths, the journaling, the breathwork, the time outside is supposed to be about? To improve our mood, our outlook, how we feel in our bodies, how we feel about the world?
I mean, yeah, sure, sometimes. Sometimes that’s what needed, and sometimes that’s possible. Although the times when it’s needed and the times when it’s possible are, sadly, not always the same. And, most often, healing is about something much deeper, and much more subtle, than just feeling better.
I’ve been reminded recently of this excellent thread by Kai Cheng Thom about somatics and social justice. She writes,
“the somatics of social justice cannot be aimed at restoring the body to a state of homeostasis/neutrality. we must be careful of popular languaging such as the “regulation” of the nervous system & emotion, which implies the control and domination of mind over emotion and sensation bc we are not, in the end, preparing the body to “return” to the general safety of society (that would be gaslighting). we are preparing the body, essentially, for struggle - training for better survival & the ability to experience joy in the midst of great danger. (emphasis mine.)
I cannot think of a time in my (cis, white, middle-class) life when I felt great danger more than when I had recently gave birth to my first child. I remember distinctly holding his sweet, tiny body in my arms, alone in the middle of the night, feeling absolutely out of my goddamn mind, and being 100% certain that I was going to die from this. I couldn’t reason how I would die, but there was no question in my enfeebled mind that my survival was at risk.
I feel fairly sure that I had undiagnosed post-partum depression. (Pro-tip: if you are googling “Do I have PPD?” self-tests every single day, you may very well have PPD even if all the tests are inconclusive.) I also, as a fairly young prenatal yoga teacher, entered into motherhood with a colossal and ill-advised sense that I was somehow prepared for the transition. I thought I had my self-care game on lock and I fully expected myself to be able to lavender oil and pranayama and abyhanga myself into the cool, calm, and collected image of motherhood that I felt convinced it was my duty to espouse.
What an absolute crock of shit that was–and I, and we, have guzzled it up.
No amount of self-care, no matter how skilled, can make up for the fact that mothers and infants are oppressed classes in this country.
No amount of self-care, no matter how skilled, can make up for the fact that we have evolved to step over the threshold of motherhood amidst a supportive, multi-generational village, and that this village is nowhere to be found.
No amount of self-care, no matter how skilled, can make up for the fact that the nuclear family unit is a tool of nation states to keep women oppressed, to keep men in positions of power, and to keep the engine of capitalism humming along.
It is both appropriate to feel fucked-up during such a transition, and also just completely, heartbreakingly understandable to be looking for something, for anything to soothe the burning anguish. I have so much respect for the very human desire to look for comfort, for our unwillingness to give up the hope that the next choice, the next gesture, is going to bring us some relief. Keeping hope alive in the midst of danger is something we can use to fuel the revolution; guilt and shame that we seem unable to, despite our best efforts, make ourselves feel better isn’t.
So–what the fuck is the point of self-care then? What’s the point of taking showers and naps, of asking for help, of trying to feel better if we’re not going to feel better–at least, not immediately? If healing isn’t about feeling good, then what the fuck is it about?
Healing–in the context of trauma, at least–is about shifting deep underlying patterns of protection towards patterns of connection. It’s about naming, interrogating, interrupting, and ultimately transforming patterns that have held us firm to the belief that our bodies are bad, that our feelings are too much, that our needs don’t matter, that our worth is tied to our productivity, that our humanity is dependent on our proximity to power. And, more often than not, this kind of healing–the deep, lasting kind, the kind that transforms lives and communities–totally feels like shit.
Having a baby absolutely destroys you, body, mind, and soul, which is necessary so that you can be remade into a mother/parent. There is actually nothing wrong with this. What is wrong with this picture of the passage into parenthood in our culture is that not only are we expected to do it without the village we rightfully need, but somehow we’ve also absorbed the fiction that it is a reasonable expectation to feel good in the midst of what amounts to being cast into the fires of Mordor, and that if we don’t feel good, it’s our own damn fault for not trying hard enough.
Ok, so if baths and naps and walks and all that shit isn’t about feeling better, then what is it about? What’s the point?
The point is this: to remind ourselves, over and over and over and over again, that we are deserving of care, especially in the midst of struggle. The point is to show our inner child (and brand-new baby, if we have one, because they are definitely learning all of this shit already), who has for so long gone without, that it is possible to receive care. The point is to affirm that caring for ourselves and for each other always matters: that it all adds up, that it is going somewhere, that we might not see the shifts just yet but that they are in fact happening, just as we don’t see the breaking and the germinating and the rooting of a seed in the ground, and yet we can trust that growth is happening in the dark.
And also the point of caring for ourselves and each other in the midst of struggle is to deliver a big fat fuck you to those systems that are hell-bent on keeping us in struggle. The point is to resist.
This is what I told my friend in the text thread: The doing of those things matters, they add up to something even if they don’t make you feel better today. It’s incremental, it builds slowly. But it’s going somewhere. I promise. There is nothing you’re doing wrong. You’re just literally not supposed to know how to do any of this yet and it’s just this hard to learn this.
Healing trauma–whether in our own lives or in the collective, because they are the same—is a long game. If we stay focused on the success or failure of our individual attempts at feeling better, we will grow discouraged, desponded, and hopeless, which is exactly where systems of oppression want us to land, which is exactly why the message of self-care as a project of immediate soothing (preferably via consumerism) is being pushed so hard to everyone, and mothers in particular.
Our project is, must be, so much bigger and deeper and more beautiful than that. Our project is a reimagining of the ways in which care for ourselves and each other allow us not only to survive and find joy in the midst of oppression and danger, but to subvert and eventually overthrow these systems. This radical reimagining of our systems of care asks us to seize every attempt and to claim it as a small victory, because each attempt, each gesture, represents making a different choice, a hopeful choice, in the face of not-great odds.
Yesterday, my new mama friend texted us a picture of her sweet baby, bundled up in the stroller in a suit with bear ears (BABY BEAR EARS SQUEEEEE), while the two of them were out for a walk. She said that going outside for walks has been a game-changer. She also texted us picture of the crocuses that are greeting her on her walks. I can imagine how hopeful it must feel to step outside, testing her new mama legs, even if they feel shaky, and be met with signs of spring. With the certainty of renewal.
The ability to look for and experience joy, pleasure, and resource in the midst of danger and struggle, as Kai Cheng Thom writes, is the point of our healing work. And it doesn’t always pan out in the moment–sometimes, the payoff looms further in the future than we’d like. But sometimes it DOES pay off in the moment. And those moments, while often small, are no less sweet or spectacular for their size. As another of my favorite thinkers in the field of somatics and social justice, adrienne maree brown, reminds us: small is good, small is all.
🌈 This thread and this thread are the Autistic 🎤 💥 🤯 of the week.
🌈 Lotions & potions are necessary Autistic sensory joy for me, and lately I can’t get enough of this cuticle butter and this lotion from Lush.
🌈 Watching Poker Face on Peacock. Each episode is like a short story: a perfect jewelbox of tight plot, terrific writing, stunning photography, and killer acting by Natasha Lyonne (and Natasha Lyonne’s hair.)
🌈 Lisa Olivera on being a person.
🌈 Erin Fairchild on being your own compass.
🌈 Anna Fusco on being off Instagram.
I am sharing this story with her consent.
Is there anything better than reading your newsletter, copy-pasting DOZENS OF SENTENCES into a little desktop note because they hit so hard, being too excited to comment and thank you for your writing that it distracts me from fully reading the piece itself so I have to slow down and re-read many parts, AND THEN SEEING MY NAME AT THE BOTTOM OF SAID PIECE. Thank you. I'm tingling.
"No amount of self-care, no matter how skilled, can make up for the fact that the nuclear family unit is a tool of nation states to keep women oppressed, to keep men in positions of power, and to keep the engine of capitalism humming along." Check, check.
Hi there Fanny, another great post, thank you so much. I appreciated the quote from Kai Cheng Thom very much because this has been on my mind a lot lately, reading about techniques for regulating or managing or controlling the nervous system, and I've had the same thought over and over that it feels like control, not listening to. If I realize I'm in flight, I don't want a technique to go to "regulation" because that just puts off trying to connect with myself to ask how I'm feeling that, where I'm feeling it, how do I connect with the part of me that triggered the flight response. The nervous system is the messenger, not the issue or memory or part that is seeking wholeness and love and understanding and used the nervous system to signal out. And I admit, I clicked on a lot of those technique links for a while because we all want a quick fix sometimes (and sometimes that's what's needed for a specific circumstance), but it is a quick fix. But applying those techniques from the repertoire felt superficial and like I was just trying to patch up enough to keep going instead of answering the invitation to connect with the magic of my own vitality and how it was being expressed in that moment. Also, I recently came across psychologist Patricia Crittenden. I've read only bits of her stuff but what stood out for me was (may be paraphrasing badly) that for her, theories of attachment in the US focus on security and assume a safe environment is the norm whereas in Europe attachment takes on board that environments actually usually involve some degree of danger. I've probably mangled her theory but for some reason I resonated with the idea that working to get to safety and to creating a safe end point may be a chimera. There's something liberating in that, at least for me. Thank you again for the beautiful post.