“Use Your Words!”

When my daughter M was twenty months old, her teacher informed me that her speech was delayed. While most of her peers were using rudimentary sentences, M was still communicating in single words and polysemous sounds. Overnight, her father and I became zealous speech therapists who corrected her every noise; when she pointed at something she wanted and made her sound for that feeling, we coached her to repeat after us: “I want that excavator.” Her speech progressed immediately, but I mourned to see the clear, bright energy of her desire occluded by the effort of verbalizing. I became aware of a painful lump in my throat that I now recognize as the feeling of dishonesty. After all, there was deception in our teaching: We behaved as though we did not know what our child wanted, and we withheld it until she traded her sounds for sentences.No one would fault new parents for helping their child learn to speak. But by rushing our daughter through a process that should have been spontaneous and gentle, we solved one problem with another: Along with our encouragement, she took in our implicit distrust of her body, our fear of her difference, and our need for her to sound like someone else. Without realizing it, we were teaching a still-nursing child to soothe us. Had we not corrected course, this might have been the start of a long education in doubting her body's timing and expressivity, its primordial wholeness.Thankfully, just as my daughter was learning how to speak, I was learning how not to speak. Shortly after M's birth, I sought help for a worsening panic disorder that had come and gone since childhood. I came to therapy believing my linguistic capacity would make me “good” at it, but I have learned that my articulacy was a kind of scar tissue—elaborate and beautiful in its way, yet concealing wounds that never healed properly. Healing from complex trauma has meant learning to touch the parts of my experience that could not be assimilated into language, and first, I had to discover that such parts existed. This was also what I needed to learn as a parent: how to hear the entirety of my child's expression without privileging the things she could say, and how to reflect the life of her body back to her. This mirroring is how raw experience first becomes personal. M's body was telling a story about the pain of translating immediacy and plenitude into words—an old human story I had forgotten. In time she would forget it too, as her struggle to speak gave way to eloquence and fluency. While I rejoiced in this development, I am grateful that I recognized the intrinsic value of her struggle before it was too late.But first, I had to learn the value of my own struggle to speak, and this meant letting go of almost everything I'd been taught to expect from therapy. My education had primed me to view self-discovery as a verbal process, and like the old woman in E. M. Forster's anecdote, I often wondered: “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” (101). Many theorists view the self as a linguistic construction, and according to this view, trauma ruptures identity insofar as it exceeds our capacity for representation. As Bessel van der Kolk puts it, “all trauma is preverbal” (43). As a result, talk therapy often prioritizes fluency as a developmental goal, much as my husband and I had prioritized our daughter's fluency. This is particularly true of psychodynamic and constructivist therapies, which center storytelling in different ways. As Adam Phillips observes, “People organize their lives to avoid the imagined catastrophe of certain conversations; and they come to analysis, however fluent they may be, because they are unable to speak” (On Flirtation 84). Secrecy and shame are like cement in our bodies, and saying what we have been forbidden to say can bring movement to our frozen parts. Yet fluency is not fluidity, and what I wanted from therapy, though I could not have said so at the time, was an alternative to “using my words,” as well-mannered parents are forever urging their children to do. I wanted to discover my life beyond words—that vibrant inarticulacy my daughter was so painfully relinquishing.Etymologically, infant means “speechless,” as does the French word for child (enfant). But speechless is not soundless, and the difference is worth exploring if we want to be closer to our children. In the beginning, we are full of sound; our bodies resonate at a range of frequencies, some of which our ears can detect and some of which we must hear in other ways. Ideally, we never stop communicating with our bodies in the first place. If our early caregivers make it safe to be interested in ourselves and help us bring sensations into awareness, then linguistic development can extend that process organically. Our speech will be grounded in somatic experience, which is what it means to speak “from the heart.”My own childhood had obstructed the pathway between my heart and voice; I spoke in metaphors and abstractions with occasional gusts of cerebral energy, but I was haunted by the sense that while I meant what I said, I'd never really said what I meant. Some part of me was not fully in my words. I did not know that the missing part was my body, or that in speaking I was searching for my heart. From an early age, I'd spoken with relative ease about thorny subjects like religion, sex, and money—yet “how do you feel?” could paralyze me, and my self-cure for this paralysis was to surround it, like a bolus, with words. The stronger the feeling, the thicker the bark.Thankfully, the universe could not have designed a better antidote to my fluency than T, the therapist I'd begun seeing. To be sure, I enjoyed talking to him; he was articulate and had a fluid, improvisational kind of intelligence that excited me. Our kids were the same age, and he seemed to understand how having children “multiplies your capacity for suffering,” as the narrator of Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies puts it (103). Yet from the beginning, I felt tongue-tied in his presence, and though my ego disliked that, the parts of me that needed healing were thrilled. More than I wanted to talk to him, I wanted not to talk to him, and he rarely engaged me on the level of narrative. In fact, it wasn't until years into our work that he asked about my childhood. Instead, he invited me to connect with the present, which was, as he liked to say, the only place we get to be. Our bodies may be intricately booby-trapped by the past, but those traps can only be dismantled now.Sometimes I thought of T as my body's stenographer: He took simple, direct notes about what it was doing while I thought or spoke. He would observe shifts in my expression, the rhythm of my breath, even the dilation of my eyes. He seemed to notice everything; it would not have surprised me if he'd said, “Your liver just released eight grams of plasma—what's happening there?” Most of all, he highlighted the ways in which I tried not to take up space: avoiding eye contact, hunching my shoulders, going quiet. I hated that picture of myself because it reminded me of the cringing, speechless child who had been the target of my mother's cruelty.At first, T's attention to my body was destabilizing. By reflecting the shapes of my aliveness back to me, he touched a desire so painful I had buried it outside of awareness: my longing to be visible. When I was a child, my mother had touched me freely with affection and violence, but she never saw whom she hit or held. All these years later, being seen felt more intimate than being touched, sometimes unbearably so. It made me sense myself from the inside, and in those moments, the most honest answer I could have given to the proverbial how does that make you feel? was that I wanted to gnaw a bone or howl at the sun. I felt agonizingly sensitive, like a creature who has awoken into its first body. None of this made sense to me, so I did my best impression of a human being and reported on my progress, challenges, and symptoms. Just use your words, something desperate in me whispered. But I was caught in Zeno's paradox: The words I spoke carried me closer to meaning by dividing an unbridgeable distance in half, always leaving an equal part unexpressed. As the years passed, it dawned on me that perhaps I wasn't missing the right words at all; perhaps my speechlessness was not a problem to be solved.As an alternative to the view that healing is about verbalizing certain feelings or experiences, we might think of the transition from sound to speech (in childhood or in therapy) as a teleological process that obscures what Phillips calls our “passionate life without words” (Beast 42). For children, that life unfolds in a body that is literally speechless (infans) yet bursting with sound. At this stage, children are an almost parodic embodiment of eros, the life force that opens us to the world. They are loud and wet and grabby, candidly sexual from the start, and dynamic as weather. Before they can speak, they speak. We forget that speech is not simply an expansion or refinement of preverbal expression; it is a qualitative shift that diverts a great deal of vitality to the prefrontal cortex.Of course, this sublimation of infant libido is the price of entry to the world we have made. We cannot just gnaw each other's bones; we have to pay taxes and make art and wait. Yet so much depends on the process by which we reconcile our bodies (and our children's bodies) with speech. In the best case, we learn to use words in ways that touch and excite and heal. But in the worst case, the body may be so eclipsed by language that it must get very loud to be heard at all. This is one way of understanding the homeostatic dysregulation that occurs with panic disorder, for example. And for better or worse, the unspeaking part of us will always haunt the speaking part. This is why, for Phillips, “In a progressivist view of education we would say: the child must learn to speak, to communicate his need. In a nonprogressivist view we would have to add: the child (and the adult) must learn not to speak, must remember what that is like; must be shown how speaking comes out of the unspeaking part of ourselves” (Beast 44).T's somatic work with me embodied this nonprogressivist view of education in that it engaged the two “unspeaking” parts of myself: my body, and what I have come to call my soul. For me, the body and soul are the material and immaterial asymptotes of language, the ever-receding edges of what can be represented in words. They are repositories of wisdom from this and other lives, what Christopher Bollas calls “the unthought known.” T has observed that some of his clients arrive with “metal plates” above and below their heads, cut off from physicality at one end and spirituality at the other. We metal-plated people have taken shelter in language and ideas, and as hideouts go, one could do worse. But the body's chaos is an inexorable part of who we are. Bodies do not make sense; they are sense. And they are most eloquent at the inflection points of sense and nonsense, in the moments just before and beyond what we can formulate in words. This visceral eloquence terrifies us for good reason: Tuning into it means facing parts of ourselves that undermine the coherence of our life stories. What if I discover that I love my child more than life, yet dislike being her parent? Why do I grieve when my dreams come true? What if your transgression of the boundaries I cherish pleases me?As the animator Marcus Armitage says, “We are weirder than we are allowed to admit” (“What Is Literature For?”). Despite the ostensible clarity that comes from listening to your body, attending to somatic processes may radically disrupt your sense of self, not to mention any notion of development or progress. Our bodies like to spread rumors of the otherness in us, testifying to the ways in which we do not entirely coincide with ourselves. And, as Jonathan Lear writes, “the problem with narratives is that they . . . cover over the countless breaks in which life opens up or breaks apart—and they calm the analyst's anxiety about whether she is really accomplishing something” (125). T often seemed anxious about whether we were accomplishing something, so it is a mark of his courage that he rarely compensated with storytelling or analysis. Rather, by declining to collaborate with my articulacy he led me back to my body, whose language I had only heard as though it originated elsewhere, like distant thunder.Practically speaking, this sometimes meant providing a degree of resistance to my speech so that I could become less fluent but more expressive. This is where I felt T's divergence from traditional modalities most starkly; in psychoanalytic therapy, for instance, the goal is to illuminate the unconscious by saying whatever comes to mind without censorship. While few clinicians practice that way now, every therapy I'd tried to that point had been essentially logocentric. By contrast, if I told a story whose point eluded me or drew us into the past, T would typically respond with one of two unsettling questions: Is there more to say about this? Was there something you were hoping I could help you with?No doubt those questions were meant to help me be explicit about my goals and the types of collaboration I wanted, but they made me feel as though I had overshared in a checkout aisle. Perhaps they evinced a resistance in T to being depersonalized or paid to listen; he did not want to be the projection screen for my movies. The problem was, the wolf in me ate goals. And the human this wolf was becoming wanted to open and connect, but I did not know how to be quiet in the presence of that longing. Some part of me viewed my craving for connection as dangerous and disgusting, but I was unconscious of that until T's questions made me curious about the performative functions of my speech. Why was I compelled to heap so much “material” between us? What did I think would happen if I stopped talking? Like a child who plays at being lost in the woods, I was hunting for meaning when meaning was right before me, plain as a stone in sunlight: my hopelessness and grief. My desire to be held. There was so much of me in those feelings that the risk of sharing them even with myself felt unbearable. But I was clinging to old math; I needed to learn that the calculus of childhood, when I had preferred the certainty of separation to the risk of rejection, had outlived its usefulness. T's questions were painful because they challenged me to risk a more genuine connection with him, which meant waking me from a dream in which we were already connected.This awakening my with my daughter by me that our resistance to is a resistance to whatever we are to this can a into our those by In my we have a is so she must be M had been ruptures with me over so I listening more to her just as I had to my When she me I wondered: What is she to feel right In the of my that while a may simply me it may also the of my for you to come me what I in your is too much for me to There is end to the I want with and if you a with me, I will through I told her that I wanted to be her. In of the do not with that felt so I simply asked her to me over and I have myself to an But the open or T's resistance to my speech me to my body, his me there long to hear what my speechless parts were of us have felt when are at an with your Just as your body will sense whether you have a or I felt T's as an of a in that my body in What a difference it to feel to be us when we are in without the need to or this is how pain becomes a part of our experience than a force that us. learned this feeling with T, I wanted M to feel it just I wanted it for I and for the who my I wanted it for my who was by by and who made my mother on when she to and my resistance to my daughter's pain took but it our the time that M was with she a of that have come and gone and the on for of a developmental disorder, I was I could not help her as a for her body's I felt the of that in a of M me in the of the in a It she said, her her into me, I and What am I to do about to and us M with a as though I'd her. I in the feeling the of what I'd said and the as a child, I'd my mother and on the by her I would my and I love it was my mother's and I in a of my own and the of that I was to that I might have M's while she was in of having her and most of all, for her I too the feeling that body was out of an took years of therapy for me to do what I did which was to the and into my of will would the at only made it worse. could I her by her it wasn't needed to that her body would in its own way and time, and to feel my to be with her as she I know how to she said, and the words seemed to come from my own I invited my body to remember the I had felt in T's and that were to my soul. At I became aware of a of me. I myself the of this and spoke to M as bodies of speak to your There is for the sounds of your my human I told her there was need to that I would with her as long as she part of me with her for years that through the of until the for the time on our I her my heart. often I had the between her for the to This time, I did not I a story about the and felt the in her later, she was is an It our and even our as we the of in our We rarely the of for that of the of in these is a of healing For me, the of my body's the of my not long we her because she had how to do a “I know in my heart that it will never come she said with such that I had to a Her father was but and after a few that she only needed he asked her to calm and use her words. through she said, “I do a and I calm of me felt as my husband this was not a true and to it would the But the parts of me I'd to know in therapy at M's on having her experience and sharing it with us. was a to even when she was was I to what should to or how had lost her and though it she was I said, have to calm I my and like on she me and later, she was through the with her