By Micia de Wet
As a white South African woman who’s now in a long-distance relationship with migraines, I’ve got a particular perspective on pain management and medical specialists. As a researcher, somatically-inclined performer, and advocate for bigger pictures, I also have particular views on what many would consider to be alternative healing practices.
Inherently, I believe that many states of dis-ease are symptoms of people’s ‘bigger pictures’. My embodied somatic knowing tells me that a body cannot be treated as a machine whose hardware is malfunctioning. There are feelings and environments that shape a body. From another perspective, I can appreciate that for better or worse, most Western healthcare systems are designed to treat physiological bodies. Hospitals reboot organs and limbs. In my experience, most doctors, when treating pain and ailments, are interested in just enough of your bigger picture to know that whatever they prescribe for you will be able to be administered. And often, if you look healthy enough from the outside, probing questions and curiosities about your lifestyle can be almost entirely avoided.
Speed dating specialists
I was a teenager when my headaches were accurately diagnosed as migraines. It took a while to discover because my attacks were not accompanied by the traditional visual markers, which according to everyone around me who knew better, was the tell-tale sign of the beast. I thought the diagnosis would bring relief. Instead, I was angry. It enraged me that someone who was not in my body could officiate my pain. This was also not a vindication. At the very least, I wanted a cure. I wanted to know why these attacks happened, so that I could do whatever needed to be done to stop them. Then there were more delicate damages to mend, such as the distrust I felt of my own sense of being in my body, which had been aggravated by other people’s reluctance to believe and accept my narrative of pain and discomfort.
In the first ten years of my process, I went through medical specialists like speed dating. Eager to begin with the least invasive routes accessible to me, I lasted six months on a homeopathic treatment. I was told upfront it needed time to work. The problem came with the urgency of the pain. It was paralysing. Since I was no closer to answering the why and in no less discomfort, I moved on. I then worked my way through ENTs, GPs, and neurology departments, giving each new specialist’s approach a chance. This lasted several years.
Sometimes the pills or injections or dissolving strips would work. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Different specialists championed different chemicals and were always confident as to why so-and-so’s prescription failed. They were always somehow less confident or interested in telling me why I would get migraines to begin with. Sometimes my financial resources would dictate which of these medicines I had access to. Other times I had to barter with time. I find it ironic that the thing that’s supposed to help you is the thing you can’t let help you. If you need to attend your life, you can’t afford to be drugged up. But the veil of pain that’s separating you from the world means you’re not attending to it in anyway. Then there’s the Russian roulette you play with your medicine, waiting for the hit or miss as you digest it.
When I would tell specialists their prescription didn’t work, I was viewed as a liar and hysterical woman. One referred me to a psychologist. Once I was told that there are easier ways to get people’s attention. The last straw was when I was prescribed a diet. In another six-month trial, my already healthy eating pattern was radically altered. Then, after spending one morning with my face in a toilet bowl, I gave up. It was clearly not a paw-paw that was operating the sledgehammer in my skull.
Knowing your triggers
At the age of 25, I found what was at the time, a radically alternative somatic approach. To the conservative South African city I grew up in, BodyTalk therapy was no different to crystal-ball gazing and tarot reading. All my previous somatic experiences of physical healing required some sort of movement. For this therapy, I was told I would lie still, and then someone was going to put their hands on me and facilitate a healing process. No medicine, no scans, no movement. It felt like that email we’ve all had before, telling you you’ve won the lottery, even though you didn’t buy a ticket.
I went to my first session expecting burning sage. I was disappointed. The room was benign. My practitioner was a direct, kind, and practical woman. A bed, just like the one you find in your GP’s office, stood before me. She put two fingers on my wrist and would wriggle them every so often, telling me things about myself. Some statements were about my physical health, many were about my emotions, and some were about greater ideologies. A very long story short: after 15 years of searching, I found my first answer in her consultation room that day. I am pleased and proud to say that after knowing what triggers my migraines, I have had a radically different life to the one I would have had, had I continued down the more familiar path of healthcare. A part of this process was for me to do. But a big part of the healing was in her expert hands. Quite literally. This made this therapy unique to other many other alternative practices, which ask you to sleep well, practice mindfulness, be more joyful, and get some exercise, which then is meant to cure you.
For many critics, approaches such as BodyTalk walk a tightrope between self-awareness and self-blame.[1] I was fortunate enough to have a practitioner who helped me navigate these waters safely, away from the rapids of radically misguided accountability. However, I can appreciate that not everyone has had my experience. To balance the scales though, I need only briefly mention trained doctors and surgeons who have misdiagnosed people, made fatal mistakes in practice, and have lacked both compassion and humanity. To be totally fair, I’ve seen medical websites and hospital information pages telling people to up their water intake and do some light stretching to combat migraines.
I write about being in a relationship with my pain deliberately. Although I was working with a proactive healer, I still had to face the fact that I had triggers that I had the power to attend to. Like many pains, my migraines are my stop sign. As someone who doesn’t often physically feel the emotions, fatigue, or recognise the early signs of hormonal shifts that would tell me to slow down, my body found another way of telling me. So now I make an effort to dialogue with my triggers. A more trying aspect of this relationship is mindfully attending to my life, which is its own mountain entirely.
Being an advocate
I also own the contradiction of inherently operating in a somatic way, whilst accepting that I am living in a world that has socio-political ideological effects. As a woman receiving a medical consultation, I am well aware that the way I am treated, spoken to, perceived, and examined is tainted by gender and sex politics. I often forget that my being is tied to hormonal symphonies that are influenced by biological sex. More importantly, I shouldn’t be treated or afforded knowledge and agency over my health any differently because of my sex and gender. Looking back, I am confident that these politics played a pivotal role in the treatment I received over the years. Had anyone known better, or bothered to ask a wider set of questions, they might have realised that I needed an endocrinologist years before a holistic healer had to ask me why I’d never seen one. And more frightening still, I wonder why no one on my exhaustive list had used their knowledge to tell me of such a specialist’s existence.
For my process, I have worked with BodyTalk therapy in tandem with conventional medicine when and where necessary. This has given me a unique perspective on what healing can mean. However, regardless of my preferences, I will never believe that healing is a one size fits all approach, nor is being in the world in our bodies. I know people who have taken sage over radiation for cancer. I also know people who will happily trust a prescribed tablet for psychosomatic conditions. I suppose if my experience can provide any insight, I’d like it to be that you are the best advocate of your own well-being, although this can be an exhausting endeavour. It means advocating for yourself time and time again. It means believing in your experiences with unwavering faith. It requires patience, kindness, and sometimes, an interest and understanding in your bigger picture.
[1] See this article.
Biography
Micia de Wet is a PhD candidate at C-DaRE, Coventry University. She is researching somatic practices, intuition and actor training.
