Pexels—Image by Engin Akyurt
Hey everybody!
Last week I explained how treatments for mental health conditions rely on one of three particular definitions of the body that are circulating in the field right now. I noted that two definitions of these bodies, the “physiological body” and the “somatic body,” are “universal”: that is, physiology and soma are said to operate the same way, in all people. We rely on universality in medicine and mental health to help us identify illness or disorder, which is said to be an aberration from a universal norm.
I contrasted these two bodies with the “situated body”:
The situated body both registers our experiences and is shaped by the cultures in which it is situated. We come to know our bodies through the networks of structural violence and oppression that shape and impact them, and by the dominant culture’s representation of what a worthy or denigrated body is and looks like. We may also inhabit subcultures and families that resist these definitions, teaching us to experience our bodies as sources of resilience and wonder.
We come to recognize and name our bodies through language, which is an effect of culture. Our body, our flesh, our physiology and soma are made sense of through a language (or languages, if we speak more than one) that existed before us, and that we use to identify our being, our loves, our joy and despair.
Our body is also situated in terms of our relationship to power. It is represented in the dominant white culture as belonging to a phenotype that exists in a racialized schema, which influences how our body is received and made meaning of by ourselves and others. Our body is received by others as gendered, as raced, as classed, as signifying our ability, as aged, and the ways we are received may or may not match our internal sense of our own embodiment.
Today’s Action Snack asks you to see what happens to your thinking, your practice, or your understanding of yourself, if you put a mental health issue or diagnosis with which you are familiar within the context of the situated self.
You might be struggling with anxiety or depression in your own life. You might specialize in working with PTSD. You might see clients with narcissism, or agoraphobia, or postpartum depression.
The point of this exercise is to play—to ask questions, to become curious about your approaches to mental health, and to widen your field of awareness. The point is not to ask yourself to find the answer to every question that comes up.
(And if you want to see an example of this process, a few weeks ago I wrote about boundaries from within a wider frame than the more conventional understanding of what a boundary “is” and why we need them.)
Here are the directions:
Part I
First, choose a condition, diagnosis, or mental health problem as your point of focus.
Second, think about what you know about this issue. How did you learn about it? Do you have personal experience with this issue? What were you told was the cause or causes of this issue? What kinds of interventions or treatments were you told were most effective in addressing it? If you read any self-help books about this condition, what did the books counsel you to do?
Third, if you are a practitioner, write down some of the ways these approaches and treatments have helped your clients. What did you notice made the biggest difference and why? If you are someone who is struggling with this issue yourself, what have you found most useful?
Fourth, ask yourself where your clients are getting stuck. Ask yourself where you are stuck. What are you longing for? Do you believe this issue, or disorder, or condition, can be eliminated, or solved?
Ok! Now you have your map of you current thinking. If you are a visual person, you might want to mind map this stuff, or make a grid, or a table, to see what you’ve come up with in your analysis. You might want to go for a walk, and talk into your phone.
Part II
Now for the fun part!
I want you to invent a person. I want you to be as specific as possible about who this person is. Tell me where they grew up. Tell me who they hung out with when they were 17. Did they ever know their grandparents? What happened to them in early adulthood? What happened to their friends?
How much money did their family have? How much money do they have now? How do others perceive them and how do they feel about that? How did they fall in love? How do they respond to connection and intimacy? What did the dominant culture tell them about their body, their desires, their shape, their needs? Do they feel seen, or warped, or defiant, or triumphant, when they think through who they are, in relation to those messages?
Were they told to control others, in order to feel safe? Do they have an invisible or visible disability? Were they socialized to expect they would access status and power? How did they learn what success meant? What was the source of their deepest shame?
What lit them up, made them feel gifted, or like they had a secret power? Who had their back? What did “family” mean to them, and what does it mean now? Did they hang with a group of people who dissented from the dominant culture? Were they enveloped in violence, and do they expect it, as a matter of course, now? Did anyone ever protect them? Did they protect someone else, even if they weren’t protected? What makes them feel powerful?
How do the answers to these questions help you locate this person in relation to ideologies like white supremacy and patriarchy? How does their identity, their embodiment, their access to privilege, their experience of oppression, shape the answers to these questions?
Part III
Now, put it all together. How might the person you created interpret the treatment or intervention you wrote about in Part I? What are the ways the treatment meets that person, and what aspects of their being are left out?
If you were going to create an intervention just for that particular, situated body, what would you have to alter? Is there a way to maintain your current intervention and remain attuned to the situated body, and to power? What can you see, now, from playing in this way, that you hadn’t thought about before?
Remember, this is an exercise of play. I would be so pleased if you wrote about this exercise in the comments section—what it was like to do it, what questions showed up, what it has you wondering about, now.
Next week I am going to be traveling so I’m going to skip next week’s post. I’ll see you back here in two weeks!
Action Snack!: Use the “situated body” to ask questions about mental health