I Was in a Patriarchal Relationship with My Body (So No Wonder it Fucking Hates Me)
Part 2 of the Broken Body Series
NOTE: This is the second installment of the Broken Body Series. If you missed My Broken Body & How Western Medicine Failed Me Completely, you can check it out here. You might want to start there for context.
There’s no slap in the face quite like the realization that you have been abusing yourself in a shockingly similar way to how you have been treated.
This, unfortunately, was a realization I had to face at the end of March, when I realized that I have indeed been in a patriarchal relationship with my body, with me in the role of the patriarch.
Yup, I’m that guy.
…Fuck.
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My Mind Patriarch’s Unintentional Emergence
Imagine you’re a woman, married to a man for many long years. There’s something bothering you—something ultimately caused by a decision your husband made—but every time you bring it up, your husband ignores or dismisses you.
I think a few of you can relate, maybe?
So what happens when you have needs going unmet constantly? You might bail out, or you might… escalate.
I’m for sure the negligent husband in this situation.
It’s not really that complicated… pain is the body’s way of saying, “umm hey, something isn’t right here,” but because the doctors who checked me out after my whiplash didn’t do anything or give me literally any advice at all, I just assumed that there was nothing to be done about it. And thus, I ignored the permanent partner that is my body and left her with no way to get better.
Under my patriarchal rule, there would be no trying, no learning, and no healing. Only pain.
The Patriarch Finally Steps Up
I used to have a fitness buddy that I saw every now and then and I occasionally chatted with him about the fucked up state of my physical health.
At one convenient point in time, he mentioned that he had very recently started a CrossFit gym and I should try the on-ramp class. Getting in better shape surely wouldn’t hurt and I might be able to strengthen some of the muscles I had lost in the process. Maybe I could even get some neck stability back.
This is the situation where the patriarch (still me) steps up, not because he cares, but because he’s tired of hearing his wife complain.
“Fine, I’ll do something about it!” he shouts, still never having listened to her feelings on the problem.
This remains one of the best photos ever taken of me
CrossFit as Marriage Counseling
I really benefited from CrossFit for 2 years.
I learned a lot. I took the bracing sequence seriously and often applied yoga breathing to optimize my performance. I made sure to always try things I hated doing, to make sure I wasn’t staying too comfortable. I also respected my limits and was careful with my posture and spine.
I learned about core stability and regularly saw sports masseuses, who commented on my insane lacks and outrageous muscle jams. I did general fitness assessments with trainers-in-training, I took supplemental yoga classes, and I had brunch with my gym-mates whenever I came in on the weekend.
I did several months of nutrition coaching from one of the best programs around. I attended the community events and even drove up to Tampere for the local Winter War games with a gym crew.
Far enough in the future that it’s not relevant to this story anymore, I would even become a CF-L1 coach and open a gym with the aforementioned fitness guy.
I learned more about my body and what was wrong with it.
However, after about 2 years of this husband spending more time with his wife and hearing how she feels, he still wasn’t listening and continued to ignore her deep-seated issues.
Finally, she snapped on him again and said that she wasn’t hurting any less, it was just in different ways, and none of this was really helping. He was pushing her too hard to change and make it better, while not doing nearly enough work himself.
Yeah… turns out, if your bones are misaligned, high-impact weight training is just going to train your muscle memory into the wrong position, while adding extra blunt force trauma to boot.
So me and my body gave up CrossFit and went back to the rare hour of water jogging or doing a sun salutation… and not really talking to one another. It kind of felt like we tried and failed, so we gave up a bit.
Did Someone Say Escalate?!
To all of you oppressed wives and ex-wives and ex-girlfriends and… well, all of you out there, what’s the most fun revenge fantasy you’ve ever had?
We all know the real world isn’t quite dialed up to Desperate Housewives when it comes to revenge, but there’s always some fascination with literally beating some sense into people. Luckily for the world, women are less generally violent… [insert smug wink here]
When my first love became a totally different person and hurt me too much to handle, I still had his eBay and email passwords. I could have run amok in his life if I had felt like it.
I imagined doing it often.
But ultimately, I found the fantasy as satisfying as the reality, without any accompanying guilt. I’ve since lived my life this way, enjoying the revenge fantasy without actually executing it.
Most of us don’t indulge our vengeance fantasies. It’s one of our feminine superpowers, to hold extreme emotions with grace. However, even the strongest of women has her limits and cannot remain unseen forever.
Especially when she’s not even asking that much, in the end. She just wants to be heard and helped.
But he didn’t hear her or try to help, he dismissed her or ignored her, or pretended to hear and then didn’t really do anything…
So she drugged him, tied him up in the basement, and beat the shit out of him with a lead pipe…
And left the house.
Ever Had a Spinal Spasm?
Even if you have, I can’t imagine they’re always the same. As I explained in Broken Body I, they took place in a special spot that’s nearly dead center in my spine (I would genuinely guess between T6-7, give or take a vertebra) that decided to full-on revolt.
With every inhale, I would roll on a Russian roulette table on a scale from a 1/10 throb verses an 11/10 knee-buckling, scream-inducing agony.
There was a trick to it, unfortunately. I could breathe through them, but it meant swallowing the pain.
To manage this, I would have to find some way to brace myself for what I knew was coming, exhale deeply, and then inhale even deeper. The pulse would either stay centered in the middle of my spine, or—depending on the condition of the rest of my skeleton—it would explode throughout my body.
The worst episode brought me to my knees, brought me to tears, and made me outright scream.
This is why I use the metaphor of someone tying me up and beating the shit out of me in the basement. My body was full fed the fuck up with me and was ready to make its demands heard… or else.
Even When Taken Hostage, That Motherfucker Didn’t Listen
From here on out, every day, the wife grabs a D20 [yeah, I’m a TTRPG geek, what of it?] and rolls to see how many times she’s going to randomly stop by the house.
She rolls a D6 to find out how many time she’s going to bash him with the pipe.
And she rolls a D100 to decide how much force she’s going to use.
And he sat there and took it, and had the audacity to admit that he had earned it.
“Talk to me, please, I want to make it right,” he says.
But you’re at the point where you hate him so much that you have become willing to cause him—a person you once loved deeply—severe physical harm. You don’t give two shits about what this asshole has to say anymore because you wouldn’t trust him as far as you could throw him.
Neither did my body when I begged it to tell me what it needed. Every time I tried to listen to what it was feeling and go with my instincts on what I should be doing for myself, I swear it would throw out a joint or a muscle just to spite me.
The Silent Treatment
I have told my osteopath a few times that I feel like an abuser in a relationship and now the abused person won’t talk to me, no matter how much I want to genuinely apologize. This metaphor came to me long before I realized the depth of my patriarchal relationship with myself.
Most abusers don’t deserve forgiveness, even the ones whose abuse came in the form of negligence. However, my body does not have the ability to leave me, so I decided to just let it reap its vengeance. I almost gave up and told myself that this was just how my life had to be. That I’d be living in pain forever.
Yet, my osteopath never gave up. He assured me that we are “onions of trauma” and that every time we peel back a layer, it makes us cry.
The Breakthrough
Honestly, the breakthrough felt like it happened by accident more than design.
I really just wanted to run my symptoms through a program. I was curious, if I threw in enough of my weird problems, would it find any through-lines that the doctors or hippies had missed.
The program didn’t necessarily tell me anything I didn’t know, but what it did do was find those through-lines that tied the different symptoms together: why do I cough like a half-dead smoker with stage IV lung cancer? Why did my foot hurt so badly for no reason? Why do I never feel better no matter how much osteo I do?
And thus, we returned to breath.
The first thing we do when we’re born is take a breath. Breath can keep us warm in the freezing cold, can rid us of emphysema, can straighten a twisted spine, and can ease mental health disorders. Let me once again name-drop the book Breath by James Nestor. It’s truly a fascinating read.
Yet us Westerners know so little about our breath.
Healing from Trauma
A common issue I see with people who are healing, is that they get really gung-ho about it and forget to… you know… actually take the space to heal…
As I mentioned in part 1, Western medicine loves a fast fix. The proverbial Band-Aid on a broken bone. What it doesn’t allow for is the time and space to heal naturally.
Hell, even CrossFit tells you to only work out 3 days on, 1 day off. You need time to let change sink in and recover.
The day my body started talking to me again, it wasn’t asking for miracles.
It was asking me to listen.
It was asking me to believe.
It was asking me to try.
And it wasn’t asking me to do it all in one go.
I spent some 2-4 hours on that day of reckoning, examining my breath and some of the simplest yet most effective movements that I know (I’ll explain those in part 3!) to see how they were affected by my breath. Every time I noticed my breath shift back into my ribs, I returned it to the pit of my belly where it belongs.
In the span of those hours, my body went through it with me. It showed me, from the furthest toe to the most central vertebrae, exactly how unhappy it is and how badly it wanted me to listen and take care of it.
I cried.
I apologized.
I saw myself for the abuser that I am and I was appalled.
My Promise to Myself
As I said, my body wasn’t asking me for a miracle. It was just asking me to listen and put in an effort. Ultimately, that’s all I’m asking for from my partner as well, when we try to extract the patriarchy from our relationship.
It’s not always easy to listen when you’ve never been taught how.
It’s not always easy to change when you’re set in your ways.
It’s not always easy to notice things that both you and society have conditioned you to ignore.
But we can change when we want to.
Am I going back to the gym or the pool or stretching every day? Fuck no! That would be repeating the ineffective patriarchal method of trying to force healing.
Nah, literally the only thing I’m doing now is paying attention to my breath. I’ve already been keeping an eye on it for years, so truly, all I’m doing now is checking in with it as often as I can, and the more I do it, the easier it gets. It’s building a habit, like anything else.
I’m not setting goals. I don’t need to have my breathing innately corrected by X day, when I move onto the next step.
Let’s face reality: I’m also struggling with mental health and life stress. It would be ridiculous to try to bite off more than I have the spoons to swallow right now.
The promise I made to myself was to listen, learn, and breathe. We will graduate from this when we are ready and not a moment before. I am not pushing myself to even do one sun salutation a day.
It Always Comes Back to Communication
In the end, my body actually does tell me what it wants. Pains tell me something is wrong somewhere. I can’t usually find the source or do anything about it, but I can change my position to ease off the pain. It sounds obnoxiously simple, but it’s actually huge. Stop stressing the body into a position that it doesn’t belong in.
It also tells me when it wants me to do something, a lot of the time. It tells me if I need to stretch out, if I need my back cracked, or if I need to hang from a bar for a while to give my spine some length.
All I’m really doing at the moment is trying to listen to what it’s saying, to untrain myself from ignoring those signals.
Now, finally, I’m not trying to escape or hide from my body. I’m trying to embrace it for the integral part of me that it has always been.
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Note from the Author: If you enjoyed this article, perhaps you might enjoy reading life stories set in a fictional world where there is little to no patriarchy. If that sounds interesting, please check out my novella series, The Vitmar Chronicles… a slice-of-life coming-of-age sseries that follow two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs… without the patriarchal masculinity requirements.
Read the free sample here — Learn about the series here — Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Volume II is coming this summer!
