Texere-Diagnosis

Against healing as separation

(Image by Tomas Sanchez)

Inspired by paradigms of wholeness and purity, our conception of psychological healing often comes to us heavy with metaphors of cleanliness and subtraction. Remove the trauma. Make a boundary. Identify the inciting incident. Disentangle it from your other parts. Separate, analyze, quantify, medicate. A patient is a fiction created by a conceptual framework with its foundation in capitalism and colonialism. A patient is a single self that can untie itself from the world and then granulate into a distinct pointillism of traumatic events, parental missteps, and pathologies. Analysis and diagnosis themselves are terms that, when we break them down to their roots, –imply just that - “breaking down”. Analysis comes from “analyein” meaning to “unfasten” “unmoor a ship”. A patient is isolated, unmoored, in a fictional idea of selfhood that is hardly seaworthy. Diagnosis, similarly, comes from the Greek roots “dia” and “gignoskein” meaning to obtain knowledge by separating it off from the rest of the world. Knowledge through separation, through rupture, through atomization. There is no better diagnosis for our culture’s ecocidal madness than the root of the word diagnosis itself. How do we possibly think we can understand any thing, being, ecosystem, pathology, uprooted, unmoored from its web of relationality? How do we treat a psychological breakdown with another break down? We are atomized out of community, out of our distributed bodies and intelligences that might have an easier time holding grief and pain too big for single selves. If we are always playing mental forensics with ourselves, increasingly stuck in a solipsistic feedback loop of self investigation, we often loose touch with the real knowledge.

Here, five years out from recovering and beginning to treat my early childhood trauma, I can tell you that I am done with standard models of healing and trauma. I am in a process I am calling “texere-diagnosis”. Texere meaning, in Latin, to weave. Let me reweave the ship to its anchor, the body to its web of kin. Let me reweave the “knowledges”, the diagnoses, the treatments, that separated me off from the messy, culpable, moss-furred, soft-bodied world that wanted to hold me and teach me and dilute the highly concentrated pain I thought I was personally responsible for containing. I am no longer interested in locating the original sin, the inciting event, the garden Eden body before the trauma, the illness, the dysregulation. I am no longer interested in normative bodies and minds. Or singular bodies and minds for that matter.

This past month when I as visiting the ocean, my period arrived. I went down to the shore one morning and swam out into the salted mountains of water flesh. I let myself curve and arch and sway in the waves. I let my blood leave me, immediately invisible. Immediately edible and included in a body so expansive it could easily dilute a substance that when highly concentrated as a hemoglobin flume within my body has the power to keep or extinguish my life.

The ocean said, “Thank you for your blood. Now give me your pain. Your trembling. Your fear. Your trauma. Your grief. It will be one tiny drop in my cosmic liquidity. I will distribute it across a scintillating skin of salt. It will be nothing. It will hold none of its original sorrow or color or sting.”

Ah, yes. The thread of my blood weaving me back into a oceanic vasculature big enough to move these feelings. The ocean takes my blood and sorrow now but it also teaches me to be an ocean at other times.

Don’t separate your hurt. Don’t clean it up or try to locate and understand it. No. Get so soft and big around it that it can’t keep its shape and color.

Get bigger. Wider. Wilder. I no longer want to remove these pains and glitches. I want to turn into an ocean around them so that they have no choice but to dissolve, dilute, and join the liquid dancework of my leaky, loving, hardly legible self.

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My first novel The Madonna Secret arrive August 15th. You can read more about the book here and pre-order from any online bookseller. There will be an in person book event and party at 2 pm at Saint Gregory’s in Woodstock hosted by The Golden Notebook on August 13th. Please come and celebrate!

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