My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Dispatches on Shame and Reclamation

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In narrative terms, one of the aspects of the book I found really interesting was the way you captured the stories of those you interviewed: you use free indirect style, rather than dialogue. How and why did you decide to write the book in this way? How did the book become “a non-fiction novel” in your own words? There is also a problem of focus. The book is weighted heavily towards the social and political drivers of trauma and inequality – and there’s no doubting Osborne-Crowley’s observations about the ways institutions have enabled the sexual grooming of children, or the structural gender inequality at the heart of the medical system. But in building evidence towards her presumed central thesis – that experiences of trauma have a physical, tangible impact on the bodies of survivors – she at times fails to show the whole story.

What I love about books like The Body Keeps the Score is that, if this had all been said to me in a conversation, my defences would have gone up. I would have said, “No, no, this doesn’t affect me, I can’t deal with this conversation.” But something different happens when you’re reading something, I think. This is why books are so powerful: you’re communing with an idea or a feeling in a way where you’re not expected to respond, and I think that’s why that book was so important to me – because I could just sit with it. There’s something so safe and calming about books; they’re always the thing for me that opens up new parts of the world. When I’m in my safe space I’m more open to new ideas that otherwise would scare me.This book is a burning manifesto for the revolutionary act of articulating shame and trauma. It is a testament to the feminist praxis of listening to each other’s stories in collective solidarity as a refusal of erasure and a way to claim presence and power in the world.’ Elaine Scarry wrote in her book The Body in Pain: ‘To be in pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.’

We now know about brain plasticity and we can completely rewire our brains and have a different relationship to pain and a different relationship to fear. We can calm down our nervous system in so many ways: yoga, EDMR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) and so many kinds of hands-on psychoanalytic therapy that deal directly with trauma. Your body can make a full recovery from this kind of thing. So as long as we recognise what the body has been through, we can completely transform it and use it as a vehicle towards freedom and healing. Once pain is chronic—and this is the part that doctors are only just beginning to understand—it is not a symptom. It is its own disease. The rigorously controlled use of subconscious memory. The very act of remembering. The attempt to reconcile not only with life, but one’s self. The complicated, exhausting discipline of internalized shame. The nearly unbearable burden of fearful abuse. The weight of forgiveness. All of this in Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s MY BODY KEEPS YOUR SECRETS. It is a profound, harrowing, enlightening book.’But the thing about living in a human body is that you cannot transcend it. It is with you everyday. You cannot leave it behind, and it cannot change what it has seen and experienced. You just have to find a way to live with it”. I feel like I’m phoning it in here but rather than waffle on when I really don’t know what to say, I’m going to share some of the quotes I highlighted. The characterisation of masculinity – as driven by the sexual desire to dominate – seems simplistic at times, and overlooks how male experiences of gender norms and trauma can be drivers of male perpetrated violence. In addition, her exploration of chronic illness frames auto-immune conditions as a physical manifestation of psychological trauma . She writes at length about her experience of endometriosis, and the way in which the condition is triggered by external trauma for some sufferers. She explores the conditions of Crohn’s disease and vaginismus through the same lens: as direct results of experiences of assault and trauma. My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Interview with Lucia Osborne-Crowley -- Freya Bennett * Ramona Magazine *