For years I had CRPS in my feet and legs without knowing what it was. I wasn’t diagnosed until six years ago, but by 2016 it had become so severe that I cried when I walked. I also knew that if I stopped walking, my world would keep shrinking. So I walked every day.
At the time, I was renting a basement room from friends. Soon after I moved in, I realized the grocery store near their house was the same one where my father would shop. He had been a monster to me throughout my childhood and on into adulthood, and I realized there was a chance I might run into him there. Instead of avoiding that possibility, I made it my destination.
I decided I wanted to look him in the eye one last time as someone he could no longer hurt. I didn’t need an apology. I didn’t need him to admit anything. I wanted to know that I could sit across from him without my body organizing itself around him. I decided I would know I was ready when I could walk to his house and back.
Every day I walked until my body told me it was time to turn around, and then I turned around. The next day, I started again. Some days I went a little farther. Some days I didn’t. My body, not my determination, decided where the turnaround point would be.
Looking back, that may have been the most important part. I wasn’t fighting my body. I was learning to work with it. Every walk became another experience of listening instead of overriding, respecting instead of demanding. My world expanded because my body and I expanded it together. Eventually, one day, I reached my father’s house. I could have turned around, but instead, I circled it.
Years earlier, Deep/Process psychologist David Bederick said something that stayed with me: to stop being the hunted, I had to become the hunter. At the time I understood that intuitively. Circling my father’s house, I understood it in my body. I wasn’t there to threaten him or take revenge, but to change the relationship. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t orienting myself around his power over me. I was the one choosing where to go, how long to stay, and when to leave.
Interpersonal Neurobiology helps explain why such experiences are important. Our brains and bodies don’t change because we think different thoughts, but through repeated lived experiences. Day after day, my body experienced moving closer to the house of my abuser, and that I listened when it said, “That’s enough for today.” Day after day, it experienced that we could move toward something that had once represented terror without having to disappear in the process. Those repeated experiences gradually changed what my body expected. The destination was meaningful, but the relationship I was building with my own body mattered even more.
Some time later I sat across from my father while he was telling a family story. I looked him directly in the eye. I saw the briefest flicker of recognition in his eye, like a fleck of opal catching the light for an instant. He knew why I was there, and he knew that I knew what he had done to me in my infancy. That was my satisfaction.
Looking back now, I see that treating my CRPS and changing my relationship with my father were the same process. Those daily walks changed both. They changed my relationship with pain, with my body, with choice, and with the man who had once worked relentlessly to make my world as painful as he could. I wasn’t training myself to tolerate more pain, but giving my body repeated experiences of agency, choice, and trust. It seems to me that I was retraining those pathways every time I walked until my body said, “It’s time to turn around,” and I listened.
