Listening to Our Pain
by Lory Widmer Hess
A review of the book Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano
Pain begs for a solution, but solutions are not always the answer. — Jen Soriano
336 pp., cloth, $29.99
August 2023
Amistad
ISBN: 9780063230132
Recently, I twisted my ankle slightly while out on a walk. It wasn’t a very serious injury, and I could hobble my way home, but I wasn’t able to rest it further; we were in the midst of moving and I had to clean out our former apartment. As I was finishing up that job, my ankle started to flame and throb. I got home as soon as I could, but the pain didn’t abate even when I elevated my foot. I could not find a comfortable position, and struggled to distract myself from the agonizing sensations.
Applying a sack of frozen blueberries brought surprisingly instant relief, dialing the pain down to almost nothing. I took a day off work to rest and apply ice at intervals, and was careful for a few days after that, but the amazing healing potential of my body seemed to have taken care of the problem, once I gave it a chance to do its job.
As I was sitting idle on the couch, I thought about what this small incident might teach me about pain, in both a physical and spiritual sense. Numbing can be an important part of physical healing; we dull down the pain that has signaled us that something is wrong, so that we can rest and allow healing forces to do their work. But what if I had numbed my pain so that I could override it — to keep cleaning my apartment, for example? What if I had ignored my injury, because some other goal seemed more important than healing? Then, obviously, I would have made the injury much worse, and healing would have taken much longer, or become impossible.
The way we respond to pain can have lasting impact beyond our immediate ability to comprehend it, as Jen Soriano relates in her new essay collection, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing. Her book embodies the testimony of an individual who has wrestled with overwhelming, un-ignorable pain, at first simply because she had to if she were to remain living in a body at all, but then in the growing understanding that this pain was not hers alone. Her family, her culture, and the whole body of our planet Earth was involved in her suffering. And as readers, we, too, become a part of it, and part of the quest for healing, as we read her words.
After a short introduction, the book begins with a prologue that encapsulates the whole journey: “A Brief History of Her Pain.” In this braided essay, one strand consists of third-person reports on “Jennifer S.” in the style of notes taken by doctors and therapists: “AD 1996. Jennifer S. Asian. Nineteen years of age. Clinic visit due to mysterious pain ‘like lead shooting through arms.’ Average build, height. Flat affect.”
A second strand selects key points in the history of notions about women’s health from 1900 BC to the present, especially the persistent diagnosis of hysteria, originally attributed to a wandering womb. And a third strand takes the form of first-person accounts of key points in Soriano’s biography. Encounters with health professionals who tell her things like “you somaticize too much.” Memories of a relationship in which the dopamine rush of sex helped to anaesthetize the pain. A disturbing dream from childhood, in which her grandfather and grandmother are running from a troop of soldiers.
Pain wants to tell us something we need to know, but find unbearable. How can we heed its message, without being broken by its power?
Woven together, these three strands form a powerful picture of bodily dysfunction as a sort of language struggling to break through the feeble capacities of our minds. Pain wants to tell us something we need to know, but find unbearable. How can we heed its message, without being broken by its power? This question accompanies the reader through the rest of the book, as it revisits the three elements — medical, historical, personal — in various iterations.
The opening essay shows Soriano’s father, a neurosurgeon, displaying his skills in the operating room, a scene of blue plastic razors, skulls marked with Sharpies, and bone chips sucked away with a tiny vacuum. His young daughter bites back her nervousness along with a sudden stab of pain in her stomach. “As my father exposes a brain and reveals his expertise on the nervous system, I am learning to conceal what is going on inside my body.”
Seeking approval for being strong and stoic has replaced the longing for love and affection in her fourteen-year-old mind; her Filipino immigrant parents are too “focused on work and each other” to connect with her. Even as her father performs a delicate operation on the brain of a stranger, he seems oblivious to how his own child’s brain and body are affected by such distancing. His control and skill, admirable in their way, have shut out a sphere of experience that includes his daughter’s pain.
It’s a striking image of how amazing and yet how limited our modern technical capacity is. Something is lost and obscured when we focus only on the body as mechanism, dismissing the soul’s protests as a mirage. We know how harmful the deferral of healing can be on a physical level, as with repeated sports injuries that wind up disabling an athlete, for example. And yet I think we are far from understanding the long-term effects of our numbing of soul and spiritual pain, numbing that may have started because it was necessary for survival, but that has persisted past its usefulness and caused further, exponentially greater harm.
Something is lost and obscured when we focus only on the body as mechanism, dismissing the soul’s protests as a mirage.
The startling truth now beginning to emerge is that the pain we deny in our souls can be expressed in our bodies, and even in the bodies of our descendants. If we have not created the conditions that permit healing to take place, the ignored injury does not go away, but merely morphs into new forms and is passed on to later generations. Awakening to this reality, and committing ourselves to the search for better solutions, beyond soul-numbing and inner fragmentation, is a spiritual demand of our time.
Soriano’s own journey in life became a quest to meet that demand, as she slowly replaced her forebears’ strategies of distancing and denial with embodied knowledge and presence. Through her journey as a patient, an artist, an activist, and a mother, she came to embrace not a mechanical model of body and mind, but rather a twisting, river-like network that flows between agitation and rest. In this system, nothing is excluded, and compassion can grow, even for the people who have hurt us most.
Most of the essays in Nervous are written in a fairly conventional first-person memoir style, but sometimes, as with her braided prologue, Soriano seems to be searching for elements of form to help contain a messy, inconclusive mass of material. “381 Years” presents an incantatory catalogue of the crimes of colonization in the Philippines, listed in relation to parts of the body, from crown to feet. The initially mystifying section headings of “War-Fire” — F3, F0, and so on — turn out to be keys to the generations whose trauma is being related, not in tidy chronological order but reflecting the confusing mixed-up, inter-layered way in which Soriano gradually discovered it.
The result is decidedly a collection of pieces, each with its own integrity and character, linked mainly by the overall theme of how the nervous system reacts and adapts in the face of trauma. (Adding another element of form, the book as a whole is organized in five sections named after aspects of neurological development, from “Neurogenesis” to “Neuroregulation.”) There are gaps that may leave readers with unanswered questions, along with a certain amount of overlap and repetition, but given the nature of the material, an orderly, filled-in narrative would not be appropriate. Rather, we are invited into a creative struggle that remains open-ended; Soriano’s pain has not been “solved,” but it has been more fully penetrated, lived through, warmed by loving awareness.
As well as undeniable tragedy, there is also tremendous joy to be found in the creative engagement with pain, the wresting of birth out of death.
As well as undeniable tragedy, there is also tremendous joy to be found in the creative engagement with pain, the wresting of birth out of death. Soriano shares her efforts to conceive, and her commitment to disrupting the cycle of transgenerational trauma by giving her child a different upbringing than she had. In her final essay, “Watershed,” she brings “Little T.” to the Philippines, thirty years after her own first journey to the home of her ancestors. She visits the rivers that she holds dear for their nervous-system-healing wisdom, some cleansed by community effort, some fouled by human greed and indifference. There is always reason to mourn, but there is always hope, and cause for gratitude.
Whether or not we have known the extreme agony that Jen Soriano has, we all need to be reminded that we are part of a global body which is calling us to wake up to the wisdom of her innate healing process, so long shut off and buried while we busied ourselves with other things. Nervous and other testimonies like it can be a catalytic force for change. They help us to better comprehend what our bodies have been trying to tell us for centuries: disconnection may be a temporary solution, but it is not the answer.
I thank all nervous people who sense the dangers of the world and still choose to love. I thank all children for giving us the chance to change. I thank water for showing us the way. — Jen Soriano
Lory Widmer Hess currently lives with her family in Switzerland, where she works with adults with developmental disabilities and is in training as a spiritual director. Her book When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey Through Healing Stories in the Bible will be published by Floris Books in 2024. Visit her website and blog at enterenchanted.com.
