Discharging on Contagion and Health
The following are thoughts from my work with bodies, disability, and health. I’m taking advantage of the COVID-19 situation to encourage us all to discharge more about our health. Let this global pandemic be our wake-up call!
Discharge and re-evaluation help us act rationally and effectively. It is important to keep thinking rigorously. Even typically trusted information sources put out “facts” that end up being refuted, as we saw with AIDS/HIV and many other diseases. There is still so much we don’t know about COVID-19.
CONTAGION
In my generation, polio spread around the United States and world. It was greatly reduced with the vaccine, but it still exists in many places. I remember as a child waiting in a huge line at a shopping mall for the vaccine, delivered with a sugar cube. Friends of mine who had polio in the 1940s and ’50s told of children running away from them in the streets, long after they’d fully recovered from the virus. My uncle was one of two children in his family to survive the “Spanish Flu” epidemic of 1918. My mother told me about “Typhoid Mary,” a carrier of that dreaded disease, who lived for twenty-six years in isolation until she died—an early example of “social distancing.” Further back, we had plagues.
We all have contagion in our histories, whether or not we can remember it, and we likely have related fears and grief that we may not be aware of. This makes it harder for us to think flexibly, accurately, and lovingly about handling contagion. Meanwhile, we are now living with COVID-19, as well as SARS, Ebola, Zika, AIDS/HIV, hepatitis, and many other epidemic diseases. We face a real crisis of contagion.
Each of us has gotten sick from contagious diseases—chicken pox, measles, colds, flu, skin rashes, and so forth. We felt miserable and scared, and the memories are lurking inside, waiting to be restimulated. Genetic diseases can restimulate distress about the “contagion” that happens by means of procreation. We need to recognize how deeply hurt we are in the area of illness. We cannot assume that our attitudes toward it are rational and based in present time.
DISABILITY OPRESSION
Fear of (the assumption of) contagion is a central factor in disability discrimination, causing people to stay away from a disabled person. People are also afraid to ask questions of and connect with disabled people. (Note: Questions can be intrusive if asked thoughtlessly, but many people with disabilities are willing to share a bit about disability. Just don’t start a conversation with some version of “What’s wrong with you?” or other comments that prioritize your curiosity over friendly human connection. Also, don’t expect a disabled person to be your educator about disability. It is your job to learn about it—from sources that don’t objectify or exploit disabled individuals.)
We have inherited ancient superstitions about disability—for example, that a condition is caused by “the fates,” or is punishment from the gods, or is due to unseen forces. Parents shush young ones’ legitimate questions with “Don’t ask, don’t stare.” We tend to deny that disability could happen to us or to our family.
Disabled elders, particularly those in nursing homes or congregate housing, along with incarcerated people, are among those with the highest death rates from COVID-19. Disabled people who live independently with home-care assistance are also caught in a bind—there is not enough personal protection equipment for themselves or their home-care workers. The result is unmet needs and neglect.
DIFFERENT IMPACTS
As with disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and so on, the people hardest hit by contagion, including now with COVID-19, are those already marginalized by racism, disability oppression, and other oppressions. In the disaster field, these constituencies are called “vulnerable,” which of course is no coincidence. Our oppressive societies privilege the few with wealth and resource and devalue targeted groups. The standard equation is that privilege equals a higher likelihood of survival.
“Remote” employment is now possible for some, but people working in service, production, and other “essential” jobs cannot work remotely. Parents, frontline workers, low-income people, people of color, and others who must keep working to survive have been hit the hardest by contagion and quarantine. In addition, some ethnicities are said to be the source of an illness and are targeted for that reason.
Contagious illness hits people in different communities and constituencies differently. Social rules and cultural values about bodies can make thinking and communicating about illness and contagion seem rude or taboo. Ostracizing or quarantining people who are sick can restimulate distress recordings of rejection, abandonment, blame, and fear. Dying alone in a hospital can be terrifying and hard to fathom.
Internalized oppression from our class backgrounds, and cultural influences, can confuse us. We are advised to stay “at least two meters from others.” Being separate physically is perhaps more familiar to those of us with “middle-class isolation patterns,” but we need connection—to discharge, to be able to think together, to generate solutions. Many of us raised in Western cultures were born in hospitals and placed in isolettes away from our mothers. Then we went on through childhood lacking the connection we longed for. We must keep finding ways to connect.
THE NEED TO DISCHARGE
Personal, local, and world economies have been hit hard worldwide by COVID-19. The threats of lost income, illness, and death are a difficult combination— even when they are abstract and not immediate. They can bring up insecurity experienced during birth and infancy, feelings from experiences of abandonment, and memories of later struggles that restimulate the earliest hurts.
We need the facts in order to find solutions and good practices—for example, regarding masks, handwashing, distancing, and so on. At the same time, we need to discharge our earliest confusions so that our actions are rational.
FEAR AND TERROR
Our societies manipulate fear; and fear itself is contagious. The media are a culprit. The news scares us. We need to discharge the fear. Can you bring your favorite news source to a session? What do you notice in yourself as you watch, listen, or read? Does it help you be informed—or feel more scared, shut down, or panicked?
Movies are another case in point [example]. Are you scared by horror movies? Disaster movies? Do you like them? Hollywood sells us fear as entertainment. Scary movies restimulate our early fears. Their plots and special effects resemble themes from our early struggles and lure us into hoping we can discharge on those struggles. The huge monsters (in other words, grown-ups)! The horrible violence (early abuse)! Creepy ghosts and goblins (our fears of death)! Aliens landing and taking over (the unknown)! People left behind, abandoned, to fend for themselves! The scary stories that most appeal to us are generally a clue to our chronic undischarged fear.
Some movies terrify us by presenting invisible forces. Contagion, too, is unseen and can restimulate how our loved ones’ distresses were generally unseen but could leap out at unexpected moments, shocking and terrifying our young selves. We also have memories of “catching” an illness from close loved ones.
SESSIONS ON OUR BODIES AND HEALTH
A few years ago, Tim Jackins wrote an article about men’s health. I was impressed with his what-seemed-to-be-joking phrase, “Discharge or die!” I’m usually “nicer” than that when I admonish people to “bring your bodies to session,” but we do need to be bolder and perhaps remind people of the consequences of not discharging on their health.
My impression is that too few RCers are having sessions on their bodies and health. Some of us are. But many are not. We forget to include our bodies’ struggles in our broader sense of ourselves. We may think that we just have “health problems to take to the doctor.”
I think we need to include our bodies in everything about us! We can aim to revere and honor our bodies and discharge about them. We need to bring our health challenges—getting good nutrition, exercise, rest, and sleep, and fighting addictions—to the light of discharge. Discharge itself is a health-promoting physical activity. I’m hoping it enhances our immune function—our best friend in fighting viruses. In addition, our personal survival and well-being make it possible for us to enjoy our lives. They also support our work. They are a huge resource and should be our highest priority!
People often ask me, “How do I counsel on X condition?” I reply, “Have you read the RC journal Well-Being and our other publications about health? They are full of wonderful examples of how to discharge on X condition. Have you brought your health concerns to your sessions?” The most common answer is no. Also, many of our RC Community members are activist minded, which is good, but it sometimes means they make their individual well-being a lower priority. Discharge and re-evaluation are our first line of defense. They should be a priority. They allow us to think creatively about solutions.
MAKING THE MOST OF OUR SESSIONS
We need to have big, heavy sessions on our early experiences and the resulting fears. We need to scan our early memories of “contagion” of all kinds. We also need to have lighter sessions, with laughter, which for many of us is the best way to discharge fear. Thankfully, laughter is also contagious. (Whew! A good contagion!) And we need sessions in which we appreciate the goodness of our families and cultures—of humans reaching for humanness.
We can try having a session in which our counselor puts on a scary “virus face” and chases us down (virtually), or the virus spiders come up through the pipes or through the windows, or the virus aliens land on our street. We can alternate these with early memories of discouragement and defeats. We can also bring “conspiracy theories” to sessions, while being thoughtful whom we choose as our counselor (probably not our neighbor or coworker who doesn’t have a way to systematically discharge).
We can ask ourselves how we are spending our sessions. Are we using this valuable time to reach for our highest standard of clienting? I and some of my Co-Counselors spend precious minutes just repeating the confusing and conflicting “facts” we’ve heard from the media. I’m trying to stop myself from talking about scary news, and rehearsing the voices of fear in my head, and instead spend the most time on early discouragement, terror, sadness, and rage. I tell myself that I must discharge heavily. This takes some discipline. Our counselors can help, of course, and we can remind them to be rigorous when they are the client.
PERSPECTIVE
Perspective can help us contradict panic about disease and contagion. One of my counselors made a good point: some societal conditions cause as much or more death and destruction as COVID-19, but addressing them is not a high priority for our societies. For example, road traffic accidents cause 1.35 million deaths a year worldwide [World Health Organization, <https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries>]. While this is not a happy fact, it helps me put our virus crisis in perspective and see that it’s likely distorted by the particular early distress being restimulated. The climate crisis is another example of something not to panic about but to decisively and quickly address.
This moment in history seems extra hard. We are experiencing increasingly polarized politics, ongoing wars, persistent and worsening oppression, and a climate crisis that threatens all of our existence. (I long to get my attention out!) My late brother was a history buff [someone whose hobby was history]. I sometimes tried to convince him that the world was becoming more humane—with more human rights, increased awareness across differences, interconnection offered by global media, and better policies and services to address needs and counteract mistreatment from oppression and scarcity. His perspective was that survival on planet earth has always been very challenging for the majority of humans. Certain time periods have likely been “better” overall, while others have been more fraught with difficulty (for example, the Ice Ages, when most of the human population perished).
Perhaps we are living in one of the worst times—but I doubt it. This also happens to be our moment. I’ve come to find my brother’s view useful. I like to remember that the earliest homo sapiens from two hundred thousand years ago and our other early ancestors, such as the Neanderthals, had brains similar to ours and used their intelligence, creativity, and resilience to face huge challenges. This helps me feel more deeply connected to beings throughout our long history.
GETTING MY ATTENTION OUT
I recently found and framed a photo of a female gorilla in Kenya. She was photographed engaging with a fluttering mass of butterflies. The photographer wrote that the other gorillas had ignored or waved away the butterflies. But this lovely gorilla appears to be smiling and enjoying a moment of connection and fascination with this other species. Perhaps she is reaching forward in evolution toward us with connection, joy, and appreciation of other beings. Perhaps she is a good role model for us humans.
El Cerrito, California, USA
(Present Time 201, October 2020)