Women’s Health is Debased by the Biologically Inaccurate Dogma of Religion, Psychology, and Spiritual Woo
I dare the new federal regime to take away women’s reproductive freedoms. The backlash would be swift, fierce, and unstoppable because we women have raised our standards sky high when it comes to reproductive health and freedom.
If our daughters came home with handouts from Mr. Delisio’s public school health class listing cutesy euphemisms for the vagina and folksy advice for how to remain ‘pure and chaste,’ we would go ballistic. We want our daughter’s to learn the science of reproduction in public school, not Mr. Delisio’s religious and moral beliefs for how to be a good girl.
Why don’t we women display the same kind of fierceness about our neurological freedoms? When did we decide it was OK to accept sloppy, mythical, magical, unicorny euphemisms for our brain and the way it assimilates information in order to make predictive decisions?
We vehemently insist our daughters learn about reproduction with biologically accurate language. But we are fine when school counselors bring in the 548th version of emotional intelligence training, character building lesson plans, and ‘heart’ centered curriculums packed with new cutesy euphemistic, trendy, buzzwords. Why haven’t we demanded just straightforward science about the brain and nervous system?
Let’s analyze nervous system buzzwords. First off, the idea we need to ‘learn’ how to be emotionally intelligent is condescending, degrading, and scientifically invalid. Our emotions are customized for our personal nervous systems. My emotional cues assist me to assess information and make decisions based on how my brain is connected, what memories I have stored and can recall, what specific associations I have made, and how efficient my processing speed, visual tracking, auditory processing, depth perception, eye hand coordination, muscle tone, and I.Q. , etc. are. Nobody can tell me how to be emotionally intelligent because my emotional cues are completely unique to how my brain integrates with itself and with all my other organs.
Furthermore, my emotional cues are as private as my sexual cues, my hunger cues, and my pain cues. My brain is maniacally protective of all my biological cues as well as my perceptions, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and predictions. It is no wonder one in five of us suffer a mental illness each year when our highly personal and personalized biological cues as well as our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are constantly dissected and discussed in the court of public opinion. Making public what should be private and protected sets our nervous systems up for sky high anxiety. But we keep doing more of the same using outdated psychological concepts from the early to mid 1900’s. It is time to move on. We don’t need more talk of emotions from the latest psychological self help darling. We need biologically accurate information about how our emotions integrate with our brain instead of an incessant stream of unsubstantiated beliefs or dogma. If a psychological belief is not scientifically verified, and many are not, it is dogma, not science.
Now let’s analyze the notion of character. Nowhere in our nervous system, spinal column, or skull do our neurons coalesce into an apparatus called a character. Being taught we’ll have a poor moral character if ours isn’t built properly sets us up to strive to achieve an unattainable goal since no amount of striving will cause a character to land inside our chest cavity or skull. Striving to achieve unattainable goals is one anxiety ridden activity we can easily eliminate!
Likewise, being told we have to think with our hearts and get out of our heads is whimsically fun to say, but it is a biological distortion that has become almost abusive in its prevalence. If our daughters are not taught how their brain processes information but are instead taught to ‘open their hearts to find their soul,’ then we can kiss equality goodbye. Because our hearts don’t do our thinking. The heart is a muscle. It pumps blood. And the soul is a baby talk way to reference our nervous system. It is time to call a brain a brain and let go of the baby talk we have been using to reference how we process information and form conclusions. Striving to think with the heart is another unattainable goal we can eliminate to reduce anxiety.
It is time for us women to do for our brains what we have done for our vaginas. Let’s get seriously scientifically accurate about them. Let’s stop accepting any self helpy bandwagon that drives by filled with money grubbing gurus and authors who want to tell us exactly how to think, emote, and behave in order to be our ‘best,’ most ‘enlightened,’ most ‘heart opened,’ most ‘spiritually present,’ most ‘grateful,’ bestest versions of ourselves. Since when is our potential to become the person we want to become anyone’s business but our own? My vagina is my business. So is my brain.
When did we women say, “No means No; our bodies our under our jurisdiction and we decide who touches them and who doesn’t, but we have been convinced by every belief system we know that we are inadequate thinkers, emoters, and behavers, so please tell us what to do and how to do it for everything except reproduction. Oh, and please incessantly tell us to be grateful and live in the moment because we love to be condescended to like children.”
The troubling fact is, to sell us products and services and capture our subservient devotion, religious, psychological, and spiritual authorities must convince us we are inadequate as we are. They must drill into us things like, “Your nervous system sabotages you, works against you, makes you sin, makes you choose the wrong partner, and is in need of constant improvement.” These authorities teach us we basically exist in a state of perpetual childhood. They teach us we need to be taught how to be human, (by them), even though no other species of plant, insect, or animal needs to be taught how to be what it is.
Dogma pushers infantilize us by convincing us we need their constant intercession. From the moment we tantrum at age 2 and get whacked or time outed, we are taught our emotional cues and subsequent responses will result in punishment and shaming because our parents were taught by all belief systems to nip tantruming in the bud. By age 8 or so we have been thoroughly taught that teachers and parents get to decide when we are allowed or disallowed to be hungry, thirsty, tired, sad, happy, angry, empathetic, less intelligent than a certain percentage of our classmates or more intelligent than a certain percentage of our classmates. We are taught loud and clear we absolutely cannot trust our biological responses and we must rely upon the rules and schedules of authorities for when and how to have responses and how to interpret our responses.
By the teen years, our nervous system often stops connecting the dots between our biological cues and what those cues are telling us. When this happens, searching out gurus, therapists, and/or pastors to tell us how to think and respond makes logical sense. Cutting, numbing, and depression also start to make more logical sense than existing inside the discomfort of bodies with cues and responses we are forced to interpret according to the whims of authorities, pop psychology, and pop spirituality fads. My research and observations tell me many kinds of mental illnesses are biologically imperative adaptations and not illnesses at all.
Here’s an analogy. If you have horrible bowel pain as an infant, you try hard not to defecate. When the pain is so bad, the neurological cue responsible for cueing you when to defecate signals you to hold instead. Eventually the brain rewires itself and the neurological cue to defecate no longer transmits its information to your brain. You then must be put on a timed schedule. You must rely on external indicators to tell you what is going on in your bowels, often for the rest of your life.
If we don’t use our neurological cues as intended, they stop working as intended. Sometimes we can resurrect them, sometimes we cannot. Because we worked so hard to dissociate our neurological cues throughout childhood, our nervous systems often do more to confuse than inform us. As a result, many of us become riddled with unmanageable anxiety because we were taught to associate anxiety with shame. We have no idea we are supposed to be relying on our anxiety as important information with which to make important decisions throughout our days, just like animals do. Anxiety related illnesses have reached epidemic proportions for good reason.
Due to the application of repressive, biologically confounding, and mostly absurd religious, psychological, and spiritual theories, we girls and women eventually stop listening and trusting the customized cues of our own nervous systems. In this barren state we seek out the woo woo gurus to tell us how to get in touch with our ‘spirits.’ We eat up the scientifically inaccurate baby talk about being constantly grateful, soulful, heart-full, positive, and in the moment. Authenticity, a favorite word of ‘enlightened people,’ really means existing according to the specifications of someone more spiritually enlightened or psychologically knowledgeable than one’s own self.
In my opinion, it is time to ditch the schools of thought keeping us stuck in submissive obedience and it is time to protect the mental health of our developing children. It is time to strive to understand how our brain and body really integrate, not how spiritual seekers or psychologists have arbitrarily decided they would ideally like our brains and bodies to integrate.
We have made great strides in taking back ownership of our reproductive organs and rights. It is time to do the same for our brain and nervous system!
