January 31, 2024

What Arguing About Captain America Taught Me About Psychotherapy

I had no way to know at the time that a mildly inebriated argument about Captain America’s sex life was going to spark a lifelong research interest that has fueled me as an author and made me a better therapist.

It all started 10 years ago at WisCon, a feminist scifi/fantast convention in Madison, Wisconsin. (Oh WisCon, I miss you). It was evening at the hotel bar, and I do not remember how exactly it started.

But somehow, I ended up in a friendly but raucous argument with a friend about Captain America’s sex life. At the time, I was deep in Marvel fandom, and Secondhand Origin Stories was barely a glimmer in my eye.

And I was adamant that, whatever the benefits Steve Rogers might have had from the super soldier serum, the process of growing most of a foot in the span of a few minutes, and the reversal of a number of sensory and medical disabilities was a form of trauma that would impair his relationship to his body.

I’ve hinted at my interest in the (much less dichotomous than it seems) mind/body connection before here and here.

But today, let me focus on the actual effects of a scrambled mind/body relationship.

When I was recovering from covid round 1, I had several months of raised blood pressure, brand new asthma and reduced lung capacity, and a digestive microbiome in total disarray. As it happened, this overlapped with a summer of wildfire smoke that exacerbated my breathing problems further.

That sounds miserable, sure, but additionally it caused my brain to interpret my body as being under constant attack. My bodies signals mimicked panic, and so I felt panicked, and so my brain found reasons to panic. This feeling wasn’t originating from deep in my psyche or from my life situation. It was biological.

Steve Rogers, per the screengrabs of his medical records that MCU fans have grabbed, would have experienced nearly the exact inverse of this.

Which would mean, we assume, that his emotions would have felt very blunted compared to what he was used to. If fear is supposed to make your lungs ache, then how will you recognize your feelings when that signal suddenly stops? What about anger, which is so physically similar?

If you don’t know how you feel, how do you know what to do? Do you just turn your values into rules and follow them? You could. That wouldn’t be the worst reaction you could have.

But it doesn’t leave you much chance to pursue pleasure, growth, or new intimacy. It doesn’t give you much of a chance to respond flexibly to new situations. You are stuck, living as a memory of yourself, instead of feeling your life as it is. You are a series of actions, devoid of experience.

As an author, I find that pretty thematically juicy. Which you’re going to keep seeing in my work.

I don’t remember what compelled me to originally take this stance and drunkenly defend it. It’s not like I’m trying to curtail anybody’s fanfic. Sometimes nerds just like to argue with other people who are having fun arguing, I guess.

But in defending my position, I started realizing that there were a ton of real world events that could scramble a person’s relationship to their body. It’s not just becoming a super soldier or cyborg or werewolf.

This was real.

I became obsessed. I was certain that my peers in the field would have lots to teach me on the subject, and dove in to journals and books.

And I was deeply, deeply disappointed.

There was so little to read, I tore through it all in just a few months. I could learn about how people process change (shoutout to Stages of Change Theory, once of the most useful frameworks I have ever found for understanding humans). I could see that illness was linked to emotion. I could find just a bit of research about how your digestive track seemed to play a bigger role than previously recognized in creating moods.

But nobody seemed to be able to tell me about the true nature of how the mind and body interact.

I didn’t realize then that my search and dissatisfaction were part of a burgeoning zeitgeist in the field of psychotherapy. Slowly but ceaselessly, the research is coming in. There is so much to learn, but there is a will to find it.

I’m still searching it out.

But this framework helped me understand, when I moved to working in addiction counseling, that many of my clients were not “resistant” to working on their emotions, as they’d often been framed before. They had numbed out their bodily signals with substances for so long that they became overwhelmed by this signal. It was as if some of them were being reintroduced to a language they hadn’t heard or spoken since they were kids, and struggled to understand.

I learned from the breakthrough book on this subject, The Body Keeps The Score, about how trauma can disrupt this connection, as the body stores signs of the trauma in ways both conscious and unconscious.

I learned that many folks with ADHD and, even more, Autism, often have a fundamentally different neurological hookup between their conscious mind at the bits of their brain that bring in the messages from the viscera.

I learned that illnesses, or even the treatment of illnesses, can so fundamentally change a person’s bodily signals can change their mood in ways they have rarely been warned or prepared for.

I started realizing that many of my clients who struggled with caring for chronic health conditions didn’t just have “impulse control problems” as I’d been told, but literately couldn’t understand their bodies information about when they need to rest, when they need to not put pressure on some part of themself, what they needed to eat or avoid.

I started to see the way trans folks around me struggled to connect with their bodies, lest they be exposed to signals that flood them with dysphoria.

As cybernetics expand, and medical rights are a battleground, and psychology keeps delving deeper, this is one of the most exciting fields going.

I’m far from done. As long as this research is coming out, I’ll be snapping it up. I’ll be continuing to explore this in my fiction, and using it to inform my care for myself and the people around me.

As always, please feel personally invited to share your thoughts and reactions with me.

Till next time,

Lee Brontide

Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop or wherever books are sold.