“‘Oh, that, well, I’ll tell you what that is,’ my mother said with a knowing look on her face. I leaned forward in anticipation, anxious to hear her explanation for my horrible plight. ‘A crab bit you at the beach!’ she announced triumphantly.
“‘A crab? Bit me down there? But Mama, I didn’t feel anything.’
“‘Well, you were probably so busy playing or swimming, you didn’t notice, but that’s what it was … just a crab. Now you wait here, and I am going to get you a special bandage to put on, because you might bleed for a little while longer.’ And within a moment, my mother came back with a long, thick white bandage unlike anything I’d ever seen, and she showed me how to attach it to a special belt so it wouldn’t fall out of my underpants.”
By now I was laughing so hard listening to my Mom-Mom Lilly’s story that I could hardly breathe. “Did you really believe that it was a crab?” I asked her, giggling.
“What did I know about these things?” my grandmother answered. “No one talked about it back then, and certainly not my mother, God rest her soul. I just put on the ‘bandage’ and waited for the crab bite to heal. And five days later, to my surprise, it did. Of course, I stayed away from the beach for the next month, terrified that I’d get bitten again and that this time it would be worse, and the bleeding wouldn’t stop after five days.”
“How did you finally figure out that you’d gotten your period?” I inquired.
“Four weeks later, like clockwork, I started bleeding again, and since this time I knew it couldn’t be a crab, I confronted my mother, and she finally told me that I had become a woman and explained the whole thing. Oh, I was very angry with her, but to be honest, I was also quite relieved. I’d spent the whole month sure that I did indeed have an incurable disease, but that my mother didn’t have the heart to tell me. So to finally hear her give my ‘ailment’ a name, to know it was normal and discover that I wasn’t the only one going through it, lifted a huge cloud from my mind.”
I always loved my grandmother’s telling (and retelling!) of this story. However, as the years passed and I grew older, I realized that the tale, which amused me so much as a young girl, contains something more important than just humor and sweet, irreplaceable memories. It teaches a lesson about the power and importance of giving a name to our experiences.
Naming has several important values:
1. Naming allows us to step back from our experience, to begin to observe it more objectively.
By giving something a name, we create a sense of separation from ourselves and whatever it is we are experiencing. I am not going crazy because I am experiencing mood swings—my body is going through PMS. I am not a bad parent because my child is screaming and refusing to cooperate—he is going through the “terrible twos.” I do not have a bad attitude because I dread going into work each day—I am unhappy with the cutthroat atmosphere at my place of business, and need to make a change. Identifying the experience contains it. Knowing the name makes it somehow more manageable. We become more tolerant and less anxious because we know what it is we are dealing with.
Recently I was scheduled on a very early flight out of town and ordered a cab to pick me up at four-thirty the next morning to take me to the airport. When the driver, Henry, arrived, I thanked him for getting up before dawn so I could catch my plane. “Oh, I’m not starting my shift,” he explained. “This is the end of it. I like to work in the middle of the night.” I asked him why, and over the next twenty minutes, he told me the following:
In the late 1960s, Henry had spent two years in heavy combat on the front lines of the war in Vietnam. He had seen every kind of horror imaginable and lost many of his buddies. Finally he was sent home. “I was a mess,” he confessed. “My girlfriend had waited for me, but when we were reunited, I couldn’t feel any emotion. Everything made me jumpy, and the smallest noise, like someone scraping their chair across the floor when they got up or the clatter of dishes in the sink, threw me into horrible anxiety attacks. Worst of all, I couldn’t sleep—I would lie awake for hours at night, sweating and hyperventilating. I thought I had gone off the deep end.”
It took several years before Henry found some professional help and could give a name to his demon—post-traumatic stress disorder. “You can’t imagine what a relief it was to be able to call what I was going through ‘something,’” he told me. “It didn’t really take away my symptoms, but at least I knew what they were, and they didn’t freak me out so much. Anyway, that’s why I work nights—I still have trouble sleeping in the dark, so this job works out perfectly.”
I felt very emotional listening to Henry, proud of him for persevering in trying to make some sense of what had happened to him in Vietnam, but sad for so many other veterans who didn’t get the help they needed to name their inner monsters as the first step in taming them. One thing Henry said really stuck with me: “When I was in ’Nam, I thought I was going through the worst thing anyone could in life. But coming home was even harder. At least over there I knew who the enemy was. I knew what I was supposed to do. But to be back here and feel crazy and frightened and angry all the time, and not know why or what to do about it—that was like an enemy I couldn’t ever see or find, but one that never went away.” When the doctors helped Henry name his inner enemy, he could finally begin to find some peace.
2. Naming can calm our irrational fears and dispel the illusion that we are going through something unusual or uncharted.
If naming what we are going through is helpful and affirming in good times, then it is all the more crucial in challenging or confusing times. Imagine, for example, how terrified we would be if the phases in life were not named and explained to us. One day we would notice hair beginning to grow in strange places on our bodies, and we would think we were going through some bizarre transmutation instead of entering puberty. A woman would notice her belly growing bigger and bigger, and would be terrified that she was terminally ill rather than pregnant. My poor grandmother thought she was bleeding to death until her experience was given a name.
This is the second power that naming has—it identifies our experience as something people have gone through before us, and by doing so, it dispels our sense of isolation, connecting us, tangibly or intangibly, with others. “I am not the only one this has ever happened to,” we think with a sigh of relief. “I am not alone.” And somehow, in an undefined but unquestionable way, this makes whatever it is we are facing more bearable.
3. Naming allows us to arrive more fully in our reality.
Whether a reality is pleasant or unpleasant, exciting or frightening, once we name it, we claim it as ours. It is as if we are pointing our finger at a spot on a map and declaring, “I am ‘here.’” Even if “here” isn’t a place we want to be, even if we are unhappy to find ourselves at this particular “here,” still, we feel a comfort and security in giving it a name, rather than having no idea where we are. Naming it makes it more of a known quantity rather than an unknown, and therefore locates us in time and space. The anxiety of wondering where we are is replaced by a certainty that clears our minds and in some mysterious way calms our hearts.
I remember reading an interview with an American soldier who had been captured and held as a prisoner of war in the Middle East some years ago. When the reporter asked him about the conditions of his captivity, the soldier explained that the hardest part had not been being beaten or kept in a tiny cell with very little food and water, or even feeling afraid that he would never see his wife and children again. The most terrible moments, he confessed, were when he first woke up in a completely dark room and had no idea where he was, how he’d gotten there or what was going to happen to him. He’d been knocked unconscious during a skirmish with the enemy, who had then transported him to a prison while he was still unaware that he’d been captured. For what seemed like several days, they left him alone in the dark pit. Reality of any identifiable sort had vanished, and he felt as if