Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

Remember the Presidential Fitness tests in school? Push ups, sit ups, some running, dangling from a bar, etc. It sucked

That’s how I learned I couldn’t do a sit up. Not in second grade, not in sixth grade, never really. From age five onward, I felt like a sit up failure. Even when my classmates would ‘help’ me try to do just one, it didn’t happen. Weird, right?

My gym teacher, Mr. Kenzel (sp?) was genuinely baffled. He knew I wasn’t faking, but he didn’t consider that beyond being “weird” – it might require a referral to my pediatrician? I just grew up thinking I had this thing about sit ups.That it was because I was fat or weird or lazy.

Much later in life, I connected the dots between this memory and another experience. I dissociate from my abdomen and have most of my life. From below my breast bone to above my pelvic bone, I rarely have any feeling. We now call this our core abdominal muscles. You’ve probably heard of the plank. I can’t do any version of a plank.

Clearly, this is connected to the sexual abuse and violence of my childhood. What else could it be? You might expect this would be more focused on my pelvis and genitalia. It isn’t. I don’t know why. Trauma is unique. We sometimes toss terms like SA (sexual abuse) around without considering that our bodies don’t necessarily respond the same way.

 The childhood sexual abuse has not only broken a trust barrier, but it also changed the way their brains perceived themselves. Instead of understanding themselves as a complete person, they dissociated their mind and body. Their mind became theirs, while their body belonged to the perpetrator(s).

I was groomed and abused by a family predator (my grandmonster) for most of my childhood. I was put in his clutches in my infancy. It is a monstrous story so the fallout is naturally ugly and malformed. Like I imagined my abdominal muscles to look.

When my neighbor was attacked by dogs and I struggled to reach her, I decided it was time to do something. I needed to heal this broken part of me. Yoga and other bodywork did not feel safe to me. I had a referral to PT for back pain so I grew curious about the possibility of abdominal PT. There muscles at play. So why not? A PT setting felt safe because it was a known quantity.

That’s how I learned about Pelvic Floor Therapy. It is a terrible name. But I did a lot of research and reflection.

What is the pelvic floor?

What do I hope to get out of this? Improved overall posture and core stability, alleviate chronic pelvic pain and associated lower back pain. Can you tell I cut and pasted that from this website?

After a thorough intake, we moved to a physical assessment. I would not agree to a pelvic exam and that was okay. She started by simply determining if my abdominal and pelvic muscles knew their jobs. It was very non-invasive and gentle. She would put one hand on my hip, the other on my lower back or abdomen and instruct me to follow certain instructions.

At the end of the first session, she gave me exercises. Her focus was going to be reconnecting my mind with my body.

It isn’t necessarily pretty. After the first session, I had a trauma reaction. But I had anticipated it and had planned ahead.

After three sessions, I felt the slightest twinge when I was doing a rep. It was a little butterfly sensation. It was beautiful.

This is not about abdominal definition or planks. It is slightly irritating that people make that same joke, but I chalk it up to discomfort with the SA context. That happens a lot.

Being me, I enthuse quite a bit about new treatments for old concerns. I have friends with all sorts of ailments we tend to attribute to being aging women – menopause, arthritis, leaky bladders, etc. We accept these things as part of being a woman. Just like we accepted the bull we were fed about menstruation when we were young. It probably explains why it took me so long to even learn about it. We still barely talk about these things. We just suffer. We deserve better, but that only starts when we start talking even amongst ourselves.

I wonder if anything would have been different if my elementary school gym teacher had notified someone about this issue. Would anyone have pursued the matter? After all, my abdominal muscles were not broken or deformed then or now. Was pediatric care in the late 70s prepared to help or heal me? Probably not.

But maybe if someone had asked the questions, I would have known. Maybe I would have connected the dots sooner.

Dissociation has protected me for over 50 years. I am grateful that my body developed a tool to keep me safe when all of the adults around me did not.

Now it’s time for new tools to manage old trauma.

While I have no plans for a sit-up trial run soon, I probably will continue to pester all my 50something friends to consider pelvic floor therapy.

Somebody has to say things out loud.

Post-script: that damn Presidential Test was horrible, but so was gym class. We were forced to square dance in seventh grade – ugh. We crowded into a subterranean room to learn aerobic routines that we had to perform to pass. Dodgeball, double uge.

Things changed for me when I joined the track team. No sit ups, but I was generally stronger. I flew through all of the tests – I ran the entire mile at a sprint pace. I scored high and my curl up fakery didn’t matter. I’m pretty sure I was using my back muscles. But I passed the damn test in my junior and senior years.

It didn’t address the core problem (see what I did there?), but it gave me confidence.

Allegheny Health Network offers Pelvic Floor Therapy at many PT locations. The worst that happens is you schedule an intake, get an assessment, and decide it is not for you.