When the Pain Doesn’t Have a Purpose: Brené Brown & the Tyranny of Transformation
By Meghan R. Henning.
In her 2010 Ted talk, Brené Brown talked about how she returned to the church amidst a period of turmoil as an academic and how she found a progressive faith that was different from what she expected. A quote from that talk has resurfaced periodically in interviews, on her own Twitter account, and recently as a meme:
“I went back to church thinking that it would be like an epidural, like it would take the pain away… that church would make the pain go away. Faith and church was not an epidural for me at all; it was like a midwife who just stood next to me saying, ‘Push. It’s supposed to hurt a little bit.'” (Brené Brown)
On the surface, there is a lot to champion here. Brown wants us to see the church as a space for accompaniment, not as a panacea for suffering. As a feminist, a scholar of disability studies, and a Christian, I think it’s an important message: Christian language around suffering and pain has a complex history for women and other marginalized communities, and harm has been done to those who suffer because of facile assumptions about the church’s role amidst human suffering and pain (yes, Marx, we are looking at you). Insistence that individuals simply push past the pain can be oppressive and result in many bodyminds being excluded as “not faithful.” For those experiencing long term pain that comes from trauma, violence, or physical or mental disability, the persistent expectation of a transformation that doesn’t come can feel tyrannical, and can lead to feelings of unworthiness, self-doubt, and even self-harm. Too often, people are encouraged to read sick or disabled bodies as problems that need to be solved and faith as the one-size-fits-all solution.
Brown seems to want to resist a “fix-it” spirituality (a goal I share), but the metaphor of faith as a midwife plays right into ableist cultural norms in which psychological pain represents a bodymind that is “broken” and needs to be “fixed.” By comparing her psychological pain to labor and the church to a midwife, Brown (unwittingly?) assumes that pain follows predictable paths, that it is productive, and that it births new life. The goal, it seems, is to offer an inspirational vision of the church as a companionable professional on the gritty journey of suffering in which pain is productive and the sufferer will be restored to a pain-free normative body. But aligning faith with the culture of constant self-improvement and the tyranny of transformation comes at too steep a cost for women and the disabled, no matter how gritty or witty the path.
As so often happens when one participates in the tyranny of transformation, Brown uses the bodies of women and the disabled to make her point. Her binary vision of the church pits two embodied experiences against each other in a competition, subtly relying upon the ableist idea that there is only one *best* way to inhabit a body. Brown’s reframing of the church as midwife emerges as the better way, and props up well-worn social stigmas around women who deliver children with the aid of medication, as well as the broader social stigma around taking medication of any kind to deal with physical or emotional pain.
When I was pregnant with my first child I was stunned to learn how many people (many of them total strangers) had strong opinions about how I brought my son into the world. One gentleman, whom I saw regularly at the dog park, but only knew as “Doggo’s* Dad” congratulated me on my pregnancy and then immediately asked me “are you going to deliver it naturally or are you taking the drugs?” I refrained from asking him in return how he planned to cope with his next tooth extraction or colonoscopy.
But I learned quickly that Doggo’s Dad was not an outlier, and that there were many women who not only felt pressure to deliver their baby without any kind of internal pain management, but also felt tremendous guilt and shame if they tried to deliver without medication but needed the assistance of medication to deliver their child safely. Beyond the harm done by the social stigma, the binary choice that Doggo’s Dad offered me in casual conversation (to take the drugs or not) is also largely a myth. Women give birth in a variety of ways that involve a range of internal and external interventions, complicating the idea that there is a single “natural” choice. Is hypnosis a “natural” or unnatural intervention? What about that kidney shaped pillow propped at just the right angle to break someone’s water faster? The binary breaks down quickly in practice. And the idea that a midwife is there to “stand there with you in your pain” is only logical if you have never seen a midwife in action, and I do mean action. The binary that Brown and so many others have drawn upon is harmful to women precisely because it distorts reality, flattening a complicated, beautiful, and messy human experience.
This stigma exists around the laboring female body, because our society sees the pregnant and nursing female body as an aberration, a deviation from the norm. As in many times and places, to be a woman is to be disabled. (This is, incidentally, why most U.S. maternity leave policies require mothers to drain their disability benefits, a fact that should give us all pause.) A similar stigma exists for almost any disabled person who needs to take medication to mitigate some of the negative aspects of their condition. The false assumptions about prescription medication users range widely, categorizing them as weak, lazy, pathetic, or dishonest. To be sure, the opioid crisis is real and has contributed to this stigma, but at its core, that crisis is another instance of gaslighting and abuse of the disability community. Some Christians have exacerbated the stigma, characterizing those with mental disabilities of any kind as deluded or demonically possessed, casting their reliance on medication as a sinful substitute for prayer or self-discipline.
Perhaps the real problem is that human suffering and embodied spirituality are too complex for slick and sexy pull quotes. Maybe, we should do as Brown means and not as she does, and find better ways to accompany one another amidst diverse embodied experiences. Recently, a group of disabled Jews has done exactly that: coming together to articulate the needs of the disabled as synagogues are “returning to normal” and creating serious safety concerns for the immunocompromised who want to attend holiday services. Christians could learn from this Jewish example of what it looks like to embody “crip spirituality,” to truly accompany one another amidst difference without demanding a transformation that may never come. Our faith, our communities, and our very lives may depend on it.
*This is not Doggo’s real name.
Meghan R. Henning is an Associate Professor of Christian Origins at the University of Dayton. She specializes in New Testament and Early Christianity, and holds an undergraduate degree in Religion and Economics from Denison University, a Masters degree in Biblical Studies from Yale Divinity School, and a doctorate in New Testament from Emory University.
Meghan’s first book (Mohr Siebeck) on the pedagogical function of Hell in antiquity is entitled Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell. She has written a number of articles, essays, and invited papers on Hell, the New Testament, apocalyptic literature, apocryphal literature, ancient rhetoric, disability studies, and pedagogy. In addition to the New Testament she is interested in the theme of suffering in antiquity, women in early Christianity, Petrine literature, historiography, contemporary philosophy, the work of Michel Foucault, disability studies, feminist hermeneutics, and post-colonial theory. Meghan’s second book is about the conceptualization of gender, disability and the body in the early Christian apocalypses (Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Hell, Yale University Press, 2021).
She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Jacob K. Javits foundation, the Society of Biblical Literature, Yale Divinity School, and Emory University. Dr. Henning has been interviewed by the Daily Beast, has written for Christian Century, and has appeared in a documentary for the National Geographic Channel, and on CNN.