Lena Dunham has outlined how a male healer once told her that her feminist work was causing her “feminine organs” to “eat themselves”.
In February 2018, Dunham revealed she underwent a hysterectomy in order to alleviate the pain caused by her endometriosis.
However, prior to the procedure, the Girls creator visited several spiritual healers in order to try to understand what was happening to her body.
On Thursday, Dunham appeared on activist Scarlett Curtis’ podcast Feminists Don’t Wear Pink, where she spoke about an unorthodox interaction she had with one particular healer.
“I was seeing all these healers, and somebody said to me – obviously it was a guy – ‘Because of your work, and you put complicated messages about women into the world and your feminine organs are eating themselves, you’re attacking yourself’,” Dunham told Curtis.
The 33-year-old added that the healer’s sensationalist statement initially led her to question the cause of her condition.
“At the time I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s too much of a coincidence that I make all this work about being a woman’. Even though one in 10 women have endometriosis,” Dunham said.
Endometriosis is a debilitating condition which causes tissue similar to the lining found in the womb to grow in other parts of the body, such as in the ovaries and fallopian tubes, the NHS states.
While there is no cure for endometriosis, some women with the condition choose to undergo a hysterectomy – the surgical removal of the womb – in order to remove parts or all of the organs affected.
During the interview on the Feminists Don’t Wear Pink podcast, Curtis also spoke about her personal experience of chronic pain during her teenage years.
The 23-year-old explained that she had been told the pain she was experiencing was the result of attending a “pressurising school” and having a close relationship with her parents, and so her brain had “invented pain”.
When she was 14 years old, Curtis underwent an operation for scoliosis, which resulted in her experiencing a two-and-a-half-year period of chronic pain and having to drop out of school.
In October last year, the actor revealed she suffers from fibromyalgia, a long-term condition which causes pain across the whole body.
In a post shared on Instagram, Dunham said that it is “hard to shake the feeling” that she’s “crazy” because the condition is so “little understood”.
“I believe you when you say you hurt. I have learned time and time again how important it is to believe,” the producer added.
