The body and
the mind are very intimately connected. We have all heard this
said, but perhaps we don't always grasp the meaning of that
statement. It is hard to really understand that the body and
all its physical manifestations are influenced by and actually
reflect the state of the mind. So too, the mind is influenced
and is affected by the body-self.. Read on !
For example,
one woman told me recently that she had spent her vacation at
a spa, where she received a massage every day for a week. The
massage therapist told her that she was holding muscle tension
at a very deep level. Normally, this woman is very flexible
and able to "let go," but here it seems that she was deeply
clenching, although she was not aware of it! One day, while
listening to some soft music during her massage, she had a thought
about her father who had recently died, and she experienced
waves of sadness riding over her. She began to weep quietly,
and felt herself "letting go." At the same time, the massage
therapist felt a deep release in her lower back muscles, just
in a place where she had been chronically holding. In this case,
the holding on to her father in grief was manifested in her
body by a holding in her back muscles.
We also tend to treat our bodies in a way that corresponds to
our mind's state. For example, Iris is a beautiful and lovely
woman who was treated terribly as a child. She was an incest survivor,
and a survivor of childhood torture as well. She suffered terribly
at her father's hand. Now an adult, Iris is still working on the
effects of these traumas on her life. She has worked hard all
her life, largely at jobs requiring hard labor. She seems drawn
to back-breaking work, and has undergone several surgeries and
other injuries and accidents, due to the difficult nature of the
work she chooses. She does not quite comprehend that she herself
is imposing traumatic circumstances on her body, in much the same
way her father imposed trauma on her body as a little girl, that
she is re-enacting the scenario of disregarding the body self,
of treating it poorly, of abusing it. The trauma to her body as
an adult reflects the trauma to her body as a child: she has had
numerous surgeries on her back due to physical stress, and can
barely walk, let alone enjoy any sense of movement, or the sports
she used to love. Her arm joints are beginning to suffer the same
ill fate. Iris has not yet made the connection between her inner
tortured world, and her outer tortured body, but as she heals,
she is beginning to take better care of herself physically; to
see doctors as needed, to get enough sleep, to allow touch to
heal her, to take medication as needed.
The
road back from physical abuse is a long one indeed. Whenever we
were treated poorly - emotionally or physically- we will tend
to abuse our bodies as we get older. Anorexia, for example, is
associated with intense feelings of deprivation of maternal resources
(milk, love, touch) at a very early age (often before the age
of two). The baby who needed desperately more of mother, and could
not get her, re-enacts that deprivation on her own later in life,
by depriving herself of the same nurturing. The child who was
driven by a punitive parent early in life may well tend to be
driven as an adult, and may well experience sports injuries at
the gym and while playing, due to over-stressing the body.
Dorothy is an adult woman who carries much anger within her.
She manifests this anger in her behavior toward herself and
her body by constantly hurting herself. She often burns herself
while cooking, knocks into furniture and gets black-and-blue
marks, trips while walking, gets paper cuts. Some of these "accidents"
reflect inattention, others reflect impatience. But such a syndrome
also speaks to the anger inside which we direct against our
bodies. As she heals, Dorothy now knows to ask herself, whenever
she hurts herself, "Why did I bump into that? Am I angry at
something or someone right now?" When she gets in touch with
what is going on for her at a deeper level, she has more options
for handling her feelings.
Feelings are BOTH emotional and physical. In fact, before we are
aware of experiencing emotional feelings, as small children, we
ONLY know physical feelings! Many emotional feelings are associated
with physical manifestations, because that is how babies know
their feelings! All feelings are originally body feelings. "Feeling
good" is originally a reflection of body satisfaction, that is
, a feeling of being warm, safe, dry, satiated, etc. Fear is originally
a body sensation, when the electrical energy of the body surges
quickly from a stable baseline to an intense high. We are born
with the capacity to discriminate 9 such affect states, each of
which reflects a different routing of electrical energy, from
low to high or high to low, for example, with different grades
of intensity. It is this combination of direction of electrical
energy and intensity of change that lead to the specific feeling.
Of course, the baby does not know he or she is having a feeling
of, say, disgust or shame or fear. The baby is responding to the
physical change in energy. It is only later that the baby learns,
from the mother or other care-taker, that the feeling he or she
is having is called "happy," "angry," or "frightened." The body
is the first knower of the experience.
Our language
has captured this close association between body and mind. When
we say "it's a pain in the neck," or "I got weak in the knees",
we are referring to physical manifestations of emotional feelings.
Fear often does indeed manifest as a weakening in the knees,
and a neck pain often does reflect being overburdened, or otherwise
overwhelmed. Something beautiful does soothe the vision ("a
sight for sore eyes"), and disgust does manifest as nausea ("it
made me sick to my stomach").
Many
doctors and other practitioners recognize the emotional component
in physical complaints. It is widely accepted that many ailments
have psychological components, such as migraines, stomach ailments,
ulcers, colitis, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, the onset of
herpes and shingles, and some auto-immune syndromes. Dentists
recognize that TMJ is often caused by chronic tension in the jaw
and by teeth-grinding at night. The medical world has only recently
begun to acknowledge the link between body and mind. Others have
done more research and made further claims. Louise Hay, for example,
has written extensively about the psychological component in virtually
EVERY ailment, and furthermore, has listed the precise nature
of the emotional issue for every illness! (Cf., Hay, Louise, You
Can Heal Your Life, 1987, Hay House).
There are also treatment modalities which incorporate both the
body and the mind. The Rubenfeld Synergy Method (R.S.M.) is
one such treatment. Started by Ilana Rubenfeld, RSM combines
gentle physical releases (done while the client is fully clothed
on a table) with verbal Gestalt-type therapy. Rubenfeld invented
her technique while she was training to be an orchestral conductor
at Julliard. She would see her therapist and feel body sensations
and restrictions which called out for touch, but of course,
her therapist could not touch her. So she would go to her body
worker, who would work on the body stress, but was not trained
to talk to her about the feelings that were coming up at the
same time! Eventually, frustrated with going to two people for
what she realized was one piece of work, she invented her own
style of treatment, where the therapist gently touches areas
of tension, while working verbally with the emotional component
of the holding.
Many people live
in their heads, in fact, most of us do! We have trouble recognizing
that, for every feeling, we have a place in the body where we
feel it! In fact, most people cannot tell you what they are
feeling, let alone where they are feeling it! If you ask most
people what they are feeling, they will answer you with a thought.
"How do you feel about that?" They will say, "I think she shouldn't
do that", or "I'm used to it," or "I think it will work out
better this way." Do you see how far away from feelings these
answers lie?
Lori
is a 35-year old woman who has suffered from a deep, chronic depression
for many years, since the death of her mother. She has been in
therapy for 12 years, and has tried many types of medication.
She has had much success with therapy and meds, but there is still
a place of deep sadness and melancholia within her which immobilizes
her frequently. Soft-spoken, Lori lives mostly "in her head,"
and is out of touch with her body-self. Recently, as we did an
RSM session together, Lori began to scan her body for sensations
and images. Descending from her head, she got no further than
her chest. There, she reported, she felt "long strands of knots.
Knots, knots, knots", she expressed, getting more and more animated.
She said that anger accompanied her experience of the knots. Then,
after a pause, she said, "There is so much NOT in me. I want to
say, 'I WILL NOT," and "I DO NOT". "Not, not, not," and "no, no,
no"...This was the message of Lori's tightened chest. In a subsequent
session, she reported feeling something in her abdomen, like a
fire inside a grate. The fire was contained, but it really wanted
to get out. This was scarey, because if it got out, it would devour
everything. Lori realized that she was afraid of her rage, and
only could experience it if it was kept strictly confined ("behind
a grate").
Lori's
work is just beginning, but she is already integrating her body
experience with her head experience, which is a very big accomplishment
for her.
Alexander Lowen, M.D., the founder of Bioenergetics, believes
that suppressing negative feelings and impulses actually armors
and de-vitalizes the body, blocking the flow of energy which allows
us to function in a life-affirming way. He believes that we suppress
our feelings and impulses as a result of continual holding back
of expression, and that this becomes a habitual mode and an unconscious
body attitude. He says, "In effect, the area of the body that
would be involved in the expression...is deadened by the chronic
muscular tension that develops as a consequence of the continual
holding back. The area is effectively cut off from consciousness
by the loss of normal feeling and sensation in it." ("The Energy
Dynamics of Depression," in Sacred Sorrow, J.E. Nelson and A.
Nelson, Eds., Tarcher/Putnam, 1996.) Lowen argues that depression
can be healed through bodywork, because the relation between depression
and depressed breathing is so great that any technique which activates
breathing loosens the grip of the depressed mood. He says, "It
does so by actually increasing the body's energy level and by
restoring some flow of bodily excitation. Generally the increased
breathing will lead sooner or later to some form of emotional
release, either to crying or anger." (Ibid.)
Many, many books have been written about the body/mind connection.
You can find much to read in your local library, or on the WEB.
Home
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Dr. Simko
is available for Media and Speaking Engagements.
Contact simko@mac.com
Update:
July 2001
Copyright 1998 – 2006 Patricia Simko
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Dr.
Patricia Simko
24 East 12th St. #605
New York, NY 10003-4403
(212) 627-0731
simko@mac.com |
