The body as a sense organ for feeling One factor contributing to the myth of body/mindseparation is the belief that the head and the body are separate — that all mental (andemotional) activity takes place in the head (i.e., in the brain), while the rest of the body serves as a vehicle to carry the brain around and take it where it wants to go. Emotional
feelings, according to this belief, are mental events occurring in the head, so have
nothing to do with the body, per se. But emotional feelings are not simply mental
events that take place in your head. They are highly complex mental and muscular
events involving changes in neuromuscular organization throughout your body.
You feel emotions by subconsciously organizing your body in particular ways, then
feeling the resulting body organization. Your musculature amplifies your emotions in
much the same way that your stereo system amplifies music, and you experience your
emotions through this neuromuscular amplification.
Feeling is the interpretation of sensation from your body, just as vision is the
interpretation of sensation from your eyes, and hearing is the interpretation of
sensation from your ears.
Feeling is an ongoing process through which you perceive the world and your
relationship to it, just as vision and hearing are.
Emotions are only part of what you perceive through feeling. You also feel internal body
states such as hunger, thirst, and temperature; body position and movement; and “gut
feelings” about the rightness or wrongness of situations or courses of action. Even your
sense of self, your basic sense of personal identity, is experienced more through feeling
than any other way.
Vision and hearing are real-time processes. That is to say, you perceive a stimulus
while it occurs, and stop perceiving it when the stimulus stops. You see these words
while they are in your visual field. But if you turn your head to look out a window, the
words disappear and are instantaneously replaced by the window and the scene it
contains. Look back at the words, and they reappear again. When you are listening to
something, you hear it as long as the sound is there. When the sound stops, so does
your perception of it. In a fully functioning human nervous system, the feeling sense
should work the same way. You should experience your current feeling-perception
completely in the present moment, and it should then fade away as you move on
to the next present moment.
If you were subject to emotionally traumatic experiences — to physical abuse, or
an alcoholic parent who might be unpredictably caring and loving one day (or minute)
and angry and abusive the next — the impact was even greater. You experienced
things that may have threatened your very survival. You wanted to make these
things stop, or at least to diminish their intensity as much as possible. You could not do
much about the external events that were happening to you, but you did have some
control over your experience of those events. You could shut your eyes to block out the
sights, maybe put your hands over your ears to diminish the sounds, and tense every
muscle in your body to reduce the intensity of the feelings. And it worked , at least to a
point. It got you through, and you survived! But the feelings you blocked out
did not just disappear. They remain as dysfunctional patterns in your
nervous system and your musculature, limiting you in unusual and
often unsuspected ways.
Feeling as a psychosomatic event You experience feeling by organizing your body in a
particular way, and then “reading out” that body organization as the feeling experience.
A feeling, then, is a psychosomatic event, with both psychological (mental)
dimensions, and somatic (body) dimensions. From a psychological perspective, a
feeling is an emotional experience (or other type of feeling experience). From a somatic
perspective, however, the same feeling is a pattern of excitation in your nervous system
and your musculature.
But when you are not willing to allow yourself to experience the feeling, for
whatever reason, you cut it off by imposing a block (as illustrated schematically
in Figure 3) that prevents the feeling from completing.
You interrupt the neuromuscular pattern of the feeling by superimposing a
stronger pattern on top of it, suppressing it or at least diminishing its intensity.
This block, like the feeling itself, is also a pattern of neuromuscular excitation,
manifesting as muscular tension.
The amount of ongoing effort required to maintain the block will be different for
different people and situations. Some people may carry constant muscular
tension for years, even for life. For others, the physical tension may fade with time, so
long as they avoid “triggers” which recall the original trauma. In either case, the block
produces ongoing functional limitation. It may make you uncomfortable in certain
situations, or make certain movements or activities difficult.
The feelings that you do block out do not just disappear. The uncompleted
pattern remains held in suspension, ready to surface if the opportunity presents
itself.
Circumstances which trigger associations with the original event can provide
such an opportunity.
Emotional trauma results from a shutting down of your ongoing experience, and
particularly of the feeling dimension of that experience. That reaction and its
consequences are so central to the concept of emotional trauma being developed here
that I take them as defining of it. Accordingly, I will define emotionally traumatic
experience as follows: An emotionally traumatic experience is one that produces a
shutting down of your ability to process the experience as it occurs, particularly
in its feeling or emotional dimension. The severity of the trauma is related to the
degree of shutdown, and the extent to which it carries over into the your ongoing life
experience thereafter. Each emotionally traumatic experience leaves a
residue of unprocessed feelings — feelings generated at the time, but
blocked from experience and held in limbo. To keep these feelings from
consciousness, you restrict your general ability to feel, muting your feeling
experience of the world. So you feel less, on an ongoing basis, than you are
capable of. In this way, emotional trauma also produces a disruption of the
feeling process itself. This disruption seldom occurs just once. It is ongoing,
The more your feeling process is disrupted the more you block experience,
adding to your stock of unprocessed feelings.
This, in turn, increases the ongoing disruption. Unprocessed feelings may come
near or to the surface in current situations, making it hard to separate past from
present.
They may surface as generalized discomfort, free-floating anxiety, or even as
flashbacks.
The emotional disorganization created by emotionally traumatic experience is both
reflected in and accomplished by the accompanying somatic disorganization. The
excessive tension used to block feelings at the time of a trauma may become chronic,
leading to inefficient and disorganized movement, chronic aches and pains, and even a
tendency to be injury prone. You may organize your life around avoiding your
unprocessed feelings.
Emotional trauma, like feeling itself, is a psychosomatic process with both physical and
psychological dimensions.
But it is also important to understand that a common thread connects all forms of
emotional trauma, across levels of severity and across different types of psychological
content. That thread is the shutting down of feeling through neuromuscular
disorganization, and it is through reclaiming that lost ability to feel that healing is
possible.
Healing the consequences of past emotional trauma
Emotionally traumatic experience can have a significant negative affect on your
life, even years after the experience occurred. The disruptive consequences of past
emotional trauma can be significantly reduced, if not totally eliminated.
Whatever events produced that trauma in the past are over now — what remains
are the residual effects of those events on your current ongoing experience.
Healing involves mitigating those residual effects, and reclaiming capabilities and
possibilities that you gave up as part of your response to the trauma. Healing as a
psychosomatic process Just as emotional trauma has both psychological and somatic
dimensions, so must the healing of that emotional trauma. On the psychological side,
healing requires a willingness to process previously unprocessed feelings and to
reclaim the feeling process itself. On the somatic side, healing involves letting go of the
neuromuscular blocks to “offlimits” feeling states and regaining access to habitually
neglected states of body organization. The implications of the dual (psychosomatic)
nature of emotional trauma for the healing process depends on the depth and severity
of the trauma. If the emotional loading associated with your “offlimits” areas is relatively
mild, then a somatic process like Functional Integration may be used to reclaim lost
functional capabilities without specific attention to their emotional loading. This leads to
lower levels of muscular tension, more fluid and efficient movement, and the reduction
or elimination of previously chronic discomfort and pain. An increased sense of
psychological security and emotional well-being will often follow. If you have undergone
significant trauma such as physical or sexual abuse, however, the emotional loading
can be so strong that it overrides any attempt at reclamation through functional means
alone. This is particularly true when the somatic dysfunction results from tension blocks
against unacceptable feelings. Improving somatic function by reducing those tensions
will allow the feelings to push toward the surface, creating an increasing emotional
discomfort. In response, the blocks may reassert themselves, perhaps even more
strongly than before. The same is true from the psychological side. If your emotional
issues have only minor somatic implications, then you may well be able to resolve them
satisfactorily on a “purely psychological” basis. If there is significant somatic
involvement, however, that may not be the case.
Psychosomatic reintegration I have characterized emotional trauma as a disruption of
the feeling process, and healing as the repair and restoration of that process. My
own approach to healing focuses strongly on feeling as a psychosomatic process, and
on reintegration of the psychosomatic fragmentation that emotional trauma produces.
For that reason, and because it is easier to talk about the approach if I give it a name, I
am going to call it psychosomatic reintegration . I do not want to imply, by naming it, that
it is a well defined set of theory and technique with clearly defined boundaries. It is not.
Both the theory and the technique are in a state of evolution and flux. T
Psychosomatic reintegration extends the practice of Functional Integration to take the
feeling process more fully into account. Healing involves restructuring your
experience.
One of the most important principles underlying psychosomatic reintegration is that you
organize and structure your own experience .
The same information, organized differently, creates different experiences.
IS IT LIFE THREATENING OR JUST A CHANGE
Feeling, as I noted earlier, is a perceptual dimension of experience just as vision is.
Your feelings provide perceptual information about the world around you and the
events happening to you, just as your visual images do.
The feeling process is more complex than vision, and has more layers to it, but
the same principles apply. You filter and select from the feeling information
available to you, incorporating some of it into your ongoing experience.
Emotional trauma disrupts the way you do that, affecting the way you structure
your ongoing experience.
Three activities comprising psychosomatic reintegration
Psychosomatic reintegration aims at helping you to repair that disruption, and to find
more comfortable ways of structuring your experience. It is important to notice
where the responsibility lies in that formulation — it lies with you. Accepting greater
responsibility for your own experience is self-empowering, and will facilitate your healing
process. Psychosomatic reintegration includes three basic types of activities: •
providing new experiences to facilitate healing, • supporting the processing of
unprocessed feelings, and • reinterpreting both the new experiences and the
newly processed feelings in ways that support healing.
Emotional trauma leaves a residue of unprocessed feelings, held in your body by
patterns of muscular tension.
As those tensions are reduced, the feelings themselves can flood into
consciousness. This can be scary, because you feel as if you are right back in the
original event, as threatened and helpless as you were then.
you can process that experience as it occurs. Once you do, you no longer need to
expend large amounts of energy blocking the feelings, and they lose their
emotional hold over you.
The core of healing is in the experience — in processing and completing
previously blocked feelings.
Interpreting your experiences so that they do make sense and integrating them into life,
then, can be as important to your healing as the experiences themselves. I support that
part of the healing process as well, helping you to interpret and integrate your new
experience. We talk in depth about the nature of unprocessed feelings and cathartic
experience, so that you have a richer conceptual framework within which to place
your experience.
If some of those parts have been cut off because of their associations with past
emotional trauma, revisiting them may trigger memories or previously unprocessed
feelings. This can give you a chance to process and complete those feelings,
finally neutralizing their hold on you. Some important themes There are several
important themes that seem to recur in somatic work with survivors of emotional trauma,
which I will discuss them briefly here. The need for safety Your sense of personal safety
is often a casualty of severe emotional trauma. You may live in constant anxiety, worse
some times than others, but never really feeling safe and secure. Rediscovering a
sense of safety within yourself, and learning how to access that sense on an ongoing
basis, are important to your healing process.
Learning to feel safe is not a one-time event, but a continuing process. As you feel
safe where you are, you can take the risk of dropping a layer of armor and seeing what
it is like without it. But dropping that armor may leave you feeling vulnerable and scared
at first, so you need to learn to feel safe all over again, at that level. When you do, you
can drop another layer of armor, and the process continues. Safety comes from
feeling grounded .
Knowing you survived Emotional trauma leaves a residue of unprocessed
feelings locked in your neuromuscular system, taking up “space” and requiring
energy and effort to keep them submerged.
As you unlock those blocks, the feelings will come to consciousness and give
you a chance to complete the experiential processing that was interrupted by the
trauma.
At the time they initially occurred, you blocked those feelings from
consciousness because they were too painful or scary to experience.
When they come back in again, they will still feel painful or scary or … We can
soften that pain and fear somewhat by strengthening your sense of safety and
support, and by dismantling your defenses at a slow and controlled rate rather than all
at once.
But the feelings may still seem scary and hard to experience now just as they
were then. You have one big edge now that you did not have at the time of the
original trauma, though — the knowledge that YOU SURVIVED!
When the trauma was occurring you did not know that you would survive! There
was an actual threat to your survival.
So when you re-experience those feelings now, they may seem just as scary as
they did then, because they are still the same feelings.
But you know now what you did not know then — that you survived and made it
through, that you are here in a physically safe and supportive environment,
choosing to reexperience the feelings in order to neutralize the hold they have had
. One way of handling trauma as a child is to break off a fragment of yourself and assign
it the job of dealing with the trauma. You encase the fragment in a protective sheath of
muscular tension, walling yourself off from the traumatic experience she took on. Years
later, when that sheath of tension is relaxed, that fragment and her experience can
come into your consciousness as an inner child.
And yet, the child has often been a very real presence all along, experienced by
the adult as fear and free floating anxiety. It is as if the child had been locked in a
dark and lonely closet, able only to dimly sense what is going on outside. When
something frightens her, she can only communicate her fright by yelling and
screaming and pounding on the door. The adult experiences this as unfocused
fear, suddenly and inexplicably flooding her system. The rest of the time the child is
quiet, lying there unnoticed, or perhaps felt as an ongoing mild anxiety.
Think of her as someone who was locked up in a closet for years. She now needs to
learn that the world is bigger than that closet, and can be a source of good as well
as bad experience. As she does she will be frightened less often, and as she and
the adult learn better ways of communicating she will no longer need to flood the
adult’s system with fear in order to get attention. Learning to communicate with
your inner child, and to provide the support and love she has been missing all
these years, can be a major source of healing.
As the communication between adult and child improves, the muscular barriers between
you are no longer needed and you can reclaim the parts of yourself those barriers
walled off.
Empowerment
Emotional trauma is often accompanied by a significant loss of personal power.
Reclaiming your competence and personal power plays an important role in your
healing, so your healing process needs to support your empowerment.
Realizing that you now occupy an adult body big enough to protect yourself
against the people who abused you as a child can be a wonderfully empowering insight.
Sense of self
It is difficult to write in a linear, intellectual way about what is essentially a
nonlinear, experiential process. These themes, and others like them, unfold in unique
and personal ways for each individual.