"MAMA" - Constitutional Theories. Healthy Psychosomatics

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Initially, this article was a continuation of a series of articles on depression, and in particular was devoted specifically to the psychological causes of postpartum psychosomatic disorders. But in the process of writing, one way or another, it all boiled down to the fact that these problems are constantly based on unjustified expectations, and not only from the child and loved ones, but in fact from myself. Since, ideally, almost every pregnant woman imagines what her baby will be like, how she will take care of him, how her husband will help her in this, etc. understanding and planning her motherhood seemed elementary, obvious and natural, when embodied in reality, it often turns out to be overwhelming work for her in the first place. How can this be?

There is a lot of different information on the network about the importance of a competent organization of life in the postpartum period, correction of spouses' attitudes in relation to a variety of family issues, the transition of relationships to a new level, etc. However, not much information is devoted to how incomplete understanding by a mother her individuality, leads to the fact that focusing on the values and ideals of society and other women, she drives herself into a dead end. Instead of understanding and accepting yourself for who she is; to understand that it is such a Mom, the best, necessary, promising and right one for her child, with all her “unders”, “not so” and so on; and learn to use your trait as a resource.

But this is where such a simple trick arises. How to understand if mom is what she is according to the idea of nature or, say, the Universe, or mom is lazy, does not want to work on herself and does not want to develop? And first of all, it is often difficult to understand this even for the mother herself. In part, this very question helps us to solve the very same healthy (normal) psychosomatics - constitutional theories of personality. If, for example, we know that our temperament is different, we theoretically assume that one mother, hearing the crying of a child, will remain calm, try to listen and figure out what the reason is and eliminate it. Another mother, who has a different threshold of sensitivity, will not be able to tolerate a scream of this exact nature (also to analyze, because the excitement is prohibitive, not before analysis). She will begin to fuss and perform many unnecessary and useless actions, only exacerbating her state of panic and self-deprecation.

But this is theoretically. In practice, from the outside, most likely we will say that the second mother has no experience at all, and we will begin to teach the clumsy simple algorithm - give a breast - put it in a column - change a diaper, etc. And someone in general will say that the first mother is "well done" and so she worked on herself that she formed such an affection with the baby from scratch, but the second still has to work and work on herself, to find a contact. Everything is already forgotten and no one thinks that the problem began with a difference in temperament. And instead of teaching mom the techniques of "braking" (breathing, counting and relaxing), we will teach her a dry algorithm, which she will not feel and will not appropriate, but along the way will experience a feeling of deep insecurity, alienation and even anger. And the mother will still be tormented by the fact that she cannot form attachment and so on (although in fact her attachment can be formed much better than that of the first mother, which we can see "in the fall").

The understanding that we are different, in fact, remains with many in words. In feelings and actions, in attitudes and values, we somehow adjust other people to our vision and understanding of what is right. This applies especially to mothers, since they are entrusted with the functions of raising a "real" person, taking into account the mistakes of their ancestors and "negligent" scientists. And if mom follows the word of modern psychological science, most likely there will be no problems. And if you don't follow, you can't rake it. On this topic, a very important article was circulated on the Internet, tentatively titled "It will take 5 years for psychotherapy." In which, in a comic form, the very idea was revealed that no matter how ideal a mother drills herself, her child will still have something to tell the therapist. Since there is actually no that ideal, correct, etc., because we are all different and each of us has our own needs, partly dictated by our physiology, by what God or the Universe created us, or by what genetic set of characteristics we were given our ancestors.

For many of my clients who “hate” their mother, it is sometimes a revelation to realize that with their “terrible” actions their mothers did their best to do “the best”. But an even greater revelation is the realization that the modern understanding of "what's best", as opposed to their mother, many of them already "rape" their children. Because even the fact that a child was born to these specific mothers and fathers does not make his "genetic" or "constitutional" set similar to them (did you notice that many children generally look like grandparents? And this is not just that). And this means that no matter what psychophysiological characteristics the parents have, it is not at all a fact that the child will have the same.

Constitutional theories of personality, where everything seems simple - looked at a person's appearance, estimated his parameters and understood everything about his psychological inclinations - it is not so easy to take root. Psychologists have long known both the theories of the “pro-fathers” Sheldon, Kretschmer and intermediate, as well as more modern ones, such as psychogeometry, etc., but they could not really apply them before, because without an understanding of anatomy and other features of body work, there is no vision of universality. In simple words, we have information that people with such and such a body have such and such psychological characteristics, and what next? This did not provide information about needs, motivation, ways of interacting with the outside world, mnemonic processes, etc. And most importantly, it did not provide information about feedback, the influence of psychological characteristics on the body. That is, if we are physicians, we did not see anything else in these theories, except as a "picture of the patient's personality." If we are psychologists, we did not understand what this could give us, except for understanding the properties of temperament and a tendency to certain diseases and problems. Until there were more significant developments in the field of psychosomatics (in this case, healthy, normal psychosomatics, as a connection between the psyche and the body). But I write this in the article, as it seems this is know-how, in fact, these developments are hundreds of years old, and some even more, there simply were no technical possibilities to combine information, process and apply it as it became possible for the last 15-20 years. …

One of the most "high-quality" constitutional theories of personality (healthy psychosomatics), at this stage in the development of society and science, came to us from traditional Chinese medicine. In it, a person is considered a priori as an integral system, where the physical body is not treated without psychological correction, and psychological problems are not solved until the somatic balance is restored. There is no division into psychology and physiology, there the person is one constantly and all interconnections occur continuously.

Any psychologist who was fond of psychodiagnostics knows about the so-called direction of psychogeometry, the scientific accuracy of which has been proven more than 85% of the coincidences of psychological characteristics and appearance of people of a certain type (squares, triangles, circles, zigzags and rectangles). It took root in management, as it made it possible to manage personnel more effectively and not to put people, in spite of education, in those positions and tasks in which they are ineffective due to their psychophysiological characteristics. If we differentiate rectangles and squares in more detail and take into account some other features, this direction very clearly coincides with the psychological basis of Chinese medicine in the theory of Wu Xing.

But the peculiarity of Chinese philosophy is that it is universal. Those. it provides not only an opportunity to trace the connection between physiology and psychology, but also shows how our psyche changes when we get sick, and vice versa, how it recovers when we recover; what changes occur to our body, in connection with different periods in our life (from the period of development, to the same maternity period or the period of career growth, writing scientific papers, etc.); what forms and models of behavior are natural for us, and what are alien to us, and how the appropriation of alien models breaks our physical health - how psychosomatic disorders and diseases are formed, and much more. And most importantly, knowledge of the connection between processes gives an understanding of why this or that method of psychocorrection or drug treatment does not work for certain people in certain situations, and under what conditions the same method will be effective for these same people.

In the next post, I will write in more detail about the psychological types of Moms, about their strengths and weaknesses, and most importantly about what and why moms are different and in what and why what is easy for one mother, another mother costs incredible efforts. And is it really worth breaking ourselves up under other people's psychophysiological characteristics, those psychosomatic disorders and diseases that we get when we play other people's roles.

Continuation We are very similar, but completely different. "MAMA" - constitutional psychotypes.