Psychosomatics

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

Where does psychosomatics begin? When mentally we cannot withstand something and the body begins to react in the usual way. A weakened psyche can no longer withstand what is happening to us, it does not have the resources and new ways to cope with stress, and our body begins to react to it. Something that is weakened may hurt, or maybe something that is already familiar. Sometimes the body begins to immediately respond to changes in our life, since this is already so familiar that it seems that there is no other way.

Most interestingly, a psychologically traumatic event can occur much earlier than a psychosomatic symptom. One of my clients had a pain in his arm, there was no physiological reason. All the doctors said that everything was fine, but the hand continued to hurt. And the reason for this was suppressed and unexpressed aggression. The very fact of the traumatic event happened more than ten years ago, and the hand began to hurt about two years ago. The bomb was ticking for almost eight years. After a small skirmish in the store, a symptom appeared - pain in the arm.

In that case, the outdated conflict, in fact, was not the cause. Everyone has long known that many of our characteristics are often formed in childhood, in our parental family. So it is with this person. The constant demands of his father to restrain all his feelings led to the fact that he began to try to suppress them. But this is just an attempt. Someone more successfully and longer suppresses their feelings, someone less successful and the symptom appears earlier.

If we talk about the symptoms themselves and where they appear in the body, then you can try to make a conditional separation. I will make a reservation right away that this is only conditional. Everyone can have their own reasons for psychosomatic symptoms. Let's start with our outer borders - the skin. The skin is our very first border, it protects us and perceives bodily contact (handshaking, stroking, hugging, and so on). If something is wrong with the skin, it can be assumed that the person has problems either with boundaries or with the perception of contact from other people. One client came with painful dry skin on her hands. As a child, my mother just "squeezed" her. She violated her boundaries in every possible way: she took her things without asking, read the diary, but was never ready for a dialogue on the part of her daughter, one might even say she forbade her to interfere with her. And the client's skin began to dry out over time. Neither cream nor treatment helped. It was psychologically difficult to touch the rejecting mother, terribly angry at the interference in her mother's life.

Our digestive system also knows how to express suppressed feelings. We have a lot to do with food. From the very first days of life, we eat. And when breastfeeding, we receive not only the food itself, but also the warmth and care of the mother, we feel safe and calm. If feeding takes place in emotional warmth and acceptance of the child, if there is enough milk, then in life he, most likely, will feel confident and complete. If, however, the child feels hunger for a long time, anger and overeating appears. Disgust for food may appear. And as a result, we get that a huge number of feelings can be expressed through the digestive system.

Bulimia and anorexia can be distinguished separately. If we try to look at bulimia from a different angle, then we can assume that the greed for food and the insatiable feeling of hunger is very similar to the lack of love from parents (mom and dad). Anorexia can be viewed as a protest and demand for attention, we have all heard more than once about hunger strikes to protest something. This is how people try to draw attention to themselves and get at least a little bit of love and care.

And finally, let's turn our attention to our respiratory organs. We feel great and full of energy when we can breathe easily and freely. If breathing is difficult, then inside we can hide fear, anger, devastation, a feeling of pressure on us. It is not only difficult for us to breathe then, but it is also difficult to speak, as if someone deprived us of the right to vote. Or we are so afraid of being rejected that it is simply impossible to say something about our needs, it sometimes happens when our parents were too anxious and too protective of us. It is still difficult to breathe when we cry, a suppressed feeling of resentment and a ban on expressing feelings can also be expressed in a violation of respiratory function.

Mikhail Ozhirinsky - psychoanalyst, group analyst