2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Our body and psyche are very closely related to each other. And what happens in our emotional life is directly reflected in our body. This is the basic position of body-oriented therapy and psychosomatics - a sphere at the intersection of medicine and psychology, which studies disorders that are primarily caused not by disorders in the functioning of the body, but by emotional factors or personality traits of the person himself. This is popularly illustrated by the saying "All diseases are from the nerves." In fact, of course, not everything - there are conditions to which psychology is not involved, but when tests and medical examinations do not reveal anything, and a person has complaints about his condition, we can talk about a psychosomatic illness.
Formation of psychosomatic diseases
At the bodily level, our emotional experiences are manifested in the form of hormonal changes and muscle relaxation / tension.… For example, when you are angry, the hormones adrenaline and norepinephrine are released into your bloodstream, and your muscles tense up so that you are ready to fight your abuser. Only now we very rarely implement such impulses - do not beat the boss every time he offers to work overtime! And emotional experiences pass, but bodily tension remains if it is not expressed appropriately (through the body or words). Repeated repetition of this cycle leads to the "conservation" of these emotions in the squeezed muscles - this is how the squeezes appear.with whom body-oriented therapy works later.
However, if the clamps remain in the body, one way or another they begin to create a load on our musculoskeletal system - and various pains arise that are not caused by inflammation or injury; they interfere with the normal blood supply to tissues - and the work of organs is disrupted, although physiologically everything is in order. In addition to this, some organs in our body are themselves muscular - the entire cardiovascular system and the gastrointestinal tract, for example. They react directly to hormonal changes and, under the influence of emotions, change their work.
Thus the body helps us to cope with emotionsthat we cannot fully live. It sort of decides:
“Yeah, now this emotion is out of place. I’ll hold her so that she doesn’t mess things up.”
And the more we use the body as a container for emotions, the easier it becomes. And at some point, emotions simply stop reaching awareness, remaining only in the form of a bodily reaction.
And the psyche, accustomed to tying emotions to unpleasant bodily impulses, concentrates on them, and painful experiences arise, only worsened by the fact that doctors shrug their shoulders, saying that they do not find any reason for feeling unwell, or prescribe medications that only partially help to relieve symptoms, but do not lead to recovery. Or it happens that as soon as one problem has been cured, another immediately arises - and so on in a circle.
The role of psychotherapy in the treatment of psychosomatic diseases
The medical approach turns out to be insufficiently effective, because it pays attention to only one aspect of psychosomatic manifestations - the bodily one - and ignores the psychological aspect, which is the cause. therefore the preferred approach to work in this case is a combination of medical intervention, if necessary, and psychological work.
One way or another, psychosomatics are used in many psychotherapeutic approaches, from classical psychoanalysis, gestalt therapy to the behavioral approach. However, since we are talking about physicality, the use of body-oriented methods of work is effective.
In addition, classical therapeutic methods require very long work to get to the root of the problem and resolve it at the mental level. But in a situation where bodily reaction has become the main one, it can be quite difficult, and the client does not always have the resource and motivation for such deep work.
The best option in this case would be a combination of short-term methods aimed at achieving relaxation and relieving acute symptoms (for example, bio-suggestive therapy), and longer-term methods of body-oriented therapy, to form new, healthier connections between the body and the psyche.
Recommended:
When Your Heart Hurts: Beware! Mental Pain
Mental pain is one of the most important, most serious and most subtle mental phenomena. It is as if it is and as if it is not, because physically nothing hurts you! She is unbearable and is associated with a lot of often conflicting feelings.
What Your Pain Smells Like Or Two Wonderful Ways To Get Rid Of Pain In 5 Minutes
Sometimes inexplicable miracles happen in psychological practice. I bring to your attention one of the psychological miracles. Professor Nikolai Dmitrivich Linde in his practical work developed the method of an imaginary smell in the 90s of the last century.
Betrayal Of The BODY: WHEN THE BODY GOES OUT OF MIND
Author: Maleichuk Gennady Ivanovich Part 1: Etiology and Phenomenology Anxiety is the director our inner theater. Joyce McDougall The widespread prevalence of panic attacks in recent years makes it possible to think of them not as a separate syndrome, but as a systemic phenomenon, and requires a more thorough study of the cultural context in which they "
Betrayal Of The Body. When The Body "goes Crazy "
Part 1: Etiology and Phenomenology Anxiety is the director our inner theater. Joyce McDougall The widespread prevalence of panic attacks in recent years makes it possible to think of them not as a separate syndrome, but as a systemic phenomenon, and requires a more thorough study of the cultural context in which they "
Pain Body
In his book "New Earth", Eckhart Tolle wrote that the Pain Body is a clot of old emotional pain that a person carries in his energy field due to the tendency to retain old emotions in memory forever. It is like a sack into which undissolved and unconscious "
