Body. Rapid Methods In Psychotherapy

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

I am a professional (that is, I live with a living) and already quite a practicing psychotherapist. My approach is psychoanalytic. I have never been specifically trained in psychosomatic therapy. And therefore I am only comprehending my personal experience here.

There are works and specialists who rely on much more complete theory and research. I just wanted to share my confirmation of the well-known connection between the body and the psyche.

Roughly speaking, the psychology of each of us is "at the junction" of our corporeality and the world that surrounds us. That is, when we experience bodily suffering, not only our body but also our soul hurts, our relations with the environment and with ourselves change. Pain no longer concerns only a sore spot or organ, but affects our entire existence and environment.

And if the soul hurts? - Then the body "connects" to the mental pain. And if we know about this, the situation is simpler, and if we do not know, everything is more complicated.

When a person comes to a doctor to treat his body, he brings to this doctor his character and his inner world, his habits and his attitudes towards himself and other people, his emotional experience and trauma, his worldview.

When a person comes to a psychotherapist with psychological problems, he brings his involuntary movements, smells, his weight, his usual postures, his genetics, his ailments, his age, his appetite, temperament and his sexuality to the office.

It is impossible to completely separate a person into psychic and somatic. And don't separate it.

The body takes an active part in psychological suffering. Whether we know about it or not, whether we want it or not, the body is closely involved.

And it has long been known that psychological suffering can be approached through the body. Not only to hear the signals of the body and decipher them, to understand the psyche, as is done in the psychosomatic approach. And to carry out an even more important work - to start or expand psychotherapy itself. I will describe examples of such work on three cases from practice. The cases have been completely modified, leaving only the plot for the purposes of the article.

Case 1.

Boy, 17 years old. I applied myself because I wanted to sort out conflicts in college. He often became a participant in fights (he was beaten and he inflicted serious injuries on his peers) and said that he did not understand how he got into such situations. He grew up in a family where assault was common. He always rejected it. He didn't want to be an "aggressor". Solving issues with fists was not desirable for him. He knew how and wanted in a different way. He was well-read, studied well. And regularly got into fights. In addition, he had congenital heart valve problems and was constantly taking cardio medications.

I understood that it was necessary to solve his problem quickly. Several years of research on aggression and self-destructive impulses was not available due to both financial capabilities and the severity of the situation.

And so, the main theme of our work was his attention to his own body. That is, bringing its proprioceptor signals (sensations of the position and state of the body) to consciousness. He learned to recognize what was happening to him bodily (where it itches, where it whines, what is “calling” or “asking” him, what is inside “crying” or “screaming”), after which he finds himself in a fight. And thanks to this, he became able to stop himself in advance. But not only that (I associate this precisely with the formation of the body-desire-consciousness connection), he became interested in music, began to meet with a girl and changed his place of study. Which was also the result of his fuller contact with himself.

Case 2.

A woman with a difficult history, many complaints and severe psychological difficulties. The interaction was not easy to develop, since it required quick and clear results from the therapy immediately. It was not easy for me to understand it and it was even harder to accept it. I tried, in order to form at least some kind of trust, to single out from her request one problem that, from my point of view, would be realistically solved in a short time. This turned out to be her desire to finally go to the dance. The woman was ashamed to be there and the problems with the organization seemed unaffordable to her. I didn’t tackle this problem directly. And she focused our attention on her movements, on her stories about movements, on her experiences of herself moving (in the past she went in for sports). And as a result of such work, she did find a dance studio for herself, and together we went through all the alarming stages of adaptation there.

That is, the access to the “success” of such a person passed through the divided attention in the relationship to his bodily manifestations. Which helped ease her suffering.

Case 3.

A woman after 40. Turned with difficulty to forget the man who left her, the impossibility to live on with constant mental pain. At the beginning of our work, she said that she suffers from severe pain in the neck and read that yoga can help with this. I picked up her idea, as I myself have yoga experience and really appreciate it.

The woman suffered from serious childhood trauma and repeated traumatization by a similar situation in adulthood. She got (no coincidence) in the so-called "hard yoga", where push-ups on one hand, jumping in support, racks, bridges and other "tin". And the suffering of the body became a projection of her mental suffering. This is the case with masochism. But my patient just went further. She learned in training to go through pain, to live it without getting stuck on it, to be close to this pain, not to become absorbed, to separate herself from pain, manifesting herself out of touch with pain. It helped that she not only had her pain and her body, but me. At the same time, she established a connection with herself and with me. Through the body and through me, she healed the soul.

Three years later, her mental pain became a memory, she was able to build new relationships, found a new job. Before starting this practice, with her suffering for eight years, nothing happened.

Summary.

The body is our matrix. And when we gain access of consciousness to this matrix, which contains all of our psychic, we THROUGH the body reach the psyche. And by doing something with the body (doing it consciously) we automatically influence the psyche. By strengthening the body, we strengthen the psyche, making the body more flexible - we make ourselves more adaptive, making the body more enduring - we make ourselves mentally more resilient, taking care of the body - we also take care of our soul. But only IF we are aware of this connection and perform our actions, keeping our intention in mind.

Dealing only with the body or only with the soul is not very effective.

Yogis discovered this connection 6 thousand years ago.

And if the connection with others (for a start, with the therapist) is organically added to our connection with ourselves, this is how the fullness of a healthy life is obtained.