THE BODY NEVER FORGETS

by Stanley
...........................and see Lanara's comment
...........................below


.......A few posts ago I wrote a little piece on near-death and out-of-the-body experiences. But did you know it is not uncommon for a person to spend a lifetime not quite in their body? In the trade it’s called ‘dissociation’, a very clinically cold term for a very real – and I won’t say ‘painful’ – lifestyle, because pain is what the condition is designed to avoid.
......When it is full-blown it is supposed to be a BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), when it is less noticeable it is like a partial anesthetization, a condition the person may just accept because that’s always been their relation to their body.
.......A common response to very early physical trauma is to actually leave the body. Babies and very young children are quite capable of doing this. It is one way to escape unbearable pain. In a recovered memory one person described how they literally ‘went up the wall’. Recovered memories of hospital operations often yield vivid experiences of looking down on one’s own body on the operating table and watching what’s going on – but, and here’s the thing, not feeling it.
........Another common reason for abandoning the body is because it carries all one’s unwanted emotions.
........There are people who are so immune to pain that they can have minor operations or have their teeth drilled without anesthetics. Some are just brave and stoic, but there are those who can do it because they are shut off from the body; they just don’t feel physical sensations like other people.
........Along with this can go a very dismissive attitude to the body – often quite punishing. They don’t seem to notice when they are overtired or when they hurt themselves. They prefer grueling exercise or hard work. They almost seem to enjoy treating the body harshly. Outright hatred of the body is not uncommon; some even go so far as to play rugby or deprive it of food. They inadvertently notice a bad bruise, but have no idea how they got it.
........A social milieu like school sports or gung-ho male friends can induce this attitude, but for some people it is a more deeply psychological problem. A shutdown of that order makes the experience of physical pleasure difficult too. Eating is like filling up at the petrol station; and sex is restricted to a momentary genital orgasm – more like a sneeze! Pleasure can be so scarce that it has to be stolen.
........Desperate to escape the deficiency of sensation a person can get to a point where any sensation is better than none. Cutting and self-harm can be a frantic response to physical numbness.
........It goes without saying that there are illnesses which have nothing to do with the body’s memory or the defences we set up against it. But one thing you learn in psychotherapy is that the body never forgets. Pain and tension that is not experienced is pain and tension that is stored. Sooner or later the repressed will return. Aging makes it increasingly difficult to keep the body and physical sensations at bay. But more especially, gradually getting in touch with one’s emotional life will bring the body back to life – and with it the repressed pain and emotion it has carried for years. The body needs something, is trying to complete something, so that life can move forward.
........Sometimes when a person is working at an emotional level there are physical consequences that follow: the body will move through the associated pain hours later. Even a release of happiness can liberate a painful physical upheaval. Sometimes an emotional release is preceded by physical tension holding the emotion in, like a pressure cooker.
........Fighting the body is counterproductive. Best is to use these kinds of pains or tensions to move into the felt-sense of them. This may revive memories, associations or images. The felt-sense of physical pain is different from the actual pain itself – it’s the way the pain makes you feel. I don’t mean feelings as big emotions, but more subtle feelings that are located physically – often around the heart or the centre of the body – but sometimes very diffused, almost a bodily mood that reminds of something in the past, something vaguely familiar.
.........One’s own super-ego that hates the body can intervene, harassing and trying to make nonsense of this procedure. But with kindness and empathy for the body this process can revive your very closest friend, the one that’s been with you all your life; and knows many things about you better than you do.