Your body isn't just a beautiful extension of your being, it's a useful tool to help us in psychotherapy as well. How does the body relate to therapy? It may seem like the body is a completely separate entity from that of the mind, which is what people think that they are addressing in therapy, but in reality, the body and the mind are connected - literally. Your brain sits right there in your body, and on a deeper and more complex level, emotions live in the body.
When we feel our emotions, we don't feel them in our heads, we feel them in our bodies - tight chest, clenched fists, a weight in the belly, racing heart. These emotions are sometimes difficult to access with the mind, but we can start with the body. One way to access emotions (energy in motion = emotion) is to observe and track how they feel in the body. Do they have a temperature? A size? A weight? What happens when you put your awareness there with that emotion? Just notice it. Oftentimes in the noticing, emotions begin to move. Our awareness is the key to shifting the feeling. As the emotion begins to move, we can continue to track it. Where does it go? What happens when it releases? Any new insights?
The body can also be a useful tool when folks are feeling overwhelmed by emotions. Overwhelm can look like uncontrollable crying, or feeling so angry you can hardly speak. Culturally we have been conditioned to believe that overwhelming emotions are not okay, so many times we find ways to distract ourselves from them, or to numb out with food, tv, alcohol, etc. But in therapy there is safe space to feel these things, and we can do so again by simply feeling what it feels like in the body. The above process works even (and perhaps especially) for big emotions. Big emotions, when felt with the attention of awareness tend to dissipate as well. The really big ones, like deep grief have layers, so they come back for visits after we feel them the first time, and other subsequent times, but awareness helps us to travel through all emotions.
Furthermore, the nervous system is an integral part of my therapy practice. I track whether clients are in a clear state, a state of depression or collapse, or an anxious state. We use exercises to either ramp up the nervous system in the case of depression or collapse, or calm it in a state of anxiety or nervousness. In addition to the spinal cord, The Vegas Nerve runs from your brain into your belly, touching almost every major organ system on the way down into the belly. We can begin to tone this nerve in therapy using breathing exercises and small body movements so that the body, and therefore the client, responds better to stress. When the vegas nerve is well-toned, the gut, the heart and the lungs all operate more optimally, which helps folks to feel healthier and less stressed.
Lastly, traumatic events are coded into the body through the nervous system. This is where we need to address them. There are many wonderful books on this subject including The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. When we retell a traumatic event, it is important to use the here and now to titrate that experience so that we don't go into full hyper or hypo-arousal in the retelling of the story, this can help the body to integrate what has happened to us, rather than blocking it out as an overwhelming memory.
In short the body is a key piece in therapeutic work, because it offers us so much information about felt experience. It is a wonderful way to stay in the here and now and employ mindfulness, as well as train ourselves to be better stress adapted. I left out that eating healthy and regular exercise can be as effective as taking antidepressants. Probably should address that.
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