All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation.
If your body is screaming in pain, whether the pain is muscular contractions, anxiety, depression, asthma or arthritis, a first step in releasing the pain may be making the connection between your body pain and the cause. “Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.
Survivors who don’t stand up for themselves often develop physical and emotional illnesses. Many become depressed because they feel so hopeless and helpless about being able to change their lives. They turn their anger inward and become prone to headaches, muscle tension, nervous conditions and insomnia.
Somatic Symptoms: People with Complex PTSD often have medical unexplained physical symptoms such as abdominal pains, headaches, joint and muscle pain, stomach problems, and elimination problems. These people are sometimes most unfortunately mislabeled as hypochondriacs or as exaggerating their physical problems. But these problems are real, even though they may not be related to a specific physical diagnosis. Some dissociative parts are stuck in the past experiences that involved pain may intrude such that a person experiences unexplained pain or other physical symptoms. And more generally, chronic stress affects the body in all kinds of ways, just as it does the mind. In fact, the mind and body cannot be separated. Unfortunately, the connection between current physical symptoms and past traumatizing events is not always so clear to either the individual or the physician, at least for a while. At the same time we know that people who have suffered from serious medical, problems. It is therefore very important that you have physical problems checked out, to make sure you do not have a problem from which you need medical help.
The symptomatology of PTSD. In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one's past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition.
In any attachment encounter, there is both what we perceive being offered and our embodied response to it.
If we call to mind, heart and body three or four people with whom we've had particularly close relationships, how do our bodies respond to their offers of connection?
We can begin by being with muscles, belly, heart and breath. How does our body want to move?
Kink is inherently somatic: it involves touch, breath, voice, eye contact, movement, power, and ritual. All of these elements interface directly with the nervous system. They can soothe it, or trigger it.
Let's take a moment to see if we remember a time when a process that had begun simply stopped, faded away, or became unavailable in some other way. It could be in our own therapy work or with our patients.
What as our experience of this?
We might check in with muscles, belly, heart, and breath as a beginning place.
Then we can move to the feelings and thoughts that arose from these sensations.
Do we feel at ease with these kinds of experiences, or does it feel as if something is wrong?
We may find that other examples come to our awareness as well, bringing similar or different cascades of sensation, feeling and thought.
As best we can, we may offer all of them welcome with warmth and kindness.
When we are grounded in our awareness, we can be more present with what we are experiencing in our bodies — in all the spaces that live between our head and our feet.
There were corporeal, psychic, and spiritual people. Somatics, psychics, and pneumatics, they called them, from the Greek. Equality goes against nature, however rightly one might strive toward it. Some are made of more earthly elements, and those people are thick, sensual, and non-creative. They are only good for listening. Others live with their hearts, their emotions, in bursts of the soul, and others still have contact with the highest spirit, distant from the body, free from affects, spacious inside. It is to this final group that God has access.
Unlike Reich's work, which excavates trauma stored in the body's armor, CBT cannot penetrate the subconscious terrain where pre-verbal wounds, shadow selves, and somatic imprints reside.
