Idiosyncrasies #2: Psychosomatic origin

Owing to the molecular mess* in me (and in all of us), I will experience transient moments of heartbreak whose source is the landscape of my present informed by my childhood. To fall into the feeling would be to fall into a hundred oceans at the same time, which I typically don’t want to do, especially as the feeling might overcome me while I’m walking the dog before work. I had one such experience this morning. This time, though, I played with it briefly, and the play gave me a “provisional” insight.

What happened was: The mildly terrible feeling sat in my chest – a powerful physical-emotional presence. I am a good and practiced feeler, so I allowed the felt sense** or emotional facet to dwell, to speak its wordless message. But then came my play. I erased the emotion. This was my effort to simulate what clients often do, as I know that many people do not want to feel their sick dark feelings. When I obliviated (suppressed, dissociated from) the emotion, what remained was the physical chest sensation of being an invalid, ill. I then realized – that is, I had an insight valid for myself – that the physical infirmity I felt was still the fusion of emotion and body but without any conscious recognition of the emotional disturbance. Presto! I was now physically “disordered,” in a heavier, more pressured way than a normal illness would feel, because of the invisible, hidden emotion. I was psychosomatic. Were I to then maintain the emotional suppression throughout, for example, my entire childhood and adult life, I would come to be alarmed and oppressed by this and other similarly derived physical problems in an especial way: a way that silently spoke whatever tragedy or loss was the true origin of the hurt. And there would very likely be more and more physical problems as time passed – because of the cumulative emotional burial, its pain and tension.

I would become like psychosomatic men and women. They walk in pain, at snail’s pace, as their back has been ravaged by “a little bulging disk”*** or by nothing detectable at all. Their life is now about their back. Somehow it has extra meaning. Her hands are painful, numb and tingly. Somehow she can’t work, ever again. She is “my hands.” The clients who say their doctor is “looking for an auto-immune disorder,” because they have such deep “tiredness, drowsiness,” or maybe the magical “fibromyalgia.”

They need to look under the rock where they buried the emotions in their history. They have to feel these feelings, and go back to their original roots in their childhood. The physical pain will not be doing double-duty then: bad back or knees or shoulders or ankles or muscles embodying and carrying childhood tragedy. There would be a division of labor, lighter on body, heavier on soul. But not all that heavy, because they would now be seeing their emotion. They would be seeing their self, with understanding.

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* See https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_6.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_10.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/07/molecular-mess-3.html and https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/09/molecular-mess-4.html.

** The “felt sense” – a term in Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing process.

*** I think this is a quotation from a Dr. John E. Sarno video – tv show 20/20 episode.