🔗 Share this article

I have just returned from a run. It’s surprising to admit those words. I believe it was likely a decade since my last. Yet I recently discovered that my tests indicate somewhat raised cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to do sweaty exercise regularly.

This is the first time in my existence that the reason to work out has been my health status. During earlier years, I jogged because I desired to lose weight. I also jogged to cure nervousness – I was merely escaping from those feelings, not addressing it. At other times, I exercised because I wanted to get better in running. This was the meaning to me then to create a better life.

Jogging with altered intent at present sparked reflection about the ways I’ve connected with my body over my lifetime and how this is changing as I move from early adulthood to middle age. I believe not I’ve respected my own body, not deep down. I’ve valued it just for its roles and the purposes it fulfilled for me: aiming to appeal; escaping emotions; running a faster 5K run. Previously, I failed to grasp that my body is me, it is my life, as opposed to something that produces results.

A great deal has been written for ages about the split between body and mind – which you will be relieved to know, I won’t summarize in this piece. What resonated most fascinating is Freud’s understanding that mental and physical selves are naturally unified from birth, because physical development necessitates mental growth and vice versa. The infant’s physical sensations – for example the bodily feeling of hunger – drive the brain to cultivate the ability to identify hunger as a sensation that is alleviated by a feed; and the emotional comfort and contentment repeatedly brought by feed after feed feeds the infant’s psyche just as the food fuels them physically. Similarly mental events – like the urge to get up and attain a goal, and the persistence to persist through effort – are the reason and method physical strength increases. Starting at birth, mind and body are intertwined in mutual development as connected as a double helix.

But I’ve observed, in treatment with my psychoanalyst, that mental and physical aspects may exist in a distinct connection – one less integrated and somewhat abusive. My mind can use my physical self to store and display things that my consciousness considers unacceptable or unbearable. During therapy we’ve become aware how there are particular emotional states that I fear are too much for me; instead of feeling these psychologically, I unintentionally push them to my physical self, where they remain as physical symptoms.

I previously experienced this with indigestion – which had nothing to do with my diet, but was a kind of corporeal reaction of the sharper sentiments I failed to handle mentally. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but when it was brought to awareness in sessions, and my anxiety and vulnerability and frustration and panic could be felt and put into words in place of converted to corporeal symptoms, it vanished. I rarely suffer from stomach problems currently.

The worst time I had this terrible acid reflux, I failed to rest for multiple consecutive nights. It seemed I was forfeiting my sanity. I went my doctor, who organised various examinations and assessments, but no issues were found medically abnormal. It was a different physician who suggested that the cause could be mental. My analyst did not disagree. I was surprised, but I recognized it was correct.

Whenever someone is suffering a corporeal problem, it can be upsetting upon hearing that there might be a psychological cause. They can experience this as being disrespected, hearing that their condition isn’t real. And of course such cases occur – individuals may experience their symptoms ignored or wrongly assessed. However, sometimes it could be that the physical symptoms exist – certainly – and the origin is mental, the subconscious utilizing the body to convey some pain or rage or any feeling the mind fails to handle. Occasionally, it’s easy to think our experience matters solely when it is expressed in physical form. We continually disrespect our minds as individuals, collectively and within our culture; how else do we accept the terrible killing-off of psychodynamic psychotherapy through health services?

My experiences have taught me that an improved existence cannot be built when we are stuck without realization in ways of relating, inside us and with others, that originate in devaluation, manipulation and dealings. These dynamics are often easier to recognize “in the world” in the general public. It’s perhaps less comfortable to think about how they got out there, and to identify these shapes inside us and in intimate connections, in the workings of our mental lives.

Yet it’s valuable to continue. Upon wearing my jogging shoes once more post a long hiatus, venturing out not to get bodily change, or to get rid of an emotion, or to improve a 5km time, {it