The experience of psychological distress in the form of physical symptoms is another example of this complexity. why, for example, does anxiety make some people want to pace back and forth? More common complaints include pain, fatigue, dizziness, and nausea. The term used for this condition is somatization. This is the condition in which mental (psychological) problems manifest in the form of physical (somatic) symptoms. Somatization is the experience of medically unexplained physical symptoms, such as pain or fatigue, that cannot be fully explained by an existing medical condition or by another mental disorder. The word itself suggests a bodily presentation and so not surprisingly symptoms are experienced in a physical way. These can include;

• Headaches
• Fatigue
• Chest pain
• Dizziness
• Nausea
• Abdominal pain
• Muscular pain
• Joint pain

Although these symptoms may be caused by a medical problem, often no specific underlying problem can be found to account for them or for their severity. People who are experiencing this can often feel like their body is betraying them and they often receive medical treatment for physical complaints, even though they do not know the root cause of their condition. This can be frustrating and stressful for both them and their loved ones because it can be difficult to find effective treatments for their physical symptoms when there is currently no known cause.

A talking therapy may help people to understand the reasons behind the symptoms. Here a therapist might relate the physical symptoms to a recent stress or to a mental health problem. For example, you may realise that a bout of neck pain or a headache is due to stress, literally “a pain in the neck” .Anxiety and depression are also common reasons to develop physical symptoms such as a ‘thumping heart’ (palpitations), aches and pains, etc. this kind of therapy aims to change any false beliefs the person may have and help them identify and deal with emotional issues that may underlie or cause their physical symptoms. A preoccupation with fears about having a serious illness, for example, despite medical reassurances that the person’s concerns are not based on reality.

– An Ongoing pain disorder, one without any clear evidence of a general medical condition that would explain the pain or a

body dysmorphic problem with a preoccupation with an imagined or slight defect in appearance.

Whatever the symptoms may be often they do go as emotional and mental factors ease. However, at times some people think they have a physical disease and see a doctor about it. They do not realise the physical symptom is due to a mental factor because these symptoms themselves are real and not imagined; You feel the pain, have the diarrhoea, etc. this is before accepting an alternative treatment once a medical issue has been ruled out.

Although different people may experience different symptoms, Somatization is often seen in people with a history of trauma, abuse, neglect, and other significant psychological stressors. Because of this it can often include emotional symptoms such as anxiety, fear, and depression in response to the physical distress these symptoms cause them.

For some, somatization can be a relatively mild and occasional experience while for others it can be more severe and ongoing. Although the severity of their symptoms can vary from person to person. more generally it is common for people with somatization to experience recurrent and multiple complaints that cannot be fully explained by a general medical condition or mental health problem such as a depression or anxiety disorder. The mind/Body perspective understands this as a response to psychological distress that is expressed as a physical symptom not a solely psychological one. Because emotional distress itself can be linked to a variety of traumata it is not surprising that these types of symptoms can often be seen in people who have a history of trauma, abuse, or other significant psychological stressors. Feeling neglected or unsupported by caregivers can for example lead to somatization as can more commonly shared experiences

such as moving home, starting a new job, or suffering a bereavement.

All of these can be felt as emotionally stressful and in the body this psychological stress can be felt as an increase in muscle tension. For many This chronic muscle tension plays a large role in anxiety. It may not surprise you to learn that psychological stress causes muscle tension and that chronic muscle tension can lead to anxiety but adopting a mind/body perspective says that it goes the other way as well: this perspective suggests that it is the muscle tension itself that causes psychological stress in the feedback loop between mind and body. This means that by reducing your muscle tension, it now becomes possible to relieve your anxiety. For this reason for many people being treated in his way reducing this chronic muscle tension becomes a critical part of the recovery from their anxiety and its related conditions.

Most pain treatments, whether they be medication or a form of bodywork, only address the symptoms of the problem. These treatments either focus on relieving the sensation of pain or assume that the problem is only occurring in the area of the body where the pain is being felt. For example, if you’re having pain in your elbow, these treatments will only address your elbow. For this reason, the results of most pain treatments typically don’t last.

Mind/Body work addresses the underlying cause of pain by working with full-body patterns of posture and movement. No part of the human body moves independently but is understood as part of a total and integrated body system, a whole. Every time you move in effect, adjustments happen throughout your body thereby allowing this movement to happen in the first place. So believe it or not, that pain in your elbow is most likely related to how you are using your entire body and so n order for the problem to go away for good, the entire movement pattern must be addressed. This returns your body back to full health again and so the emotional self along with it . This way of working is to understand that the symptom is not treated in isolation but moreover by looking at its cause, the body itself. In this way a treatment program can become increasingly focussed on the root of the problem and not just its outgrowth.

Our true selves stem from our early experienced in childhood. To have a healthy sense of Self.. is to experience a sense of being alive and real in one’s mind and body, also having feelings that are spontaneous and unforced. This experience of aliveness for us is what allows people to be genuinely close to others as separate persons each with a sense of wholeness rooted to this world in our bodies which have a beginning, a birth and an end, a death. These bodies of ours are connected to time in this way and experience the temporal continuity of their environments which translating this for our inner selves forms a sense of internal continuity which is then established in our minds. We are in other words stimulated by our environments and it is our bodies that communicate the nature of this to us..

Most people carry within them a firm sense of their own autonomous identity. This basic trust about who we are is built on the knowledge that the surrounding environment has certain consistent and inarguable laws, laws that are common to all of us. We internalise these environmental laws into the same unspoken assumptions about who we are, all of us objects in time and place who can then relate to each other from a reliable sense of the world within which we all exist and so form a basic security within us. This we share as an on going and self validating fact of our lives.

Relationships can then be formed from this core feeling of a shared community based on these common assumptions about who we are together. As before these basic assumptions are conveyed to us through our bodies. Due to our connection with the body and it’s understood experience of its relationship to time and to its place in time we feel a sense of commonality. This feeling is foundational and all other certainties are built upon this ultimately forming a basic secure sense of the world within which we exist as as an on going and self validating fact of life. This feeling of a secure and reliable connection to the world is internalised and felt as a strong and reliable sense of a true self with its real sense of aliveness, one developed out of the certainty that its environment is stable and secure in a way that can be readily understood. Each separate person then has a sense of wholeness to them, rooted to this world by their body which has a beginning, a birth and an end, a death. They are connected to time in this way and experience the temporal continuity of their environment through their bodies which translate this for them to form a sense of internal continuity which is then established in their minds. They are in other words stimulated by their environment and it is their bodies that communicate the nature of this to them.

As we choose to share from this basic security with other people likewise assumed to be equally secure we can experience a relationship that feels non-threatening now that a shared feeling of common safety is established. It can be seen that this security is based on physical assumptions that have to do with a connection between the person and their body, the organ that locates them in time and place.. It is this bodily sense of the connection between mind and body that forms a foundational experience through which a stable and secure sense of self is achieved. As before contact with this environment is achieved through the body which attunes itself to it through contact with its stable environment.

However when this environment fails an individual then he or she is deprived of this foundational experience and the stable and secure sense of self that is linked to it. Then they often respond by compensating in certain defensive ways, each an effort to cope with the stress and preserve the integrity of the true self. This could be thought of as a coping mechanism. . One of the main defences that we can employ is what winnicott called “compliance”, or behaviour motivated by a desire to please others rather than spontaneously express one’s own feelings and ideas. One of the most common of these is to develop a false self as a response to an environment that no longer feels safe to them in the way they need it to.. This response of the self to its now unsafe felt environment can lead to an overdevelopment (under parental pressure) of certain aspects of the self at the expense of other aspects – of the full potential of the self for example that can be sacrificed in favour of more familial or social needs– producing thereby an abiding distrust of what emerges spontaneously from the individual himself or herself. Such people suffer inwardly from a sense of being empty, dead or “phoney” as the energy that is bound up in the true identity is no longer available to them. Here it can be seen that although the false self is defensively employed to preserve the real individuals sense of aliveness what happens is a loss of that aliveness. Instead of living from the true self with its spontaneous contact to it’s own body and the body’s natural energy the individual lives out a kind of mask of behaviour that complies with others’ expectations. Winnicott saw this as an unconscious process: not only others but also the person himself would mistake his False Self for his real personality. But even with the appearance of success, and of social gains, he would feel unreal and lack the sense of really being alive or happy.

Susie Orbach, a much documented psychotherapist, went on to extend Winnicott’s account of how environmental failure can lead to an inner splitting of mind and body,[16] so as to cover the idea of the False Body — a falsified sense of one’s own body.[17]Orbach saw the female false body in particular as built upon identifications with others, at the cost of an inner sense of authenticity and reliability.[35]

From this basic insecurity people can no longer relate together as separate persons because it no longer feels safe to do so. this is because they cannot distinguish a distinct idea of who they are and who they are not. From this position a relationship to the other person becomes impossible. To understand that we are both not isolates in our relationships existing in our own bodies alone but neither are we parts of the same body requires an internalised sense of boundary between people. but if a person can no longer trust what they are feeling then how could such a negotiation be achieved with any degree of accuracy?

Breaking up a monolithic but false body-sense in the process of Mind/Body work or therapy could allow for the emergence of a range of authentic (even if often painful) body feelings in the person.[36] and over time and in this way

the capacity to experience ourselves as individual persons in our own right with other individual persons who exist in their own right too could become possible again.. extending outward in our relationships In response to incorporating the difference of the other not me person we can now grow in ourselves. our sense of our personality can become enriched in this way, our egos strengthened and a lost vitality returned. Winnicott wrote that “a word like self…knows more than we do.”.[39] He meant that, while philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas about the self could be very complex and arcane, with a great deal of specialised jargon, there was a pragmatic usefulness to the ordinary word “self” with its range of traditional meanings. For example, where other psychoanalysts used the Freudian terminology of ego and id to describe different functions of a person’s psychology, Winnicott at times used “self” to refer to both.

Although many psychologists may differ in their ideas about how emotional problems in life develop and how they might be understood one thing we can all agree on is the importance of living our lives from both our minds and our bodies. what I am suggesting is that to live this way is to give due respect to this mind/body connection from which we may then begin to live authentically in response to what life offers us.. This is to live out our spontaneous feelings, expressions, and initiatives which in turn fosters confidence in our own bodies and how they feel. We can then also form confidence in our own feelings from the assumption that nothing bad will happen when we express how and what we feel. Also that our feelings don’t seem dangerous or problematic both to us or to others. . From this assumption of trust in who we are and how we are received we no longer need to put undue attention into controlling or avoiding how we feel but instead experience through our bodies the sense that we are real, that we exist and that our feelings and actions have meaning. These experiences are as always felt through our bodies. People who seem unable to feel spontaneous, alive or real to themselves anywhere, in any part of their lives, yet who manage to put on a successful “show of being real”. inwardly would feel bored, empty, dead, or “phoney”

Breaking up a monolithic but false body-sense in the process of therapy or of a mind/body work could allow for the emergence of a range of authentic (even if often painful) body feelings and aim toward the recovery of these lost feelings and the energy bound up with them. This would return the person back to a state of original health typified by a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive.For the self is a very important part of mental and emotional well-being which plays a vital role in creativity. The sense of feeling real, feeling in touch with others and with one’s own body and its processes can now be seen to be essential for living a happy life.