🔗 Share this article

I have just returned from a jog. It’s surprising to state those words. I think it might have been many years since my last. Yet It came to my attention that my tests indicate elevated cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to do sweaty exercise on a consistent basis.

This is the first time in my life that the driving force to work out has been my physical health. In my youth, I ran because I desired to slim down. I’ve also run to manage nervousness – I was merely escaping from the anxiety, instead of dealing with it. At other times, I ran because I sought to get better in running. This was what it meant to me at that time to create an improved existence.

Jogging with altered intent currently sparked reflection about the ways I’ve related with my physique over my lifetime and its transformation as I transition from youth to being a middle-aged person. I believe not I’ve valued my own body, not truly. I’ve valued it solely for its capabilities and the objectives it served me: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; completing a speedier 5K run. Until today, I failed to grasp that my body is me, it is my existence, as opposed to an instrument for achievements.

A lot has been explored for ages about the division of mind and body – which it’s reassuring to know, I’m not going to precis now. What I’ve found most compelling is the Freudian perspective that mental and physical selves are developmentally integrated right from the start, because bodily growth necessitates emotional evolution and conversely. The newborn’s bodily experiences – like the corporeal experience of hunger – motivate the brain to cultivate the capacity to recognise hunger as a feeling that may be satisfied by eating; and the mental reassurance and contentment regularly delivered by feed after feed feeds the infant’s psyche just as the nutrition nourishes them bodily. So too mental events – such as the urge to get up and reach for something, and the determination to persist through effort – are why and how physical strength increases. Starting at birth, our body and mind are intertwined in mutual development as connected as DNA strands.

However It’s become clear, in treatment with my psychoanalyst, that my consciousness and physique can be in a distinct connection – one less integrated and somewhat abusive. My psyche might utilize my physical self to store and express things that my psyche deems unwanted or unacceptable. During therapy it emerged how there are specific feelings that I am afraid I can’t handle; in place of feeling these psychologically, I subconsciously push them into bodily form, where they get stuck as corporeal issues.

I previously experienced digestive discomfort – which had nothing to do with food intake, but represented a form of corporeal reaction of the more acidic feelings I couldn’t digest psychologically. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but when it was brought to my attention in sessions, and my anxiety and insecurity and frustration and panic could be felt and articulated rather than changed into corporeal symptoms, it vanished. I seldom experience with digestive issues currently.

The toughest period I had this terrible acid reflux, I failed to rest for multiple consecutive nights. I believed I was forfeiting my mind. I went to the GP, who organised multiple scans and tests, but no issues were found corporally problematic. The situation was another doctor who told me that the cause may be emotional. My psychoanalyst agreed. I was stunned, but I recognized it to be true.

When a patient is suffering a bodily issue, they can be offended upon hearing that it may have a psychological cause. They can experience as invalidation, the idea that their condition is imagined. And of course such cases occur – people can have their symptoms dismissed or misdiagnosed. Yet occasionally it’s possible that the corporeal issues exist – certainly – and the cause is psychological, the unconscious employing the body to express some pain or fury or whatever emotion the conscious self is unable to bear. At times, we might assume our feelings matters solely only through expression as bodily symptoms. We persistently neglect our psychological well-being personally, as a society and within our culture; how else would we tolerate the shocking killing-off of mental health treatments on the NHS?

Life lessons have shown me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable if we remain trapped without realization in ways of relating, within ourselves and socially, that originate in disrespect, exploitation and dealings. These dynamics are frequently more straightforward to identify “out there” in wider society. It may be less comfortable to consider where they come from, and to recognise these patterns within ourselves and within our closest relationships, in the dynamics of our mental lives.

Yet it’s valuable to continue. When I put my trainers again after such a long decade, venturing out not for bodily change, or to eliminate an emotion, or to improve a running record, {it