Finding Your Body

In the first three minutes of the first day of my undergraduate neuroscience course the professor asked the class to weigh in on a question: what percent are we our brains? About half the class raised their hands to vote that we are 100% brain, including myself. A few classmates wanted to speak about the existence of the soul, a few others about the body. Of course we have a body, but the brain tells the body what to do, was the leading consensus. Without getting too deep here into the psychological or medical aspects of the brain vs body debate– which is centuries old– I’d like to share the possibility that us humans are refreshingly not only 100% brain and this truth is key to supporting our mental health. A lot happened for me in the several years since that neuroscience class. I discovered yoga! Then I tried meditation and realized I could feel things happening inside my body, like my diaphragm expanding as I breathed. I even learned that I could hear and feel my own heartbeat! I was a therapist and I became trained in ‘somatic experiencing’. In short, I found my body. 

This is a crucial time in the world of psychology as the concerning rise in mental illness has us doing our best work to uncover the underpinnings of mental health and the best ways we can support it. Why does this question that my professor asked stick with me? Because it continues to be relevant to the evolution of therapy. Like other fields, psychology has undergone its fair share of paradigm shifts bringing us to where we are now. Freud invented “psychoanalysis” in 1896. He had a medical degree, but was attempting to be a pioneer in the area of the brain, and the subconscious corners of the mind, to address troubling emotions. So Freud wanted to separate from biology, and his medical profession, because he was trying to chart new territory. Essentially, so that psychoanalysis and bringing attention to the importance of the mind could continue into something great, he had to detach from the physical. This kicked off the superiority of the mind over the body. Jump a few decades past Freud, and the mid-20th century was most interested in behavior, what makes us do what we do. Then, in the mid-late 20th century began the cognitive revolution. Psychology was influenced by new perspectives in fields like linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science. Only looking at behaviors was getting boring and it was more interesting to know how we process information and specifically how our thinking patterns could be contributing to psychological distress. This is where we find ourselves now in psychology, though we’re holding a magnifying glass to some specific complex cognitive functions. The one I’m most interested in: emotion. 

But are we 100% our brains? If the answer is no, and we are our bodies too, then our felt emotions may stretch beyond a ‘cognitive function’. There are about six theories on emotion at the moment, and luckily many support each other. There is some controversy around the order of events that result in the experience of an emotion. Nevertheless, we agree the body is somehow greatly involved. Raja Selvam, PhD says emotion can be thought of as an assessment of the impact of a situation on a person’s brain and body physiology. A more recent timeline: In 1970 Pat Ogden founded the Sensorimotor therapy Institute after noticing how her patients’ physical patterns were connected to their psychological struggles. Around the same time Peter Levine founded Somatic Experiencing after studying how animals would rebound from traumatizing events while people seemed to get stuck in them and demonstrate post-traumatic stress symptoms.

In 1994 Stephen Porges introduced Polyvagal Theory, having researched the topic for five decades, and shed light on the physiological connectedness of the mind and body. In 2015 psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk released his book “The Body Keeps the Score” which has since sold over 3 million copies. The book explores the findings of his trauma research and discusses emotions as having physiological, cognitive, and behavioral components. In sum, the body comes back into the conversation. Many people say it never exited it in the first place, but as far as mainstream psychotherapy is concerned, it was definitely not a focus. 

You may have heard the therapist buzz phrase, ‘embodying emotions’. Technically, we embody emotions all day long. Meaning, we have body language, facial expressions, sensations inside, that match our emotions. Our terminology backs this up. For instance, take the phrase “jumping for joy”. It implies that when we are joyful we might literally jump or bounce on the balls of our feet or feel that we could jump, maybe clap too? It's upward, it's buoyant. Now, the opposite, and perhaps a difficult image to hold in mind: the image of grief. Cue– falling onto the knees, hands holding up the head, weeping. It's downward, it's heavy. Consider that you hear something sad and put your hand on your heart. Literally, with your body, you are supporting yourself in that emotion of sadness.

Why does this matter? Because if we believe that emotions connect to body language or desired gestures and movement, then maybe we can believe that there are inner sensations there as well (maybe you’ve felt them: a lump in your throat, butterflies in your stomach). And if we believe that then we can believe that the body is a major part of us, holding our emotions and communicating information to us, all day long. Brain, 100%? I was so wrong. Therapy can help you answer some key questions we should all be asking ourselves. What is the information my body is communicating to me? What do I do with this information? The same way we recruit our minds to support our cognition and therefore our mental health, (think: a gratitude exercise), perhaps we can recruit our bodies to support its own sensations, to feel our emotions, to feel better in the end. The only way out is through. 

Somatic Experiencing is one example of a “bottom-up” or body-based therapy modality which as a school of thought is more interested in your nervous system and the experience of you noticing it, than what you think or why. I love the term bottom-up because it mirrors the methodology which is that we start focused on the body and, rather than ignore the mind, we find that the mind follows. In other words, mental peace, mental clarity, mental wellness may be just around the corner of a body-based technique. A therapist who enlists a bottom-up approach can be integral to improving your mental health because they can guide you to feel the entire way your emotions are showing up, not only what the emotion does in your mind. It may be surprising what the rest of you, the body, had going on without you realizing. 

When we tune into the body and get curious about its sensations, (particularly when guided by a therapist), we might notice some defenses, or physiological strategies enlisted to protect ourselves. Dr. Selvam, founder of ISP, a somatic modality, believes staying stuck in our defenses can interrupt typical processes “that are vital for brain and body regulation and physical and psychological well-being” (22). In therapy we can explore the question: do we need to be using these protective strategies? (tightening, clenching, constriction, to name just a few) When have these physiological ways of coping helped me survive, or feel safer, in the past? Do I need them right now? And if we pay attention to them for a moment, shifting attention out of the mind and to the body, do any sensations move or change? As patterns of body sensations shift, emotion shifts, maybe even more pervasive mental states. Finding your body may be the missing piece to finding mental wellness. 

Book Reference:

Selva, R. (2020). The practice of embodying emotions: A guide to integrating emotional and body awareness for psychological well-being. Routledge.

Visit this link to learn more about the author, Alexa Casale.