Blog

Mentally rehearse/imagine these situations happening to you, and pay particular attention to what you feel in your physical body even as you just pretend your way through these hypothetical scenarios:

1. You return to the lot where you parked your car before meeting friends for dinner. Your car is not there.

2. Your phone rings at midnight, and on the other end of the line is a police officer. There has been a serious automobile accident; one of your children is involved.

3. Your girlfriend of one year asks you to lunch, and there’s a sense of purpose and expectancy in her voice. Because you’re crazy about her, you’d been thinking of engagement for quite some time, but it seems now that she’s going to beat you to the punch. Excited, you meet her at the restaurant, and during lunch, she calmly lays out her thoughts that each of you should see other people and perhaps transition to “more of a friendship.”

We’re all different, so I can’t guarantee that you’d feel exactly what I would feel in these situations. But my hunch is that most of you would feel something, in each of these scenarios, that feels a little like a chop in the stomach–a twinge, a kick, a knot, some sort of bowling-ball-in-the-belly feeling. Another common feeling is a twinge or contraction at the back of the throat, as though you’ve eaten a very, very sour pickle.

These three scenarios involve loss (loss of a car, loss of control/wellbeing/peace of mind, loss of a significant other.) A very simple, clear diagram of what our reaction to loss looks like can be found in this scenario: imagine a two-year-old, contentedly playing with a beloved toy, laughing, smiling. Now, take the toy away. You’ll get a reaction that looks something like this:

Before we develop ego structure, we experience loss as loss. Babies will be angry, hurt, full of rage, but what they will not do is write story (because they don’t have the ego structure required to write story.)  An example of story would be: “My parents are so inconsiderate; God, I have awful parents. I am the victim of terrible parents. I’m going to suffer terribly as an adult and incur countless therapy bills because my parents are so selfish and inconsiderate and narcissistic that they took my toys away from me. I can’t be happy now because my parents have damaged me. I will never be able to be happy now.”

Kids don’t do that. When you’re a little kid it looks like this:

1. Toy=happy. Happy with toy.

2. Toy gone!

3. Unhappy! Need toy back. Return toy, you miserable fuckers! I will kill you to get that toy back. Give it back now!

The reaction to loss is quite simple before we have ego structure, before the upper levels of the brain start to develop and we begin to imagine ourselves as separate from our surroundings. Afterwards? Our convoluted, complicated reaction to loss is the thing that keeps hundreds of thousands of therapists in business (including some of my best friends.)

What we experience as “emotion” is comprised of two components: a physical component, located within the physical body, which I tried to help you find in the exercise above, and a cognitive or cortical (from cerebral cortex) component. For adults in scenario 3, for example, the girlfriend who proposes seeing other people, the physical component will likely be felt as a kick in the gut, or a gulp in the throat, or a stopping of the heart, or something in the mid body from throat to belly somewhere.  The cortical component might look like this:

option a: “That BITCH. After all I did for her. I gave my eyeteeth for this relationship during the last year, and this is the thanks I get. She’s an ungrateful, stuck-up cunt. I’m glad to be rid of her. I deserve better.”

option b: “Oh god. Again. See, this just proves I’m unlovable. This is the third girl that’s broken up with me in ten years. I will never be able to find a relationship. I’m doomed to a life of singleness. I feel like damaged goods.”

option c: “I didn’t really love her anyway. I knew something wasn’t quite clicking; this wasn’t really what I wanted. I never really felt very deeply for her….”

And options d through z, and beyond.

For most of us, emotions consist of an instantaneous physical response, which is clear, sharp, but non-specific (it might be negative, positive, or neutral, but not much more than that) plus a delayed cortical response, the “story” we write in the cerebral cortex, the more evolved part of the brain. The physical response comes from the limbic brain and from the amygdala in particular. The limbic response is “fast and non-specific,” and the cortical response is “slow and detailed.” We put our emotional experience together by combining these two parts of the brain. Let me see if I can give you a clear, easy example of how this works.

You’re walking through a garden with your beloved. Suddenly, there’s a rustling through the grass and you catch something in your peripheral vision; “Lydia” shrieks and jumps several feet into the air.

That’s the amygdala working, the long-range danger radar. Anything scurrying about underfoot catches our attention and provokes a response in the body, a response so fast we don’t have to think about it.

“Darling,” you say, “it’s just a garter snake! No need for concern! We’re more of a danger to him than he is to us!” That’s the cortex working. The analysis of the snake’s patterns, the logical determination that there’s no need for fear, that’s the upper levels of the cerebral cortex at work. Slow, but specific.

If you’re paying attention, however, you’ll notice that your heart is still thumping and your breathing, perspiration, blood pressure and body temperature are all still elevated, even though the cortex has determined the specific nature of the snake. That’s because the body reacts to fear without thinking; before the cortex gets involved, your adrenal glands have already squeezed powerful stimulants into the bloodstream, and the aftermath of that will take at least several minutes to clear, deadly threat or not.

The difference between “darling, that’s a garter snake; nothing to fear” and “darling, that’s a boa constrictor, I’m so sorry; I guess this is goodbye” is too long for most of the body’s defense systems to endure. So the amygdala and the limbic brain have a direct impact on our emotional state, even before we think about what we’re feeling. But the way we flesh out the body reaction with cerebral elaboration plays a role too.

You’ll notice that when you awake from a dream which is very distressing/sad or terrifying and fearful, that even after you realize, “oh, it was just a dream,” you will FEEL sad or FEEL frightened for a good four or five minutes after you recognize you were dreaming. In some cases that mood will continue into the first several hours of the day. That’s because the chemical imprint of what you experienced is in your body, and it’s “real.”  The fact that your pre-frontal cortex recognizes what’s going on as “imagined” doesn’t in any way overrule the physical reality of the body. If someone dear to you died in your dream, you can feel the physical reaction to that death in your body even as the cortical portion of your brain says, “this actually didn’t happen.”

In Touch Practice, we work with emotional experiences, especially grief and loss, in the body, using the body, moving away from the “stories” we write about what has happened and towards the physical sensation of the event itself. I call this “emotional proprioception,” the ability to locate an emotion within the body. Rather than talking or thinking about what a bitch one’s ex-wife was, how much it hurt that your boyfriend died, how unfairly your boss is treating you, how disappointing it was that you didn’t get a second date or how hurt you were to be picked last for kickball, regardless, we try to locate those events within the body, as sensation within the body, and work on them using touch rather than by talking or thinking about them.

Case in point: the advent of my being sexually abused by a teacher in high school consisted of him placing his right hand on my left thigh as I sat in the passenger seat of his car. My left thigh, to this day, is sensitive to touch. When I have a massage, my left thigh is often ticklish. During massage, I find touch to the left thigh very challenging and I often will warn my masseur that I need care and special consideration in that part of the body. And if they ask me why I tell them flat out why. That is a place in the body where I work that out in the body. I have told the story of having been a sexually abused kid a hundred times; I don’t need to tell that story anymore. The people who know me all know that story. What I still need to do, however, is to work the physical residue out of my physical body using physical touch. And I’m getting there, slowly. My left thigh is slowly getting friendlier to being touched.

People are sometimes frustrated in Touch Practice because I don’t let them talk as much as they would like to. Seriously, I have frustrated dozens upon dozens of men by not letting them talk as much as they want to. I don’t always let them go into the “story” of what has happened in their lives, because I’m more interested in the story that their physical body will tell me if I just hold it and touch them. I don’t always let them retreat into the cerebral cortex because in some ways the amygdala is closer to the core of the animal. The first thing on the scene was the body. The first “memory” we have of many events is the physical memory, not the story we write about what happened.

I’m a bodyworker, not a psychotherapist. And while we work on our issues somewhat by talking about our thinking, in psychotherapy, we also work out our issues by touching our way into, through and out of our physical bodies. There is a record of every single thing that has ever happened to you, stored within your physical body, ready to be “told” to anyone who is ready to “listen” using touch. The story is told without words, without thinking, without translation. It is a direct, chemical, muscular record of your life, and it is available to people who listen with their hands rather than with their ears.

Be well brothers.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

Touch Practice is a sacred practice for me, and part of that is keeping confidences sacred. While a name and e-mail address are required to post a comment, feel free to use just your first name, or a pseudonym if you wish. Your e-mail address will never be seen by or shared with anyone. It is used to prevent spam and inappropriate comments from appearing in the blog. I’d really like to hear from you!