About therapy

01On the mechanisms

To make clear why we look for the answer to many problems in the body, let us remember how our body reacts, for example, to a sudden, unexpected loud shout or a blow. Yes! It shrinks! Shrinking is the body’s natural and understandable reaction to aggression. To be more precise, it is the body tightening so that it can go on to respond to the situation, in answer to the aggression: flight or attack. But that is, so to speak, the healthy way things could develop… Can we react adequately here and now, yet in a way that lets us assert ourselves and show self-respect?

In real life we less often have the chance to answer an outside message adequately. As a rule, a whole mountain of restrictions rises in front of us: you mustn’t, good children don’t do that, it’s frightening, I can’t, what will happen, will they stop loving me, how will I look, what will they say, I’ll make a fool of myself, they won’t like me, and so on. Then we begin to lose the ground under our feet, we lose our confidence and our sense of reality, we stifle our response, and often the situation itself.

It is good if afterwards we still get the chance to live through the situation again: to cry, to curse in our hearts the one who hurt us, to scream, to say NO. Of course we can take it out on the person close to us, on a colleague, on a neighbour, but that will hardly make us feel better. For years, even for decades, we carry the traces of insults, despair, anger, disappointments, betrayals, lies and infidelities.

What form do these traces take?

The form of so-called zones of blocks and tension in the body. A block is chronic tension in the body behind which there is a live problem. Live means still alive, not worked through: a problem that still troubles us at a conscious or unconscious level.

02On trauma

So a person has suffered a psychological trauma and the body has shrunk. Where exactly does it shrink? If someone swings at you, you will reflexively tense your knees, diaphragm and neck, pull your head back to protect yourself, hunch your shoulders and, if the roots of your aggression are not suppressed, clench your fists. The body knows much better than we do how to defend itself. That is why the body finds its own answer to every situation: a posture or a movement.

We have to react, however, with the permission of our inner judge (who is the product of what we have been taught so far). And sometimes he says: “Be quiet! It isn’t right to react like that. What you feel now doesn’t matter. Quick, smile.” And by the evening the body is already beginning to fall ill. If you are lucky, the problem is resolved through pain (this is called psychosomatics).

If you are afraid of being hurt and have to live through fear again and again, over time the body of the unhappy, submissive person will, for ever or for a long time, take on the shape of a hurt, oppressed and frightened person. From then on everyone will allow themselves to insult and hurt you. It is like walking into the town square with a placard: “Anyone may hit me!” And there will be people willing to do it.

03On childhood

It is especially sad, but from early childhood we learn to suppress the natural needs and reactions of our body. A child screaming with hunger can hardly understand that feeding time has not yet come, or that mum is busy now and it will have to wait. A baby cannot know the meaning of the words “stop whining”: behind the grizzling and whimpering there may be something very simple, a wish to be cuddled and comforted, to feel the warmth and smell of its mother. The mother, for her part, gets angry at the child’s lack of understanding. And the baby gets its first lesson, which it will remember well.

04On the armour

As we grow up we manage to accumulate a good deal of tension we have never worked through. It builds our protective armour, which keeps us from having to live through disappointment and fear again. But the armour begins to protect us not only from negative experience, but from everything that might happen to us. This is how people with stifled feelings appear: people who forbid themselves to love, to rejoice, to trust, who allow themselves no pleasure.

05On energy

The conductor of the emotional information about the traces of pain in the body is energy. The word energy, in the context of psychotherapy, is used in the work of the founder of the body-oriented approach, Wilhelm Reich’s pupil Alexander Lowen, and of their other followers. What happens in the body, in terms of energy, when a person suffers a psychological trauma? The problem that has not been worked through holds the energy back, and it stays in the body, forming a block.

The body builds its protective armour, and the person takes on a particular way of moving, bearing, reacting, behaving, feeling, and a way of life. All this to cause the “armour” as little inconvenience as possible. That is understandable. Try to imagine moving about dressed in a suit of iron mail weighing 20 kilograms. Like it or not, you will find it hard to dance or to walk as lightly as you would like. The armour constantly reminds you how you must not live, what you must not allow yourself, so that you never feel pain again.

And the person begins to avoid situations where they might meet pain and suffering again. Someone lied to several times stops trusting. Someone who has been abandoned hurries to abandon first. The frightened one stays at home and does not show their face outside. All of them believe they make these decisions themselves. In fact they are guided by the traces of pain, suffering and disappointment hidden in the body, which remind them of themselves at every opportunity. That is exactly why solving a problem at the level of consciousness requires the body to take part too, with its movements and its limits.

06On the pressure cooker

Blocked energy can stay in the body for many years. The result is like a pressure cooker forgotten on the stove. It is clear what will happen next. We often carry such a pressure cooker inside us, and it is madness not to want to part with it.

07On reliving

During therapy the whole range of emotions once suppressed is lived through again. Anger, aggression, shame, joy, the wish to please, to be noticed, recognised, and many others. We can once more experience movements we long ago forbade ourselves or “forgot”. To ask sincerely and see that we will not necessarily be rejected, that we can get what we want and nothing terrible will happen. To make someone believe us and follow us, not only in order to possess, control and rule them, but to feel real pleasure in being with them, in trusting them, in being liked. To answer sincerely without fearing that we will be rejected and hated. To say NO, to say YES if we truly want to, not just to please.

From this follows a widening of the personal field of possibilities for coping and moving. Good planning of actions and decisions. Grounding, so that we can check our reality against the facts. Working out new, more successful strategies. Then the therapy can be considered complete.

08On suffering and discomfort

It is a sign that your essence, your soul, is not happy and is trying to wake you up to new realities and possibilities of living and thinking. The fear of leaving the defences, the comfort and the gains of our old, stereotyped patterns of behaviour sometimes makes change seem almost impossible. By working with these fears, dethroning unproductive thoughts and experiencing “new”, different feelings, change can be made considerably easier. Emotional transformation and the breaking down of old myths, traumas and armour demand devotion to self-discovery, come with intense experiences, and do not happen easily, as if with a magic wand.