Why Do Therapists Like to Talk About the Body?
Why do you ask me about my body all the time, a client asked last Thursday. She was a bit exasperated by her inability to clearly articulate what her body sensations are like, powered by her own internal imperative to speak clearly, a demand I feel is completely unreasonable when it comes to the body. I briefly explained my interest in her feelings as they manifest in her body, she agreed that it is, indeed, important and we moved on with our session.
Her question stuck with me. It’s not something I’m asked about frequently in such a direct way, but I realized that many of my clients, at least in the beginning of our work, express surprise when I turn my attention to their bodily experience. I suppose the popular imagination dictates that therapists ought to be preoccupied with the mind, the popularity of CBT partially rests on this idea that it’s our thoughts that are the problem and that if only we rationally deal with the world, we won’t be experiencing any particularly intense suffering. But popular imagination is wrong, as it so often is. Reason plays such a tiny role in our psychological lives that it borders on insignificant.
The more neuroscience develops and the more we read and discover psychologists that were exiled from the scientific mainstream of the last century because they were “unscientific”, the more we start to understand that our psychic apparatus isn’t only mental, but deeply embodied and profoundly beyond words. Embodiment doesn’t mean “mind + body”, but “mindbody”, both at once, one whole. Psychologists like Freud, Melanie Klein, William James, John Dewey, Kelly, Lacan and others are often maligned by the kind of psychologist who sits in the lab, feels very rational and scientific, and thinks that letting mice run through mazes offers useful insight on people’s career choices or whatnot. (Spoiler alert: people are radically different from poor animals abused in labs.)
The thinkers I listed above all had rather different ideas about the human psyche, but they all knew that what drives our behavior isn’t reason or logic, but those parts of us that are not easily expressible in words and, therefore, largely unconscious. A British psychologist Donald Bannister titled an article on constructivist theory of emotion The Logic of Passion, indicating wonderfully that those deeper, murkier layers of our experience follow their own logic and don’t care much for formal logic. Jacques Lacan famously compared our unconscious mind to gravity – this unrelenting, omnipresent field that directs all our conscious activity but remains elusive and invisible to our own eyes. In other words, no matter how logical and rational you think you are, all of your logic rests on invisible assumptions about the topic. Therefore, very often, what we mean by “rational” or “logical” is just an unreflective misuse of an otherwise useful tool.
Those dark, deep layers of our experience often carry the information that needs to be worked through and dealt with, but those layers don’t speak English - or any other language you can find a course for. Our unconscious minds have their own language, one that has to be understood, but it’s a language that’s not formalized, an alien set of symbols that can feel disturbing to our conscious mind. Were you ever disturbed by a dream or a fantasy? Or a bodily reaction to another person? When we don’t understand our body, we interpret every discomfort as a sign of danger – what a wasted opportunity to get to know yourself and act more wisely!
In another blog post, I defined trauma as an intense event that destroys our ability to make sense of it, something that renders us speechless and “languageless”. That means that trauma lives in those layers that exist beyond conventional languages, out of reach of logic and reason, but as powerful, if not more. Trauma lives and acts, but if we don’t pay attention to the body, we can’t understand its ways. And if we can’t understand its ways, we can’t heal. If we want to access the trauma, those are the layers we have to plunge into and understand.
Put trauma side for a second, as this is not everyone’s problem. Here's a simple, even banal question: how many times you knew what the right, logical thing to do is, but you did something completely different? Every one of those times, it was your unconscious mind that won.
I suppose a careful reader already concluded that the body has something to do with our unconscious mind. That is correct. It must be said, however, that it’s not just the how our unconscious mind expresses itself, and that merely focusing on the body isn’t going to get you to where you want to go. You need more but focusing on the body is certainly the right place to start for most people.
Earlier, I mentioned the term embodiment. What does it mean to say that our cognition is embodied? It means that it’s reflected in body sensations, feelings, gestures, etc. but also in our memories, dreams, thoughts. In all of our experience. In constructivist psychology, we think of embodiment as being reflected in our idea of what a construct is. For construing, as a psychological process, words or memories or body sensations are all the same – they are elements of constructs. Words are perhaps easier to understand, but they all reflect the same underlying process which is construing, making sense of the world. Meaning is not about the mind, not about the body ether – the mind and the body are just different ways in which we articulate meaning and classify our experience. Our experience is embodied, total, holistic. That means that we can’t only focus on the body, but on the totality of our experiences. If you have a feeling, it carries a memory, it’s reflected in your posture, movements, thoughts – all of that together makes up who you are. It’s not just your brain that remembers, it’s also your body. It’s not just your mind that speaks, it’s also your body. Because we culturally privilege words, in therapy we privilege the other aspects of our experiences so that we can achieve balance and understanding between these.
What makes the body so unique is that it’s a channel for secret communication. Our bodies are very much socially shaped. Some body types are more desirable than others, which impacts who we see ourselves and how much we value ourselves. Some bodies are more athletically inclined than others, which also adds to their perceived sense of value – and their use. This is, naturally, a complex topic, one that many of my clients wrestle with, but there is more. Understanding your body beyond social conditioning is the doorway to understanding your psyche.
The body is also a tool for communication. Again, consider a banal example: flirting is communication, and it’s largely about the body. How it positions itself in relation to the other person, what it conveys with touch, gaze or just a smile, etc. It’s a form communication that lends itself to numerous misunderstandings, but it is nonetheless a form of communication and an important one at that. The human body is a source of pleasure – think about food, sex, exercise. It’s what our existence depends on: to say anything, your body needs to cooperate. To breathe, walk…. The body is necessary. Yet we often approach it with the socially conditioned critical lens. Rarely do we take the time to feel gratitude because our legs successfully carry us all day, but we’re very likely to pass by a mirror and identify twenty flaws that need to be fixed. Even though we treat them with such lack of gratitude, our bodies still work for us, deeply underappreciated, and often discontent. That alone means it deserves more attention, but that’s just the beginning.
In psychotherapy, the body is primarily that – a tool for communication. Sometimes, a client’s posture will change, and that will convey more than their words. When we work online, sometimes a client will hide their body and just show themselves neck up, other times, they will “zoom out” and I will see their whole body. This is usually an unconscious process that supplements the spoken words and gives context. In a sense, whereas we can carefully choose our words, we can’t carefully choose our involuntary body movements, so our bodies speak the truth even when we successfully gaslight ourselves into believing what feels good/right to believe.
The body is also a source of knowledge, although this is hidden, cyphered knowledge. When I teach my Mindfulness of the Body 101 course, we learn how to understand the language of our bodies and then translate their messages to our conscious minds. When you feel that sinking feeling in your stomach, it’s your body communicating something. When you feel pressure on your chest, it could be an invitation to remove that burden. When your throat closes and you can’t speak, your body could be trying to say that silence is preferable.
One way to look at this is to imagine different layers, different currents in the ocean. Our verbal and our nonverbal aspects are like that: they flow and participate in the world, but when there’s no communication between them, we end up in trouble: one current carries us left, the other wants us to go right. Not everything our bodies say is true, just like not every thought is worth listening to, but when these two layers of experience exist separated, without bridges that connect them or other channels of communication, we reduce the wholeness of our personality to just one part. Then we invest and waste energy trying to push away the other part – a battle we are doomed to lose, but still pursue.
Becoming more aware of how your body reacts to thoughts, memories, situations, or other people is the first step in building those bridges, because you are starting to understand what that other, quieter but powerful side of you thinks. You start to understand how you truly feel about your partner or boss only when you start listening to your body and give up on your mind’s preconceived notions on how you’re supposed to be feeling. Once again, the body takes you closer to the truth of your lived experience.
Because our bodies circumvent the annoying tendency of our minds to impose all kinds of shoulds, musts, and oughts onto our experience, paying attention to how they feel and what they’re communicating is paramount if we want to understand ourselves as we are, not as we like to think we are.
The body brings us closer to the truth. That alone makes it an invaluable resource in therapy.
