🔗 Share this article

I recently came back from jogging. It’s shocking to state those words. It seems it was likely a decade since the previous time. Yet It came to my attention that my tests indicate elevated cholesterol, and the recommendation was to engage in vigorous activity on a consistent basis.

This is the first time in my existence that the reason to be active has been my bodily well-being. During earlier years, I exercised because I desired to lose weight. I also jogged to alleviate nervousness – I was merely escaping from those feelings, without confronting it. At other times, I ran because I wanted to get better in running. It signified what it meant to me at that time to build a superior lifestyle.

Jogging with altered intent currently prompted contemplation about the ways I’ve connected with my physique during my years and the way it’s evolving as I transition from being a young person to midlife. I believe not I’ve valued my own body, not truly. I’ve appreciated it solely for its functions and the aims it provided: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; achieving a quicker five kilometers. Up to now, I’ve not understood that my body is me, it is my life, rather than a tool for outcomes.

A lot has been written over the centuries about the separation involving physical and mental aspects – a topic you will be relieved to know, I’m not going to precis here. What has struck me most intriguing is Sigmund Freud’s view that mind and body are developmentally integrated from the beginning, because physical maturation demands psychological development and vice versa. The newborn’s corporeal feelings – for example the corporeal experience of hunger – drive the mind to develop the capacity to perceive hunger as an emotion that can be sated by a feed; and the psychological solace and satisfaction repeatedly brought by meal after meal feeds the infant’s psyche in the same way the nutrition fuels them bodily. Likewise psychological experiences – for instance the urge to get up and attain a goal, and the persistence to try again and again – are why and how physical strength increases. Since infancy, our body and mind are interconnected in reciprocal evolution as integrated as a double helix.

But I’ve observed, in sessions with my therapist, that my consciousness and physique can be in a different kind of relationship – a more separated and more exploitative. My psyche can use my body to hold and display elements that my consciousness deems unacceptable or unbearable. In analysis it emerged that there are particular emotional states that I am afraid I cannot bear; in place of sensing them mentally, I unintentionally shift them to my physical self, where they get stuck as corporeal issues.

I previously experienced this with indigestion – which had nothing to do with my diet, but acted as a type of bodily backlash of the harsher emotions I was unable to process psychologically. It wasn’t an intentional act, but once it was raised into my consciousness in sessions, and my dread and sensitivity and anger and alarm were experienced and expressed verbally rather than transformed into corporeal symptoms, it disappeared. It’s uncommon for me from stomach problems now.

The worst time I had this terrible acid reflux, I didn’t sleep for several nights in a row. I felt I was slipping away from my mental stability. I consulted my doctor, who organised all sorts of scans and tests, but everything was physically wrong. It was another doctor who suggested that the root could be psychological. My psychoanalyst concurred. I was surprised, but I also knew it to be true.

When a patient experiences a bodily issue, they might feel insulted upon hearing that it could have a mental root. It can seem this as being disrespected, the idea that their condition is fabricated. Certainly that does happen – some face their suffering discounted or misdiagnosed. Yet occasionally it might be that the bodily signs are real – without doubt – and the origin is psychological, the unconscious employing the body to convey certain suffering or fury or whichever sentiment the mind fails to handle. At times, we might assume our experience is only valid if manifested through the body. We often undervalue our psychological well-being as individuals, in social contexts and culturally; how else can we allow the terrible reduction of mental health treatments in public healthcare?

Life lessons have taught me that a better life cannot be built when we are stuck unawares in modes of connection, internally and with others, that stem from disrespect, manipulation and dealings. These interactions tend to be simpler to recognize “externally” in broader culture. It’s perhaps harder to consider where they come from, and to recognise these forms within ourselves and within our closest relationships, in the workings of our mental lives.

But it’s valuable to continue. After donning my trainers back on after such a long decade, venturing out not for bodily change, or to escape a feeling, or to surpass a 5km time, {it