Lifestyle Choices

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), a pupil of Freud, extended analytical ideas on repression of thought and feeling to include the physical level. He showed that people literally tense against an uncomfortable or socially unacceptable thought,by tensing muscles and thereby creating an “armouring”, rendering the body physically less vulnerable. When the body is harder, the person feels less vulnerable emotionally. Many people are aware of their bodies tensing in a tense situation, for instance, their necks stiffening in a moment of anxiety. Lowen and Pierrakos, both patients and pupils of Reich, took the best ideas of Reich and developed what they called “bioenergetics“. In this form of psychotherapy they made use of physical movement to help release old tension patterns, which Reich had recognized to be related to old patterns of thought and feeling.

For instance, when you cry you hold your jaw back and when you are angry you hold your jaw forwards. Even if you have not noticed this as a conscious objective observation, when you see someone’s jaw go forwards you will probably know, perhaps without being aware of why you know, that that person is beginning to get angry. The person who holds his jaw forwards perpetually tends to believe the world will fight him and that he must fight back or resist, whereas the person who holds his jaw backwards tends to believe the world will hurt him and that he must retreat.

In this way physical stance is related to attitudinal stance, or character. A good bioenergetic body-reader will be able to tell a fair amount about somebody’s character without having seen that person before, simply by looking at his body. Sometimes this amazes people who have never before seen how much a body can reveal.

There are three main ways of working bioenergetically.

1 To increase the ease and depth of breathing It is ancient knowledge that breathing and feeling are closely related. An example is that moment before a car crash or a near miss, when you hold your breath, concentrate on the best avoidance and feel very little — this is sensible since feeling fully the terror of death at that moment might convert a possibility into a probability. When you are safe, you take a deep breath, sigh, and suddenly you are flooded with delayed fear which makes you feel Weak. Another example is your breathing pattern while watching a thriller. In a moment of suspense, you hold your breath in order to reduce the feeling of fear, then take a deep breath when the tension is relieved. The relationship between breathing and feeling is used therapeutically to help someone connect with deeper feelings through breathing more fully. More relaxed and full breathing is related to more energy felt in the body.

2 To relax the tension of some of the muscles which “armour” the body “Armour”, or life stance, limits your flexibility of response and therefore your creativity, spontaneity and energetic capacity. Tension can be reduced by breathing more fully, or tension can be released by initially exaggerating the degree of tension.

The therapist working with John might describe his case: “John had rather a protruberant jaw and a kind of permanent stance of silent aggression. He was the tough, taciturn type.

I asked him to exaggerate the jutting of his jaw and make a sound; he was angry. A little later I pushed his jaw down and back, firmly but not hard, and asked him to breathe more deeply. After a while, tears began to well in his eyes and his jaw began to quiver, but in his inner view it was not acceptable for a man to cry (even though, intellectually, he disagreed with this idea) and so he could not let himself cry. He told me that his father never cried and was always tough and distant, “a hard man”. Then he began to feel what he had missed with his father—no warm contact, no softness, no tenderness — and he began to cry.”

3 To make sure there is good contact with the ground

As taught in Eastern sports of self-defence, if you stand your ground in a stable yet flexible posture, your opponent will find it hard to knock you over. Such a stance conveys confidence and non-rigid stability, which allows you to be able to take more feeling and excitement in your body without becoming hysterical, frightened or out of contact.

Much of the emphasis in bioenergetics is on the need to increase your capacity for feeling and excitement. The body is seen as a container for feeling and has the capacity tosqueeze feeling (by blocking it with tension) or to let feeling flow. Since we cannot be happy without feeling (since happiness is a feeling), the aim is to develop the capacity to loosen your body so that you can feel when you choose to.

Increasing body energy is particularly appropriate for depression, for which bioenergetic exercise can be very useful (see Short-term explorative psychotherapy, overleaf). One of the difficulties with bioenergetics has been its particular use of language, explaining processes in terms of “energy” blocks, and even calling itself “bioenergetics“. Although this may make sense to someone experiencing this kind of therapy, it has created a credibility gap with medicine, science and those wishing for a more exact and mechanical understanding. I have therefore translated it into more mechanically understandable terms. From these ideas and others, many forms of body-work have developed.As they can be a powerful and fast form of psychotherapy, the same precautions apply as in psychodrama.

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