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Bodywork Therapies & Techniques and POIS / Re: Reichian Growth Work by Nick Totton
« Last post by truthaboutpois on April 15, 2015, 06:58:33 am »The 'Spastic I'
Unfortunately this empowering process has a frightening side to it. It also involves releasingthe fear of consequences which made us shut down our feeling in the first place: the fear of adult anger or coldness or withdrawal, the fear of a dangerous universe. Even more, it meanschanging the whole basis of our identity - the sense of 'I' upon which our life is founded.Opening up can sometimes seem like a threat to our very survival.As Freud pointed out, our sense of 'I' (he used the German
Ich
, though it was translated intoEnglish with the Latin word
Ego
) starts out in the
body
. As the infant grows, she begins toorganise bodily sensations and impulses into a whole, to 'take command' of them and developan image of 'me' - when she looks in the mirror she realises that this image is herself, that thisis how other people see her. In a healthy and supportive situation, she can grow into apowerful, realistic capacity for self-management, based on a strong but relaxed sense of identity and wholeness.Tragically, our culture doesn't generally let this process of self-management happen naturallyin its own time and rhythm. Most children are fed and put to bed and toilet-trained to fit inwith the needs and timetables of adults. They are often forced with threats to learn rigidcontrol of processes like excretion which should be developing spontaneously. Small childrenliterally
cannot
control their anal sphincters: the muscle-nerve connections aren't formed. Sothey must tense up the whole pelvic floor in a massive, straining effort to 'hold it in', a tensionwhich easily becomes chronic, extending to the whole body and tightening the breath, so thatthe person 'holds themselves in' on every level.
11Similarly, if our feeding is controlled by timetable, or if we are forced to eat food we don'tlike, then we 'swallow' an external regulation of our bodily processes. and have to swallowdown our rage if we want to get fed at all. These are all examples of the way in which thewhole business of attaining self- management in our own body, which can be a proud and joyful affirmation of autonomy, very easily gets entangled with patterns of denial andnegative, so that our very sense of 'I' is bound up with bodily tension. Like boys at an old-fashioned public school, we learn to 'get a grip on ourselves'. and to
identify
with that grip.Feeling tense becomes part of our continuous background experience, so that full relaxationseems like a threat to our existence, as if we are going to melt and drain away completely.Just as muscles are forced into chronic spasm in order to comply with external restrictionsrather than inner self-regulation, so our 'I' develops a 'spastic', uncontrollably rigid emotionaltone - a set of fixed attitudes towards the world and other people which we are unable to varyin response to changing circumstances. The 'I' becomes identical with the body armour.'Armouring' is a good name for this process of physical and emotional rigidification. Musclearmour, like its medieval counterpart, is hard, stiff, restrictive, suffocating; also like ironarmour, its original purpose was
defence
. We have no reason to feel guilty and inadequateabout being armoured; on the contrary, it represents our skill and courage to survive in verydifficult circumstances.We have always done the best we can. making a rational decision to protect our vulnerableinsides from an unsafe world - and. since we're still here. we have succeeded! But the pricehas been high in lost pleasure and potential. Now that we are bigger and stronger we have theoption of melting our armour, re-experiencing our feelings in a safer way - and letting our softpink insides out to play in the sunshine!Of course, even now there isn't always sunshine; it isn't always safe or appropriate to be soft.People often get the idea that Reichian-type therapy will leave them vulnerable to whatevercomes along. But the whole aim is to regain the power to choose, the power to be loving andopen, or to scorch with righteous rage' or to close off totally for a while. Very few of us haveaccess to the whole range of possible reactions.Another way in which muscular armouring resembles its iron counterpart is that it tends to bearranged in
segments
: bands of tension that wrap horizontally round the body. constrictingflow along the head-to-feet axis. If you imagine how a worm or snake moves, in wavy pulses,this gives a good image of the free unarmoured body. But if something pins the serpent downat one point in its length, the graceful undulation turns into jerking and thrashing.
12This is like a human body becoming armoured in one segment: it can no longer expand andpulse in a smooth, expressive. unified way - expression becomes distorted and ugly, bothphysically and emotionally.Most of us are armoured in more than one place. It's as if the snake is a child's wooden toy,split up into separate stiff lengths and able to bend only at the joints between the segments, ina parody of undulation. Having lost our sense of unity with the world through disjointedbreathing, we lose our sense of
internal
unity through the disjointing effects of the armouring.We'll look in much more detail later on at the segments and what they mean, but it's worthemphasising here that the specific details of armouring, as Reich described them or as we usethem doing therapy - so many segments in such and such places - are rules of thumb ratherthan gospel truth. The human organism is immensely rich and complex, full of subtlechannels, links, patterns and mirrorings, and each human individual is in many ways unique.But the more each of us is armoured, the less freedom of expression we have, the lessindividuality and richness; and the more we tend to operate in a groove to correspond to themechanical system of the segments. It's the armouring that has segments, not the person; andthe process of therapy is precisely one of rediscovering our individual uniqueness.
Armouring and Illness
We've used the word 'healthy' once or twice to describe the state of natural, unarmouredopenness. It's also the case that being armoured is the precondition for being ill in the medicalsense. When energy can't flow freely through the body, we get areas that are over-charged,where energy 'sticks' and stagnates, and other areas that are under-charged, where energy can'tget to at all. Over time, this sets up a chronic imbalance in the tissues and organs, whichallows infection or functional disorder to take hold.
13The sort of ailment which results is by no means random: our illnesses express, in vividdumb-show, the issues around which we tense and close off. To pick some trivial examples,most people who have a cough are suppressing anger - if you pretend to cough, and thenexaggerate it, you will find yourself roaring. Similarly, most colds have to do withunexpressed grief - the tears have to find some way out.This is a tremendous over-simplification: every illness is the expression of a complex andlongstanding set of issues. But we do see physical symptoms as the bodymind's attempt toresolve conflict, to break free from the constraints of the armouring. In Chapter 4 we shalllook in more detail at the relationship between specific illnesses and specific forms of armouring.
Unfortunately this empowering process has a frightening side to it. It also involves releasingthe fear of consequences which made us shut down our feeling in the first place: the fear of adult anger or coldness or withdrawal, the fear of a dangerous universe. Even more, it meanschanging the whole basis of our identity - the sense of 'I' upon which our life is founded.Opening up can sometimes seem like a threat to our very survival.As Freud pointed out, our sense of 'I' (he used the German
Ich
, though it was translated intoEnglish with the Latin word
Ego
) starts out in the
body
. As the infant grows, she begins toorganise bodily sensations and impulses into a whole, to 'take command' of them and developan image of 'me' - when she looks in the mirror she realises that this image is herself, that thisis how other people see her. In a healthy and supportive situation, she can grow into apowerful, realistic capacity for self-management, based on a strong but relaxed sense of identity and wholeness.Tragically, our culture doesn't generally let this process of self-management happen naturallyin its own time and rhythm. Most children are fed and put to bed and toilet-trained to fit inwith the needs and timetables of adults. They are often forced with threats to learn rigidcontrol of processes like excretion which should be developing spontaneously. Small childrenliterally
cannot
control their anal sphincters: the muscle-nerve connections aren't formed. Sothey must tense up the whole pelvic floor in a massive, straining effort to 'hold it in', a tensionwhich easily becomes chronic, extending to the whole body and tightening the breath, so thatthe person 'holds themselves in' on every level.
11Similarly, if our feeding is controlled by timetable, or if we are forced to eat food we don'tlike, then we 'swallow' an external regulation of our bodily processes. and have to swallowdown our rage if we want to get fed at all. These are all examples of the way in which thewhole business of attaining self- management in our own body, which can be a proud and joyful affirmation of autonomy, very easily gets entangled with patterns of denial andnegative, so that our very sense of 'I' is bound up with bodily tension. Like boys at an old-fashioned public school, we learn to 'get a grip on ourselves'. and to
identify
with that grip.Feeling tense becomes part of our continuous background experience, so that full relaxationseems like a threat to our existence, as if we are going to melt and drain away completely.Just as muscles are forced into chronic spasm in order to comply with external restrictionsrather than inner self-regulation, so our 'I' develops a 'spastic', uncontrollably rigid emotionaltone - a set of fixed attitudes towards the world and other people which we are unable to varyin response to changing circumstances. The 'I' becomes identical with the body armour.'Armouring' is a good name for this process of physical and emotional rigidification. Musclearmour, like its medieval counterpart, is hard, stiff, restrictive, suffocating; also like ironarmour, its original purpose was
defence
. We have no reason to feel guilty and inadequateabout being armoured; on the contrary, it represents our skill and courage to survive in verydifficult circumstances.We have always done the best we can. making a rational decision to protect our vulnerableinsides from an unsafe world - and. since we're still here. we have succeeded! But the pricehas been high in lost pleasure and potential. Now that we are bigger and stronger we have theoption of melting our armour, re-experiencing our feelings in a safer way - and letting our softpink insides out to play in the sunshine!Of course, even now there isn't always sunshine; it isn't always safe or appropriate to be soft.People often get the idea that Reichian-type therapy will leave them vulnerable to whatevercomes along. But the whole aim is to regain the power to choose, the power to be loving andopen, or to scorch with righteous rage' or to close off totally for a while. Very few of us haveaccess to the whole range of possible reactions.Another way in which muscular armouring resembles its iron counterpart is that it tends to bearranged in
segments
: bands of tension that wrap horizontally round the body. constrictingflow along the head-to-feet axis. If you imagine how a worm or snake moves, in wavy pulses,this gives a good image of the free unarmoured body. But if something pins the serpent downat one point in its length, the graceful undulation turns into jerking and thrashing.
12This is like a human body becoming armoured in one segment: it can no longer expand andpulse in a smooth, expressive. unified way - expression becomes distorted and ugly, bothphysically and emotionally.Most of us are armoured in more than one place. It's as if the snake is a child's wooden toy,split up into separate stiff lengths and able to bend only at the joints between the segments, ina parody of undulation. Having lost our sense of unity with the world through disjointedbreathing, we lose our sense of
internal
unity through the disjointing effects of the armouring.We'll look in much more detail later on at the segments and what they mean, but it's worthemphasising here that the specific details of armouring, as Reich described them or as we usethem doing therapy - so many segments in such and such places - are rules of thumb ratherthan gospel truth. The human organism is immensely rich and complex, full of subtlechannels, links, patterns and mirrorings, and each human individual is in many ways unique.But the more each of us is armoured, the less freedom of expression we have, the lessindividuality and richness; and the more we tend to operate in a groove to correspond to themechanical system of the segments. It's the armouring that has segments, not the person; andthe process of therapy is precisely one of rediscovering our individual uniqueness.
Armouring and Illness
We've used the word 'healthy' once or twice to describe the state of natural, unarmouredopenness. It's also the case that being armoured is the precondition for being ill in the medicalsense. When energy can't flow freely through the body, we get areas that are over-charged,where energy 'sticks' and stagnates, and other areas that are under-charged, where energy can'tget to at all. Over time, this sets up a chronic imbalance in the tissues and organs, whichallows infection or functional disorder to take hold.
13The sort of ailment which results is by no means random: our illnesses express, in vividdumb-show, the issues around which we tense and close off. To pick some trivial examples,most people who have a cough are suppressing anger - if you pretend to cough, and thenexaggerate it, you will find yourself roaring. Similarly, most colds have to do withunexpressed grief - the tears have to find some way out.This is a tremendous over-simplification: every illness is the expression of a complex andlongstanding set of issues. But we do see physical symptoms as the bodymind's attempt toresolve conflict, to break free from the constraints of the armouring. In Chapter 4 we shalllook in more detail at the relationship between specific illnesses and specific forms of armouring.