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I recently came back from a run. It’s surprising to state that statement. I think it might have been a decade since I last did so. Yet It came to my attention that my levels show somewhat raised cholesterol, and the recommendation was to perform intense workouts on a consistent basis.

This is the first time in my life that my motivation to work out has been my physical health. In my youth, I exercised because I desired to slim down. I’ve also run to cure my anxiety – I was merely escaping from those feelings, without confronting it. At other times, I ran because I wanted to get better at running. This was the definition to me back then to create a superior lifestyle.

Jogging with altered intent now sparked reflection about the ways I’ve interacted with my physique over my lifetime and how this is changing as I progress from youth to being a middle-aged person. I believe not I’ve respected my own body, not truly. I’ve valued it just for its functions and the aims it fulfilled for me: trying to attract others; escaping emotions; achieving a quicker 5km. Until today, I hadn’t realized that my body represents me, it is my existence, instead of something that produces results.

A lot has been explored for ages about the split involving physical and mental aspects – a topic it’s reassuring to know, I won’t summarize in this piece. What has struck me most intriguing is Freud’s understanding that mental and physical selves are developmentally integrated from birth, because physical development requires psychological development and conversely. The newborn’s bodily experiences – such as the corporeal experience of hunger – motivate the brain to cultivate the skill to identify hunger as an emotion that may be satisfied by eating; and the mental reassurance and contentment repeatedly brought by feed after feed supports the infant’s psyche in the same way the nutrition fuels them bodily. So too mental events – such as the desire to get up and reach for something, and the determination to attempt repeatedly – are why and how muscles grow stronger. Since infancy, our body and mind are interconnected in mutual development as connected as a spiral.

But It’s become clear, in treatment with my psychoanalyst, that my mind and body can be in an alternate dynamic – one less integrated and increasingly manipulative. My mind might utilize my physical self to store and manifest elements that my psyche considers undesirable or unbearable. In my sessions we’ve become aware that exist certain emotions that I fear are too much for me; instead of experiencing them mentally, I unintentionally shift them to my physical self, becoming trapped as bodily signs.

I often had this with indigestion – unrelated to my diet, but represented a form of corporeal reaction of the more acidic feelings I couldn’t digest mentally. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced into my consciousness by my analyst, and my fear and insecurity and anger and terror became palpable and expressed verbally rather than changed into bodily feelings, it disappeared. It’s uncommon for me from stomach problems now.

The toughest period I had this terrible acid reflux, I failed to rest for multiple consecutive nights. I believed I was losing my mind. I visited to the GP, who arranged multiple diagnostic procedures, but everything was medically abnormal. It was a different physician who suggested that the root might be psychological. My psychoanalyst concurred. I was stunned, but I also felt it to be true.

When a patient endures a bodily issue, they might feel insulted upon hearing that it may have a mental root. They might feel as invalidation, hearing that their symptom is imagined. And of course such cases occur – individuals may experience their symptoms dismissed or misdiagnosed. However, sometimes it’s possible that the physical symptoms are real – no question – and the origin is mental, the inner mind using the physical self to express certain suffering or rage or any feeling the mind cannot tolerate. Occasionally, it’s easy to think our experience matters solely when it is expressed as bodily symptoms. We often undervalue our psychological well-being as individuals, as a society and culturally; for what reason do we accept the terrible killing-off of psychodynamic psychotherapy in public healthcare?

Life lessons have taught me that an improved existence cannot be built if we remain trapped unconsciously in ways of relating, within ourselves and in relationships, that stem from devaluation, exploitation and dealings. These dynamics are frequently more straightforward to identify “externally” in broader culture. It’s perhaps less comfortable to think about where they come from, and to identify these forms personally and in intimate connections, in the workings of our psyches.

However persistence pays off. Upon wearing my jogging shoes again following many years, going outside without aiming for a better body, or to eliminate a feeling, or to surpass a running record, {it