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I just got back from a jog. I’m amazed to admit those words. I think it was likely ten years since my last. But I recently discovered that I have slightly high cholesterol, and doctors suggested to perform intense workouts regularly.

It’s the initial instance in living memory that the reason to work out has been my health status. During earlier years, I exercised because I desired to slim down. At times I ran to cure nervousness – It was an avoidance tactic from the worry, not addressing it. At other times, I jogged because I sought to get better at running. That represented what it meant to me back then to build a better life.

Running for a different reason currently got me thinking about the methods I’ve interacted with my physical self throughout my life and the way it’s evolving as I progress from early adulthood to midlife. It seems unlikely I’ve valued my own body, not truly. I’ve valued it solely for its roles and the aims it served me: aiming to appeal; escaping emotions; running a faster 5K run. Up to now, I failed to grasp that my body represents me, it is my life, instead of an instrument for achievements.

A lot has been written through history about the separation between body and mind – a topic it’s comforting to know, I’ll avoid detailing in this piece. What I’ve found most intriguing is the Freudian perspective that consciousness and physique are naturally unified from birth, because bodily growth requires mental growth and the reverse is true. The newborn’s physical sensations – like the bodily feeling of hunger – drive the mind to build the ability to identify hunger as a feeling that can be sated by a feed; and the emotional comfort and fulfillment regularly delivered by feed after feed feeds the child’s mind in the same way the food sustains them physically. Similarly psychological experiences – for instance the urge to stand up and attain a goal, and the resolve to persist through effort – are the cause and means the body develops power. From our earliest moments, mind and body are intertwined in mutual development as unified as DNA strands.

Yet It’s become clear, during therapy with my psychoanalyst, that my consciousness and physique can be in an alternate dynamic – a more separated and increasingly manipulative. My psyche might utilize my physical self to store and express elements that my consciousness views unwanted or intolerable. In my sessions it emerged how exist specific feelings that I worry are too much for me; in place of experiencing them in my mind, I subconsciously push them into bodily form, where they get stuck as corporeal issues.

I previously experienced digestive discomfort – which had nothing to do with what I’d eaten, but acted as a kind of physical reflux of the sharper sentiments I couldn’t digest mentally. This was not a conscious choice, but after it was introduced to my attention by my analyst, and my dread and sensitivity and anger and alarm became palpable and expressed verbally in place of changed into corporeal symptoms, it disappeared. It’s uncommon for me with digestive issues today.

The worst time I had this terrible acid reflux, I failed to rest for many nights straight. I believed I was losing my sanity. I visited my doctor, who scheduled various diagnostic procedures, but everything was corporally problematic. It turned out to be an alternate medic who told me that the origin may be psychological. My therapist agreed. I was surprised, but I also felt it was correct.

If an individual is suffering a corporeal problem, they can be offended upon hearing that there might be an emotional origin. They can experience this as being disrespected, being told that their illness is imagined. And of course such cases occur – individuals may experience their suffering ignored or incorrectly identified. Yet occasionally it’s possible that the physical symptoms are genuine – certainly – and the source is mental, the unconscious using the body to manifest certain suffering or anger or any feeling awareness cannot tolerate. Occasionally, we might assume our emotions only has value if manifested as bodily symptoms. We persistently neglect our mental states as individuals, in social contexts and culturally; why else would we tolerate the appalling reduction of psychodynamic psychotherapy in public healthcare?

Personal insights have shown me that a better life cannot be created if we remain trapped without realization in ways of relating, inside us and socially, that stem from disrespect, use and exchange. These dynamics tend to be simpler to identify “externally” in wider society. It’s perhaps less comfortable to consider their origins, and to see these forms within ourselves and in intimate connections, in the economy of our mental lives.

Yet it’s worth persevering. After donning my jogging shoes once more after such a long decade, venturing out without aiming for bodily change, or to eliminate an emotion, or to improve a running record, {it