“Despite that we’ve learned a lot about healthy exercise practices, healthy diets & good medical care, the bottom line is that the most significant way of contributing to our own good health is thru the quality of our thought processes. This power is a valuable gift, in light of the lack of control we have over other aspects of life,”

explains Christiane Northup in The Wisdom of Menopause.

The bottom line, according to Northrop, “ is that what goes on in your mind boosts either parasympathetic or sympathetic nervous system activity. Every thought & every perception you have changes the homeostasis of your body. Will it be the brakes or the accelerator, a health account deposit or a health account withdrawal?” She goes on:

. . . this, in a nutshell, is how your autonomic nervous system translates how your view of your world impacts the state of your health.

The language spoken by the autonomic nervous system is translated to the rest of your body by hormones. The primary messengers of the sympathetic nervous system are hormones called norepinephrine & epinephrine, which are often referred to together as adrenaline.

They're produced in the brain & in the adrenal glands. Every time adrenaline levels go up, levels of another adrenal hormone, cortisol, also goes up. While cortisol provides a much-needed boost in the short run, helping you get thru an occasional crisis, it has its dark side.

If you live in the SNS’s “fast lane” for a long time, prolonged elevation of cortisol can cause a number of problems. Initially cortisol sparks up your immune system, but if stress keeps the body in a constant state of flight or fight readiness, cortisol’s effects on the immune system quickly become a liability.

White blood cells get pumped into the bloodstream, flooding the system with germ fighting warriors. Over time, the immune system & the bone marrow become depleted. Long-term overexposure to cortisol causes your skin to become thin, your bones to become weaker, your muscles & connective tissue to break down, your body to develop abnormal insulin metabolism, your tissues to retain fluids, your arms & legs to bruise more easily & your moods to tend toward depression. In these paragraphs, we see how stress undermines physical well-being, both present-day stress from fast-lane living & long-term stress that we carry in our biological systems from our early life experiences.

We’ll meet the situations in our current life, bracing ourselves w/our fight / flight / freeze (or connect & nurture) apparatus in full gear, assuming, at some unconscious level, that a crisis is at hand. Our adrenal system goes on high alert & our bodies pump out stress chemicals & experience feelings that accompanied previous hurt, even if none is intended in the current situation.

The line between the present & the past blurs & we feel as if we’re being hurt all over again, even though it may be mostly yesterday’s pain that’s being triggered. But we don’t know that; we see it as belonging exclusively to today’s offence. We get caught in a negative feedback loop, in which the stress chemicals in our bodies trigger or stimulate painful memories, and our painful memories stimulate more stress chemicals.

This becomes a place that it’s tough to get out of & our thinking can become distorted & fuzzy. Our bodies & our minds are interacting in a way that sinks us further into a stuck place. This is why we need to resolve deep emotional issues that we may be carrying from our past. Otherwise, we interpret situations today thru yesterday’s distorted lens.

Seeing current situations thru the lens of our hurt thinking places us repeatedly at that center of our old pain, both physically & emotionally. If the meaning we make of the situations of our current lives is based upon the meaning we made as helpless children, in circumstances we could do nothing about, we live by that old interpretation, whether it's currently appropriate or not.

Our bodies, minds & spirits are living off an old script. Forgiving ourselves, whether or not we’re actually at fault, can be harder than forgiving someone else; it makes us feel vulnerable, needy, confused & hurt all over again, but it's critical for full healing to take place.

Think of September 11 & the constant TV replays of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Many children across America thought that this disaster was happening over & over & over again. They had no way of understanding, as youngsters with limited capacity for reasoning, that these were instant replays.

Their line between reality & replay was blurred. So many of the especially young ones experienced September 11 as being as many days’ long as the replays that appeared on our television sets if no adult explained otherwise. Our child minds are really not much different. They stretch out our past thru the landscape of adulthood, replaying over & over again those memories that we found traumatic as youngsters.

Often, the adults in our lives were too preoccupied with their own pain to help us make sense of a painful situation; or they thought that because we were silent or uncomplaining we were not being affected. How often I’ve heard adults say, “Kids are so resilient.” Because children have the capacity to laugh & seemingly let go of pain, we assume they aren’t being affected. But nothing could be further from the truth. Children are like sponges, soaking up their environment & holding it in all the tiny spaces they have inside.

The brain is uniquely wired to best remember memories that are powerful in emotional content, whether the memory is of a wonderful clown at a child’s 5th-birthday party, the circus with grandparents who made it seem magical, or repeated abuse by an adored or feared relative.

However, if the memory was traumatic, the mind also has the capability to block it out, to selectively “forget” what made life as a dependent child feel too threatening. Here is a case in point:

Similarly, British psychologist Anne Manyande of University College in London, “examined blood levels of two stress hormones, adrenaline & cortisol, in patients just before surgery & 2 days following surgery.”

The patients were divided into 2 groups. The patients in the first group were taught relaxation techniques & had lower blood pressure, lower heart rate & required less pain medication after surgery than the second group who received no training.

However, their bodies told a story with a significantly differing subplot. The group who had used relaxation techniques had significantly increased levels of the stress chemicals adrenaline & cortisol, while, in the group that received no training, the levels for these hormones didn't increase.

In other words, though the “relaxed group” had lower blood pressure, lower heart rates & needed less medication (which is a good thing), their levels of stress, as represented by elevated adrenaline & cortisol went up, (which isn't such a good thing).

Again, the split between the unconscious & conscious mind manifests in the body. Even though we can seem to be in control of our stress response, another part of us clearly isn't. The hypothesis of the researchers was that our bodies seem to need a little worry & fear before surgery so that we can accurately plan for potential pain & immobility.

Wipe out the worry & fear & we wipe out some of our conscious connection with the real experience. Our unconscious, however, seems to be aware of what’s coming up & expresses its fear thru elevated levels of stress in the body.

So blocking our ability to experience feelings of, let’s say, “normal” fear & anxiety - even with something as seemingly helpful as relaxation techniques - means we can’t feel, integrate & interpret their messages to us.

Again, in Candice Pert’s words, “The body is the unconscious mind.” We need access to our authentic feelings so that we can use them to guide us toward what we need to do to resolve our life situations. We need to know how we really feel, or our bodies will let us know in some other way, usually in the manifestation body aches or disease.

The Role of the Limbic System

Altering deep emotional patterns is slow & painstaking work.. Limbic bonds imprint themselves onto our emotional systems.

The limbic system “sets the mind’s emotional tone, filters external events thru internal states (creates emotional coloring), tags events as internally important, stores highly charged emotional memories, modulates motivation, controls appetite & sleep cycles, promotes bonding & directly processes the sense of smell & modulates libido,” according to Dr. Daniel Amen, author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.

Our neural networks aren't easily altered, “early emotional experiences knit long-lasting patterns into the very fabric of the brain’s neural networks,” says Thomas Lewis, M.D., in A General Theory of Love, “changing that matrix calls for a different kind of medicine all together.”

Our emotional life is physical, it imprints itself on our bodies. When we have problems in our deep limbic system they can manifest in “moodiness, irritability, clinical depression, increased negative thinking, negative perceptions of events, decreased motivation, floods of negative emotion, appetite & sleep problems, decreased or increased sexual responsiveness or social isolation,” says Amen. Our neural system carries w/it our emotional sense memories from childhood. Familiar smells, sounds or places can send a cascade of memories flooding thru us that either wrap us up in their warmth or challenge us to maintain our composure.

Or, if we felt overly disempowered, we may have a deep wish to “get our power back,” which can manifest in healthy or unhealthy ways. All of us experienced some sort of power imbalance, it goes with the territory, but these imbalances can vary greatly along the continuum. We need to find real & sustaining ways to feel whole & solid. Relationships are part of what helps us feel we have a comfortable place in the world. Damage from youth needs to be repaired so that we don’t pass it along in harmful ways & so that we can have reasonably healthy relationships in our current lives.

Psychotherapy is one way of repatterning our limbic systems, along with other healing relationships of all kinds. Because "Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love or other feelings," says Lewis.

"The limbic system is associated with our emotions & the neocortex is associated with critical thinking. Both are operative in processing emotions." While the neocortex can collect facts quickly, the limbic brain doesn't. Physical mechanisms are what produce our experience of the world & we need new sets of physical impressions to change or alter those impressions.

Emotional impressions shrug off insight but yield to a different persuasion: the force of another person’s Attractors reaching thru the doorway of a limbic connection. Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal can restructure the limbic brain of another. . . . The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology.

When a person starts therapy, she isn’t beginning a pale conversation; she is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness.

Evolution has sculpted mammals into their present form: they become attuned to one another’s evocative signals & alter the structure of one another’s nervous systems. Psychotherapy’s transformative power comes from engaging & directing these mechanisms. Therapy is a living embodiment of limbic processes as corporeal as digestion & respiration.

The body is part of the therapeutic process. One of therapy’s ultimate goals is to restore our ability to care & be cared for in reasonably functional ways, to learn to love & be loved. The three neural "faces" or "expressions" of love are limbic resonance, regulation & revision. It's relationship that heals.

We’ve probably all had the experience of loving a subject in school, not because of the subject but because of who was teaching it, we responded to them so we responded to it. Most research done on the efficacy of therapy arrives at the same point:

We take in information thru all of our senses; the more senses that are involved in our learning, whether it’s the alphabet or emotional learning, the more the brain absorbs & stores it. The more powerfully the memory is encoded in us, the more it takes to alter the patterning.

All self-help books should probably come w/a warning that reads something like: Caution! This book must be accompanied by a network of sustaining relationships. Don't attempt to get better in isolation. Most women don’t need to be told that relationships are core to our sense of well-being, we’re wired to understand this. And most therapists have always understood intuitively; that there is a repatterning of neural networks that accompanies a long & successful therapeutic relationship, no matter what name or discipline it has operated under.

It’s Never Too Late to Limbically Revise

My own discipline is psychodrama, sociometry & group psychotherapy, the brain child of Viennese psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno & later his wife Zerka Moreno.

It's essentially a role-playing method & a group-therapy method combined to allow clients not only to talk about their lives & passions, but act them out as well. In psychodrama, clients have the opportunity, e.g., to speak to an empty chair or a role-player representing a person to whom they have something to say. This allows more senses to get involved more directly in the therapeutic process which, we believe, creates more opportunities for healing.

Limbic Resonance

We're always giving off emotional signals or rather an emotional essence for other people to pick up on. Our brains are designed to pick up on these signals & translate them. We know much about people w/out exchanging a word, we get a sense about them, what their essence is & how we relate to them. In psychodrama we call it tele, the connection between people that's nonverbal but says everything, what we “get” about another person & they about us. Lewis likens it to listening to a piece of music:

The first part of therapy is to be limbically known - having someone with a keen ear catch your melodic essence. A child with emotionally hazy parents finds trying to know herself like wandering around a museum in the dark . . . she can't be sure of what she senses. . . . Those who succeed in revealing themselves to another find the dimness receding from their own visions of self. Like people awakening from a dream, they slough off the accumulated, ill-fitting trappings of unsuitable lives.

The experience of being seen for who we really are, of feeling understood & “gotten” by another person or people can be fundamentally altering & healing.

Limbic Regulation

We, as humans or mammals, are physiologically patterned to resonate to each other at a deep neural level. Lewis says,

Our neural architecture places relationships at the crux of our lives, where, blazing & warm, they have the power to stabilize. When people are hurting & out of balance, they turn to regulating affiliations: groups, clubs, pets, marriages, friendships, masseuses, chiropractors, the Internet. All carry at least the potential for emotional connection.

Together those bonds do more good than all the psychotherapies on the planet. A parent who rejects a child’s desire to depend raises a fragile person. Those children, grown into adulthood, are frequently those who come for help. . . . If patient & therapist are to proceed down a curative path, they must allow limbic regulation & its companion moon, dependence, to make their revolutionary magic.

Working in the addictions field over the past 3 decades has taught me endless lessons about limbic regulation. People who have been traumatized by inadequate parenting, who are living with addiction or are addicts themselves, need to put in the time that it'll take to heal in therapy & 12-step programs.

The ones who do poorly are invariably the ones who, for some reason or another, won’t put in their hours. Maybe they go to 12-step meetings & are bothered by what people do or don’t say, maybe the idea of groups creeps them out, makes them feel vulnerable, but sooner or later they'll need to come to terms with their aversion to connection that makes them want to pick up a book, read it & walk away better.

Books like this one can point us in the right direction, but words alone don’t make for a full healing, they need to open the door to deeper, more meaningful connections w/others, to light a path toward the right kind of healing experience. Lewis feels that because  . . . people don't learn emotional modulation as they do geometry or the names of state capitals.

They absorb the skill from living in the presence of an adept external modulator & they learn it implicitly. Knowledge leaps the gap from one mind to the other, but the learner doesn't experience the transferred information as an explicit strategy. Instead, a spontaneous capacity germinates & becomes a natural part of the self, like knowing how to ride a bike or tie one’s shoes. The effortful beginnings fade & disappear from memory.

As a client depends, she internalizes this regulation & it becomes a part of her. Gradually, she feels more whole, capable & confident, until eventually she is ready for independence & self-regulation.

Other life events can also cause problems in the limbic system, such as divorce, death or loss of significant relationships or children in the home. Divorce can actually be a “ a source of one of the most severe kinds of stress,” according to Dr. Amen. Partners who are deeply limbically connected can feel a deep sense of rupture or serious fragmentation when they're separated & likewise w/ the children involved.

He feels that this may be a part of why it’s so hard to leave even an abusive relationship, where partners have shared the same bed, table & life for years. The kind of deep fragmentation we experience over these sorts of separations or breakups can be w/us throughout our lives. When we try to ignore the sense of fragmentation that can accompany significant loss, when we don't go thru the grieving process, we condemn our unconscious to carry it in silence.

I. An ALERT on Body Image Issues

The cavepeople used to draw images & pictures of themselves on the walls of their caves to keep a running narrative history of their lives. The cavepeople didn't seem to be bothered by body image problems since they drew their bodies just as they were.

Cavepeople weren't irrational about body size since they were happy to have bodies which were alive & surviving the hardness of their lives. They were accepting of their bodies in an unconditional way by saying:

"My body is fine & acceptable as long as it keeps me alive & well."

How well do you compare with the cavepeople when it comes to your body image?

Answer the following questions:

• Do you have a problem in being able to unconditionally accept your body as OK as long as it is alive & well?

• Are you concerned about looking at images of yourself?

• Do you have a problem accepting your body just the way it is?

• Do you have a problem with your body being seen in public?

• Are you bothered about being seen or looked at when you are trying on clothes in a clothing store?

• Do you have a problem looking at your naked body in the mirror? 

• Do you hate having your picture or a home video taken of you? 

• Do you hate seeing your body's image in a shadow?

• Do you avoid looking into large street side windows to avoid seeing your body's reflection?

• Do you avoid being captured on the camera in a store window so that you don't see your body on the TV monitor?

• Do you hate looking at pictures or home videos of you?

If the answer is yes to all or most of these questions, then most probably you have poor body image & are in need of extensive work to get more rational, realistic, healthy & reality based concerning your body image.  

Poor body image comes from a variety of irrational, unrealistic & unhealthy causes.

1. It can be based on the conditional acceptance of your body only if it meets certain criteria for such acceptance or approval.

2. Poor body image can be based in denial over what your body really looks like & a refusal to see your body the way it is rather than how you fantasize it to be.

3. It can also come from self-rejection & self-non-acceptance. This is the refusal of self-acceptance of yourself as a good person. This refusal is because your body doesn't meet the "standard" which you believe it has to reach. This body standard must be reached before you can believe that you're a "good enough" person to  be accepted by yourself.

4. Poor body image can come from self-hatred over what your body has become.

5. It can come from the fear of your body being seen by others the way it is rather than how you would like it to be.

6. It can come from the need to be invisible & not seen by others & yet it's seen by others & commented on by them.

7. Poor body image can come from the guilt over the fact that: "I have done this to my body."

8. It can come from perfectionism over the fact that: "My body isn't good enough the way it is."

When you're dealing with your poor body image you need to first ALERT yourself so as to get rational about your body so you can relax the anxiety, stress or panic you experience every time you're about to see an image of your body in a mirror, picture, home video, store window, security monitor or your shadow.  

These people over the years have contributed directly or indirectly to the negative messages in your head every time you look at an image of yourself. These negative body image scripts are so well entrenched in your subconscious, that by this time in you life, you may not be able to remember who first said them critically about your body.

What you need to do, to help you change your poor body image to a healthy one, is to kill the voices in you head which currently criticize, reject & disapprove your body. 

You'll have to accept that you need to let go of the anger you have against yourself for your body image.

You'll have to accept that you need to redirect this anger against those people, who have taught you to be self-critical, conditionally accepting, self-rejecting, self-disapproving & self-destructive in your attitude & feelings about your body image.

You'll need to accept that you were taught & reinforced by others to be self-critical & self-demeaning about your body image.

You'll need to redirect your self-hatred & anger where it rightly needs to be directed, which is towards the sources of the negative body image messages.  

The second step of the ANGER workout is to NAME at whom, for what & why, you're angry. You need to do an exhaustive self-history from your earliest recollections on & identify the sources of the self-hating negative messages you have about your body image.

For each person identified you need to identify which messages they gave you, which you carry to this day. You need to identify how these messages contributed to the following categories of irrational causation of poor body image:  

1. Conditional Acceptance of Your Body:

The sources, of your negative body image messages, told you that you were only worth associating with or gaining the approval of others if your body was the correct proportion, size & weight.

You were told that you could participate in certain activities only if your body was meeting the conditions & criteria for such participation.

You were told that it was a shame that you had "such a pretty face" & it was too bad that the rest of your body didn't look as good.

You were told that "thin is in" & only thin bodies were acceptable.

You were told by these sources that you needed to diet, starve yourself & learn some self-control so that you could improve your looks.

You were told that: "looks are everything" & "others will judge or accept you by your looks."

You were told that you'd never amount to anything unless your looks changed.

You were told you'd never be able to have a relationship with a significant other unless you changed the way your body looks.

Identify every person who taught you this conditional acceptance of your body. Identify every message you remember hearing about conditional acceptance of your body & name the message & the source of the message in your ANGER workout.

2. Shame & Guilt for the Way Your Body Looks:

The sources, of your negative body image messages, told you that you should be ashamed for your lack of will power & loss of control for allowing your body to look as unacceptable as it had become.

You were told that you should feel guilty for letting down your parents, family, friends, school, community & yourself for allowing your body to look the way it did.

You were told that you were not "trying hard enough" to change your body looks.

You were told that you were "breaking the hearts of others" for how your body looks had evolved.

You were told that you ought not to go out in public so as not to embarrass your parents, family, friends, school, community or yourself.

You were told over & over again that it was your fault that your body had become what it had.

You were told that you'll eventually pay for your bad habits of eating, dressing & grooming in the future.

You were told that it was a shame that you had allowed your body to deteriorate to the condition it had.

You were told that your were lazy, slovenly, slothful & undesirable for what you had done to allow your body to become so ugly.

You were told you should be ashamed that you had become so fat.

You were told that you should be embarrassed & ashamed that you weren't successful, in making your body look better, by failing all the diet program you attempted.

You were told that there was something "terribly wrong" with you if you couldn't do something about improving the way your body looked.

Identify every person you remember who tried to inflict shame & guilt on you. Identify every shame & guilt inducing message you heard about your body image & the person who was the source of the message in your ANGER workout.

4. Need for Your Body to be Invisible to Others:

The sources, of your negative body image messages, told you that it would be better for you not to be seen by others so that your ugly body would not be criticized & thus embarrass yourself or them.

You were told verbally or nonverbally that it would be better if you didn't come along with them so that others would not ridicule them for having you along.

You were told nonverbally that because of your body size, weight or shape, it would be better if you didn't try out for public activities when you would either not be selected or you would be the last one picked.

You were told verbally or nonverbally that it would be best if you were not seen & not heard so as not to cause conflict due to your body size & shape in the family, school or community.

You were told that if you wore certain clothes you could camouflage your body & hide the "real body" from others.

You were told if you made your hair up & wore the right makeup you could deflect others looking at the rest of your body.

You were encouraged never to look in a mirror or look at your picture.

You were excluded from family & group pictures whenever possible.

You were encouraged directly or indirectly by others not to have your picture taken or be included in a home video.

You were told, directly or indirectly, that you were never invited to the "in events" due to your body size, weight & shape.

Identify every person who directly or indirectly encouraged you to make your body invisible to others. Identify every invisibility encouraging message you heard & the person who was the source of the message in your ANGER workout.  

5. Self-worth Defined by Size, Weight &/or Shape of Your Body

The sources, of your negative body image messages, told you directly or indirectly that your worth as a person was defined by the size, weight & shape of your body.

All of the comments you received from them were preoccupied with the status of your body image.

They ignored giving you reinforcement or rewards for anything about you other than the state of your body.

They ignored your:

• personal achievements
• personality characteristics
• intellectual abilities
• competencies
• creativity
• generosity
• kindness
• skills
• abilities
• interests
• involvement with others 
• career accomplishments

They only focused their comments on your body such as: how big it had gotten, how small it was getting, how fat it was, how thin it appeared, how awkward a certain part of your body looked, how beautiful a body part looked, how well dressed you were or how sloppy you looked.

These people helped to contribute to your pre-occupation & concern about your body image.

They helped to shape you into being self-conscious about your body image.

They assisted you to believe that your worth as a human being hinged on how your body looked.

They were able to help cement in your subconscious & conscious mind that:

"I am only as good as my body looks & everyone in my life judges me by how my body looks."

Identify every person who directly or indirectly made you feel that your worth as a human being was dependent on how your body looked.

Identify every "self-worth dependent on body looks" message you were given and the person who was the source of the message in your ANGER workout. 

Once you have done a thorough analysis to name every person or group of people and their negative messages about your body image, you are then ready for the third step in the ANGER workout model.

You now need to GET IT OUT of your system. This requires that you do specific anger release work to free you up emotionally. You will need to do three specific GET IT OUT activities:

• resentment release
• hatred elimination
• rage workouts

You need to detail out in these letters of resentment:

• How these people did these bad things to you intentionally or unintentionally.
• If these offenses were done directly or indirectly; what the negative consequences were for you of these offenses?

How the negative body image and self-hatred grew in you as a result of these peoples offenses towards you; how your life could have been healthier, happier & filled with more emotional & physical energy if these offenses had not happened to you.

How the choices you have made in your life and the direction you have taken in life were influenced by the offenses of these people.

What irrational beliefs you have developed about your body image as a result of these peoples offenses.

What new healthier messages you need to develop to get your body image & Balanced Life Styles efforts on a healthier & more solid footing.

What are the rational reasons why you need to release the resentment & anger you hold with these people who have been so offensive to your personal development.

Finally, why you're now willing to forgive & forget these people for their past offenses so that you can proceed on with your life in a healthier way. Chances are that you'll not be able to forgive them, so you'll need to go on to the second step of the GET IT OUT process which is hatred elimination. 

2. Hatred Elimination:

3. Rage Workouts

As you are identifying your resentment & hatred issues, you will most probably need to be working on rage release by rage anger workouts. Follow  Eliminating Rage in the Tools for Anger Workout.

As you begin to identify the issues of anger towards the people who have contributed to your self-hatred & self-loathing, you might be driven to contact them directly & vent your anger & blame on them for what they've done to ruin your life.

If you were to directly contact them to let them know how angry you are, you would end up in the old unhealthy anger cycle. This is where the natural feeling you after expressing anger on a person, is guilt for hurting the other's feelings.

This is then followed by remorse for having done so. This results in pulling in the anger leaving you feeling the stuffed emotions of depression & resentment towards the person.

Over time you might get irritated by the person or something that triggers a memory of what the person said or did about your body image & you express your anger on the person again.

To avoid getting into the old unhealthy self-feeding loop of the anger cycle, you need to use the ANGER workout process for unresolved & current anger issues as identified in Anger Work-Out of the Tools for Anger Workout.

In the ANGER work-out model you release your rage on inanimate objects & the people in question never are confronted with your rage & hostility. You pound on a weight bag, or pillows or some other beatable object & yell & scream until you have exhausted the topic.

You do this over & over again until you're no longer triggered into rage & anger when you're presented with a behavior, message or comment which stirs up the memory of the offensive behaviors of the person for whom you harbor resentment, hatred & rage. You need to release your rage as you progress with the GET IT OUT process so that you can finally forgive the people who are the source of your self-hatred & poor body image.

This forgiveness will then lead to the fourth step of the ANGER work out model.