Evil words: how to protect the body from mental pain

Igor came to see an osteopath in despair. The man suffered from psoriatic arthritis. He was tormented by stiffness and discomfort in all joints. And most of all he was worried about the pain in his feet, at the age of 35 he could hardly walk.

At the sessions, Igor began to talk about his life. It turned out that he had a very difficult relationship with his mother. Not wanting to decide anything in her life, she called every day and endlessly complained about problems, but at the same time did not allow him to take active steps in order to solve them for her.

Work with the body paid off – he soon felt better. Igor got physical strength, and, on the advice of an osteopath, he went to a psychotherapist for deeper work with the psyche. Soon he limited contact with his mother and defined his own boundaries, understanding where her life was and where his. Then he established a relationship with his ex-wife and daughter.

Already three months after the start of treatment, he was running around the botanical garden, and two more months later he went on a hike to Olkhon, an island on Lake Baikal. And got married again. The psychological problem has been solved. The body has strength. Everything is interconnected and everything is one. How does this happen?

Since ancient times

Let’s imagine the ancient people who survived in difficult conditions. In addition to unpredictable nature and weather, their lives were also complicated by external dangers – in particular, predators.

When meeting with a saber-toothed cat or a bear, our ancestors activated the reticular alarm system, it is also the reticular formation (Latin reticulum, “network”). This system is a network of nerve cells that wraps around the back of the brain and the top of the spinal cord. This is a rapid response system, it activates the structures necessary for the survival of the organism.

Fight or run!

What can you do with a predator? You can start to fight with him, run away (there is another option to pretend to be dead, but this happens less often). The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the fight-or-flight response.

What happens when it is activated?

• Pupil dilation (we see wider, that is, we control a larger area);
• Increased heart rate and breathing (ready to run and/or fight);
• Increased blood flow to the brain and skeletal muscles (even more ready to move and even better think);
• Reduction of sphincters (we don’t go out of need, but put it off for later, when the danger has passed);
• Strengthening the work of the sweat glands (we sweat);
• Contraction of the muscles that raise the hair (the remnants of our thick hair);
• Contraction of the walls of the arteries (so that more fresh blood per unit of time passes through specific tissues);
• Production of adrenaline and norepinephrine in the adrenal glands.

This activates, in particular, the trigeminal nerve, which is also responsible for the masticatory muscles. That is, he saw a predator – he clenched his teeth and rushed away. Either he clenched his teeth, bared his teeth, bared his fangs – the predator got scared and ran away. Thus, the ancestors fled from the predator or knocked it down with one blow of the fist, and then, satisfied, ate it with their jaws that had time to open.

If it seems to you that saber-toothed cats, mammoths, cave bears are extinct, no matter how. In fact, they pop up at us from everywhere: from TV, mail, WhatsApp chats, in unhealthy relationships at work and at home, the list is endless. But there are social limits and ethics: so often you want to start a fight, but you can’t.

As a result, our ancient rapid response system constantly receives alarms, activates all of the above, but does not receive discharges. Not to hit, not to tear to pieces, not even to run away – where will you run away from the alarm clock? And she stays in shape all the time.

“Wounds” in the body

As for the fangs of a predator and the reaction to them, everything is clear. Ancestors needed attention and speed to survive. Well, what to do with modern “predators”? Roughly the same. It doesn’t matter what the cause of stress is: whether you are threatened with physical harm by a neighbor who is a wrestling champion, whether your friend is offended by stinging remarks, or scared by a TV that says that everything is bad.

The system reacts to the alarm signal, which brings the whole body into tone under the influence of adrenaline. The body in tension sends a feedback signal that there is stress, and the rapid response system again responds with muscle tension and adrenaline rush.

Imagine, we constantly clench our jaws: try to relax them now – and the whole body will relax. Due to the constant contraction of the muscles, calcium accumulates in them and the so-called trigger points are formed – these are the places that you ask the massage therapist to stretch harder. Since there is also muscle tissue in the vascular wall (otherwise, as if the vessels contracted and expanded), then it also contracts, contracts and gradually loses the ability to relax. As a result, a person is diagnosed with hypertension.

Word as a weapon

Today’s “saber-toothed cats” cannot be escaped, but the body cannot get used to them either. It turns out that we are constantly in a state of stress: neither the cerebral cortex, nor the underlying structures, nor the autonomic nervous system rest.

The first way to reduce the tone of the nervous system is to remove the extra load, and not to run to the pharmacy for dietary supplements at all. Extra load is TV, bad news, chat notifications, email messages. Finally unsubscribe from useless mailing lists.

The threat comes not only from the information space – it is the easiest to deal with. Often, relatives act as a source of constant tension: a partner, parents, grown-up children, as well as colleagues and others with whom we are forced to contact. A person can constantly wait for poking from an eternally dissatisfied father, feel guilty for not spending enough time with a child, be afraid that the soup is not like mom’s, endure endless reprimands from the boss, malicious reproaches from so-called friends, and so on.

When we hear or even think about hurtful words, we tense up. Remember right now how you feel when your boss yells at you. And when dad says: “You are not my son, I didn’t raise such a person”? Feel it in your body. Doesn’t it sound like a description of how the sympathetic nervous system (the one that “fight or flight”) is activated? Because that’s exactly what she is.

This is exactly how the body reacts to a verbal attack every time an unpleasant event occurs or even when you only remember it, because the brain does not care if it is reality or your imagination.

A child who is constantly shouted at, who is kicked and called a loser can be recognized by an extinct look, a hunched back. He is already prepared in advance that higher forces (that is, parents) will fall upon him, he has already reacted, moreover, he is tired of reacting, he just lives and grows like that. But if the child has at least one person who loves him, everything will be much better.

Healing of the body and mind

And what happens to us when they begin to love us for nothing, just like that? We grow wings, everything works out. The wounds heal. In fact, we cannot constantly think about how we were mistreated, so we push such events out of consciousness.

This does not mean that we forget about them. We can remember them and free ourselves from their influence at the appointment with a psychologist, psychotherapist, bring our body with all its tension to an osteopath.

The difference between osteopathy is that it begins to work with the body, and not with the mind. Working through all areas where there is a restriction of mobility, the osteopath, as it were, reminds the body that they exist. The body “remembers” these areas, directs the flow of arterial blood there and begins to actively nourish, washing away accumulated for all the time that has passed since the injury.

Since the body, mind and emotions are interconnected, the health of one leads to an improvement in the condition of the other two. And, of course, love is the best cure. And it is not so important who loves us: someone else or ourselves. The biochemistry of the process is the same.