Identifying, verbalizing, and understanding our protective mechanisms and patterns are not enough to cure them.
Body-Mind therapy aims to create a clear and healing link between body and mind, between psyche and soma. Our modern societies have framed the mind as a superior and "all-powerful" entity, thus disconnecting the human being from what they are: a conscious body. One does not exist without the other, one is not superior to the other. It seems obvious then that the therapeutic process encompass this inherent duality. This idea is all the more obvious since we know today that the majority of our neuroses, sufferings, and patterns are rooted in childhood, very early childhood, and even in-utero life.
However, these first stages of life completely escape our conscious mind; our language; our faculties of control; and analysis.
Think of your first memory, itself totally subjective, and of everything that preceded and succeeded it, and of which you are no longer aware today... If our conscious mind does not keep traces of it, our unconscious and our body remember them. They remember our traumas, our frustrations, our fears, our misunderstandings... and they do not fail to remind us.
Psychocorporal therapy is in direct line with Freud's and Reich's theories that the majority of painful memories are repressed in the unconscious and recorded in the body.
Some of the chronic pathologies; diseases; pains; body postures; and somatizations, to name a few, are there to remind us that the all-powerful mind is a myth. Our unconscious speaks to us through our dreams but also through our body. An unexplained chronic pain, certain addictions, but also things as simple as the way we express certain emotions, the way we walk, talk, laugh can be linked to unconscious and repressed thoughts, memories or traumas.
Everything that we have repressed remains present in us.
Beyond repression, the body that we don't listen to, that we hate, that we don't inhabit, constantly tries to remind us of itself. An unloved body suffers from not receiving the care and attention it needs not only to live, but to exist. Fortunately, the lack of self-love, which results directly from our childhood wounds, is not inevitable and can be healed.
Zoé Messinger.