Disconnect between mind and body...the theory expands

There's the William James (I think) idea that the amygdala creates physical changes in your body in response to stimulus. THEN, your conscious mind perceives those changes and the corresponding stimulus and sort of infers, "Oh I must be feeling x. " But it hits the body first which makes sense when you look at emotions from an adaptive perspective as motivators that helped us survive by initiating action.

I heard about a study on an NPR show called Radiolab which confirmed that people with spinal cord injuries experienced their emotions as being less powerful since becoming paraplegic or quadraplegic. The deadening of emotion increasing as the injury went further up the spine. This seems to confirm the importance of the bodily sensations in our identification and experience of emotion. If, as a quadraplegic, you can only feel your pulse pounding in your head, fear just does not have the same heft as it did when your whole body throbbed with your heartbeat.

Just something to think about--that those emotions may well be present in the body and we are yet unaware or perhaps even in denial. This is one of the things mindfulness can improve I'd imagine--our ability to notice our sensations.

Yes! You grow larger, your skin turns green, your shirt rips and... ROAR!

Chopin, I've been working with the whole mind-body disconnect thing for gosh a couple of months now. My t finally not too long ago asked the million dollar question in my case, "why did you disconnect from your body?" Well I spent a lot of hours thinking and writing about that. I figured out the why even. Now we're working through that. My mind-body disconnect took a little different turn though, instead of just not feeling the feelings, I was eating allllll the freaking time and prior to may 1 i was at my highest weight ever, even more than when I was the most pregnant with my son. Anyway as I've been working on this with t and on my own I am learning to 'live' in my body and not just in my head, we had a really emotional session a few back where I was calling myself all kinds of lovely names and bawling like a baby but the point was I was fully in my body. I'm one day at a time learning how to stay there. And I've gotten to the point where I'm now eating only when I'm hungry, which is amazing, and I've lost a little more than 10 lbs already since we started working on this. I don't know if this helps you any at all. But the topic just really hit home with me and I wanted to share what I'm going through. Best to you and hope you get in to see your t soon!!

Thanks Artemis. I want to get to where you are now. I live only in my head and I realize that. I am very near my highest weight and the scale keeps creeping up. I know we as humans are meant to feel in our bodies, so we do other things to try to feel something, but those things are usually unhealthy. Congrats on your weight loss! I appreciate your reply.

I read this thread and thought a lot about it, but didn't have the luxury of much time to reply. However, I just wanted to say I totally understand the concept of intellectualizing feelings. T1 told me I did this ALL the time; she seemed to hate it and thought it was not a good thing and tried very much to get me to just say 'I feel, I am feeling......'. She'd say to me, you keep saying, 'I think ..... I think I felt this ....' Like I would use all sorts of adjectives and descriptors and analogies and metaphors, as if I were telling a story, not from first person, but from third person .... creating an intellectual distance to make the emotions safe to see, to deal with, because I could almost pretend it was some other part of me, not really ME, that had them. I felt better analyzing my feelings than I did feeling them .... well, I still do, really. My feelings are sometimes more intense/deep than I feel safe approaching without a life-jacket (the intellectualizing, analyzing); I get panicked like I might drown in them. And I hate that drowning feeling! But I am learning, I think, to swim in deeper emotional waters and keep myself from that panic/dread of drowning .... to allow myself moments where I just notice the feeling, try to see where it is my body and do something that acknowledges and soothes the feeling, rather than fighting it or falling into it ..... kind of like a drowning person is easy to rescue when they don't fight the rescuer ..... I can rescue myself in the depth of my emotions if I don't fight them/myself....

They told me this is my first year at group: "You tell this story as if it happened to someone else."