Ch 2 - THE BODY NATURE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOCKS

CHAPTER 2:

THE NATURE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOCKS
Where they come from versus where most people think they do
And where they're actually located

Now you know, that from the time we're born until about age 7, we go through specific stages of psychological development, and the blocks we experience show up as particular kinds of psychological problems later on in life. Most blockages are not serious and we grow up to be functioning adults. But each of us does have certain difficult patterns. In certain circumstances these blocks keep coming up to create 'issues' we have to deal with. These issues embody the limitations that prevent what we really want to happen in our lives from happening.

I also mentioned that events in the pre-natal that happened to Mother also set up psychological patterns. And I explained that Mother's issues are also the child's issues. Whatever Mother experiences, on any level, consciously or unconsciously, goes directly into the unborn child's sub-conscious mind. These will be adult issues for the Mother; they will be formative issues for the child. We start our growth at the moment of conception and our psychological form as well as physical form is determined by the way we are 'conditioned.' Specifically, what Mother says and thinks while the child is inside her, all the way through birth, has a major effect in determining the patterns of the child.

Mother's relationship with Father is primary in this regard. What she says, and thinks about him, and what actually happens in their relationship, will set up the very same kinds of roles and scenarios that are created during the stages of childhood development after birth. And this also is the way the person ends up having interpersonal man-woman relationships. So we find prenatal to be a guide to how we have difficulties in relationships.

If Father abandoned the family before the baby was born, a major place to work is Mother's experience with it. Mother's relationship with her parents also creates similar major events in the prenatal and these, too, significantly influence the child's attitudes, behavior and thoughts in regard to his or her family and with other people in general. Mother's thoughts and actions toward the baby itself are also of primary significance. In general terms, the issue of acceptance starts at the moment of conception. And all of the other stages of development have their parallels in Mother's relationship to the world during pregnancy. I'll repeat this and add more in subsequent chapters.

There are two general kinds of imbalanced behavior: hypo, or underdeveloped, function and hyper, or excessive function. We all have both. A block creates an under-developed way of behaving, a way in which we're held back. We automatically compensate. This creates excessive behavior. One very obvious example: Some people are withdrawn and others are loud, blaming and pushy. Most people in the latter category are also withdrawn, or limited, way deep inside. As you'll see, all these patterns are set up early in our lives.

Where are the blocks and how do we get in touch with them? Often we can remember, and work with, many of our childhood experiences, in a conscious way. This helps to understand ourselves better in psycho-therapy. But it usually doesn't solve the problem in the behavior. This is because the majority of our blockages are located in the unconscious mind and we don't have direct access to them.

I've found that some of the most 'foundational' blocks we have occurred in pre-verbal times, particularly in infancy. Almost no one remembers these incidents. But the material always seems to be there, and is accessible through other means besides 'remembering.' What happened to us back then became a part of us, in our body form, in our energy fields, and in the nerve patterns of the brain and peripheral nervous system. What we are left with from these incidents are called incompleted experiences of past traumatic events, but I prefer to see them as energy imprints of what went on. I'll explain in detail how they get physically embedded and then limit us.

Many body oriented psycho-therapists point out that negative behaviors and limitations are indeed embedded in physical form including those that developed from being in difficult situations for an extended period of time. A chaotic family atmosphere is one such example. Living with a berating or abusive parent is another. Having a parent who just can't handle upsets or illness is a third. These developments create a subtle but increasing tightness in our bodies that limit our physical form to the way we tensed up in these repeated situations. This can happen in our adult lives, too. The chronic physical tightness also contains the emotional upsets from those times. To understand this clearly, let me expand upon what I said in Chapter 1 about the restrictions in connective tissue.

Old patterns of behavior get stored in our bodies because of distortions in this putty-like fibrous connective tissue that surrounds and goes through all our muscles. It also covers the entire outside of our bodies as the inner layer of the skin. This material is elastic, up to a point. Any strong muscular contractions in our structural muscles or even in our organs, can move this tissue beyond its normal range of elasticity and thereby change its shape. This will directly change the shape of the muscles that did the contracting, as well as many other muscles in the body that have to compensate for that unnatural shortness. This shortness will even be there when we later relax or un-tense our grip, because the connective tissue has grown that way.

Massage, physical therapy, rest and stretching do not correct more than the superficial layers of this contraction. The contractions will occur whether the experiences happened in a big way, all of a sudden, such as in a fall or when we're hit, or in a gradually increasing way, over a long period of time, when we tense up around difficult people.

Thus, the incidents and behaviors in childhood are perpetuated by the shape of our physical bodies. This fixed shortness in the muscles and connective tissue affects us in a number of ways. We are limited in our range of movement, and the power of both our physical and emotional expression is diminished.

Different areas of the body are related to different areas of our psyche. The legs give a stance in the world. A distortion in their shape will weaken our stance and manifest as an instability in the way we stand and move forward in the world. The sides of our bodies and our shoulders and arms reach out, to embrace, to push away, and to build. Tightness here limits our abilities in these areas of life. The entire body is naturally designed to have all parts working together in every physical thing we do. But shortness and distortion throws this integrated ability into a behavior pattern where different parts of us actually go in opposite directions.
Body oriented therapists can see how these physical patterns manifest as our limitations and as the overcompensating ways we try to make up for those limitations. Many laypeople can also learn this technique and see it for themselves.

Body-oriented therapies such as those in my system remove these built up experiences relatively easily. Structural Integration Bodywork gives instantaneous and permanent relief from the bodily tension built up over these long periods of time, and frees the person from the continuous experience of strain and repression he or she had in childhood. This is because it literally reshapes the connective tissue. This Bodywork is also very effective in a 'routine' manner for clearing long, or short, periods of adult stress as well.

Other blocks and limitations can develop purely from physical experiences such as falls and accidents. Because they shorten and distort the connective tissue, these events also create limitations to the ways we can relate with our environment. These limited forms also embody the psychological upsets that were going on at the time of injury. This is because the physical contractions locked the emotional energy into the energy storing fibers of the connective tissue.
The therapies and the Bodywork are very effective here, too.

A third kind of circumstance occurs from a specific dramatic, and traumatic, overwhelming experience that was created in an interaction with other people. These circumstances involve both a physical and psychological shock to the system. Some occur in adult life and include gunshot wounds, stabbings, beatings, rapes, forced imprisonment, heart attacks in confrontations, and events of war. The embedded trauma of these incidents can usually be removed fairly quickly by a combination of Netherton verbal release therapy and the Bodywork.
Other sudden experiences happen in childhood. Many people can remember spankings or beatings or threats. Each one of these, because it is a physical as well as an emotional event, locks in the emotional trauma with the physical distortion of the connective tissue and muscles.

What is not known by most therapists is that long term developing issues in childhood are almost always preceded by shocking traumatic incidents of the same kind, in infancy. These psychosomatic conditions are also very effectively treated with this combination of techniques, and they shorten a full therapeutic correction of the pattern which would otherwise take a much longer period of time. The techniques in Netherton's method are what allow us to discover and access these specific incidents in the pre-verbal times. I have always found them in every client I have worked with.

Along with the purely physical forms of all these kinds of blocks, there are also energy blocks formed at the same time. These also need to be removed. There are two aspects of energy blocks.

First, the collagen fibers of the connective tissue are said to be organic 'crystals,' which hold in the energy information of what happened in an episode. As the Bodywork presses and spreads the connective tissue during body realignment, even non-traumatic memories from recent or much earlier times pop into a person's mind. I have specifically seen this happen on a number of occasions.

So whenever we experienced tightness and/or physical blows in childhood, the collagen fibers of our connective tissue stored the emotional energy as well as the physical experiences our bodies were receiving, even if we were not consciously aware of it all at the time.

This forms part of a physical 'enclosure' or shell in the outer tissues of our structure, as well as in the actual tissues of our organs. These energy crystals then form a 'filter' around the 'core' of our body-mind. And it is this core that connects to the deeper parts of our brains and energy fields. They are the things that interpret what is happening to us. The way we interpret our world is through these interpretations, and they come through the filter. So we interpret our adult world in the limited view of how we were treated as children. Psychologists know this happens. It's called transference. This is a technical explanation of how it occurs.

We also act outwardly through this filter. As we reach out into the world, our different layers of energies extend, too. The negative experiences that are embedded around our expanding core are then pushed out into the world, like the outer surface of a balloon expanding as we blow it up with air on the inside. These outer negative layers include the imbedded trauma and the negative or defensive attitudes that we had. These include the words and the doings of the other people involved, the ones who repressed us. The inner layers are our own experience; the outer ones are impressions from Mom, Dad and other people. So when the energy patterns of our outer layers expand into the world, they attract other people who have the same kinds of behaviors that our 'repressors' had. They come into our lives and act out the patterns that are in our own tissue.

The second kind of energy pattern has to do with the energy fields and energy centers of our bodies that are always flowing around and through us. They're a part of us whether we see them or not. Our body-minds include a series of major energy centers that are located along the front side of our spines, from the top of the head to the bottom of the torso.

Each of these centers is a spinning mix of specific frequencies that is intimately related with our physical and emotional functions. These major energy 'chakras,' and the many more minor ones that are located in the joints of the extremities and in the 700+ acupuncture points, interface with the energy field that flows around and through us. This field is called the aura, and it has a number of layers, each clearly defined by people who have been able to detect them.

We get blocks in these centers and fields from happenings in this life and some we carry over from our past lives. Whether you believe in past lives or not, the process and scenarios that are there look like whole life scenarios, and can be accessed & cleared, even for Christians who call them the Imaging subconscious, by people who call it DNA memory, and by therapists who call them body-mind creations that manifest the patterns we have. These blocks, or distortions, are directly accessible with Netherton's method. Some experts in the energy field say tears in the energy field as well as blocks can be repaired by certain professional energy healers, and they can also be helped with a wholistic mind and body therapy.

When the old episodes of trauma are removed, people act & physically and emotionally feel better, as if the tears are no longer there. It’s especially workable with using specialized nutrition And herbal remedies to re-nourish the organs. This system approach of Bodywork & Release Processing with high level Nutrition is what my method does. We could even say it un-pollutes and un-blocks the chakra energy centers and in parallel, re-energizes them and I tegrates them with each other.

This energy field has been measured by instruments and photographed numerous times in American University laboratories. It was observed by physicians in the 19th and 20th centuries for medical diagnosis with the aid of a specially filtered glass. Modern day Soviet Block medicine has included measurement of the auric field in medical diagnosis using specialized photography. The body's energy field has also been seen with the specially developed vision of adepts for centuries. This work is a more common.

For the purposes of this book, it's enough to remember that both the energetic and the physical blockages affect a person's psychology, and that both levels are cleared, in many ways, with Netherton's techniques. Most of the experiences we have in this life are located in the flesh of the body but, as I said, affect the chakras and the aura as well. Those from past lives are said to be seated in the outer layers of the aura but actually flow through the body via the aura's interconnections with the energy centers.

Whenever I speak of physical blocks in this book, I am also speaking of the more subtle physical energies that we call energy fields.

Two specific aspects of these energy imbalances involve both these systems and should also be mentioned. One has to do with 'running away up into the head,' and involves what is called a 'gravity mechanism.' The other has to do with Chinese Medicine Organ Systems.

Gravity mechanism is a term used to describe in which direction our energy goes when we're frightened. You may remember that in Chapter 1 I said we get our feet on the ground and start running around during the anal stage, at about age four. Before this time, we haven't made full contact with our Mother Earth, and we haven't learned to have a stance in the world.

When a person, of any age, is confronted, he (or she) will stand his ground if he thinks he's strong enough to resist. When we know the opposition is greater, we give up our position and retreat to safety. The same thing happens in our body, but in slightly different manners, depending on our age.

Before the age of four, during the stages of acceptance, needs and independence, when we have not yet gotten our stance, we will verbally resist but when the fear becomes too great, we will immediately go in, or up, and out of the body, or at least to the forehead and top of the head. (This, incidentally, creates psychics. If you know a very stout woman who is a good psychic, and shares that she was abused as a child, you'll see an actual result of this mechanism.) People who were traumatized by control and manipulation, may live way deep inside themselves, with a very stoic attitude about their 'outer' flesh.

In the next stages, the initial confrontation is usually met with stomping of the feet, or some other activity like that. And when the adult overwhelms us, the 'tail,' or buttocks, drops down in back. There is depression and hopelessness, but no running away into the head. However, because the kinds of episodes that happen to us after the age of four also happen to us in infancy, birth and other times, I have noticed that this structural imbalance also occurs with the baby's position in infancy confrontations with Mother, in Mother's physical distortion and during the birthing process.

People who have experiences later in life of going out the top of their heads during a traumatic physical injury will understand what I'm talking about here. In the next chapter, I'll describe an important manifestation of running away to the head.

Traditional Chinese Medicine defines 12 major organ 'systems' in our bodies, governing emotional feelings as well as physiological health. Stored anger resides in the liver and prevents us from making plans for the future. Get rid of this past resentment and it has room to work on the future. Fear is located in the kidneys, in the lower back, which comic book characters arch when they run away in fear. Survival issues and sympathy are located in the pancreas and spleen area. Anxiety affects these as well as the heart, which is also affected by hurt.

These organ systems include 'meridian' energies that flow in specific paths through the muscles and connective tissue of our bodies, up and down the legs, trunk and head, and from the head to the arms and hands and back again.

When a particular energy gets imbedded in the body, it also goes into the tissues of the organs. And by having structural muscle tightness, the energy in a particular meridian flow is restricted for the associated organs. These imbalances eventually affect us in our physical health. And the emotion that is trapped in our bodies keeps expressing itself through our daily fears.

How is a block experienced? It manifests as a physical tension, often in the chest and abdomen, but also in the pelvis and legs, and even in the arms, back, neck and head. It’s an emotional hopelessness and a lot of mental thoughts, either about how depressed we are or about how we can work 'around' the block that is being perpetrated by another person. Guided self-awareness during a counseling session is a good way to become aware of what it feels like, especially if your guide can feel these energies in your body and has enough experience to hear the patterns in your emotions and speech.

If a person has difficulty feeling these physical sensations, it means their connective tissue is very hardened in these forms and the energy path from their location to the forebrain is also restricted by this chronic tightness. By neutralizing this 'permanent' hardness, a person can then feel the energies come and go, and will have enough degree of body calmness to look into the emotions and thoughts without battling with the therapist or going away inside and hiding.
While awareness of the block coming and going is a very helpful and, I believe, necessary step to being free of it, the awareness alone doesn't clear the energy pattern inside you.

So the problem with doing just verbal analytical therapy, or even sensory awareness exercises, is that while we learn a lot about our issues, they don't seem to go away until their body and energy components are eliminated. Most methods of verbal psychotherapy, while very effective in some ways, do not access and neutralize these energy 'packets' or 'imprints' that reside within our unconscious minds and bodies, and take us over. These packets get 're-triggered' by difficult circumstances and then they affect our feelings and thoughts. More precisely, they are our feelings and thoughts at these times. When triggered, the old memories replay themselves and we say our 'old tapes' are running. The connection is usually made in a set of nerves in our brains called 'the limbic system.'

If we do a lot of meditation and have a strong 'center,' we can be aware of some of these tapes and disconnect our actions from them to some degree. Some people also pride themselves in how they can 'overcome' them. But as you may know, they still come up. Our awareness is centered in the nerves called 'the super-limbic' part of the brain, an entirely different section than the one storing the tapes. So one part of us can indeed be aware of what is happening in another part. This is why just verbal talking and objective thinking does not remove old blockages. It does not access the necessary physical locations.

We can get calmed down from our upsets and then come to our senses. But until that happens, the thoughts, words and emotional feelings fill us up. When people are really all wound up, they can't stop those behaviors no matter how hard they mentally try. The only way to get rid of them is to neutralize them. Even just the Structural Integration Bodywork alone is a great help. It restores a very wound up person to a relaxed and softened state in a matter of a few hours. If any 'buttons' are still left, they'll only come up in new stressful situations and they'll release fairly quickly when the person mentally lets go of them. In this regard, the Bodywork is much more effective, and much faster than massage.

As I said, the unconscious patterns make up a shell around the 'real' you. And they continuously broadcast their own energies that attract people and situations into your life that go against what you really want. This shell is often called a 'secondary' personality in Reichian therapy. It's made up of the compromising behaviors you made in childhood when you were forced with a developmental dilemma. These compromising behaviors, which include 'negative' attitudes and feelings, may not have been consciously thought out, especially in infancy. But they embody your 'role' in a self defeating drama. In childhood, it was Mother or Father who defeated you.

Once you embodied this kind of 'script,' that script will happen over and over for you
Your real self will continue to be disappointed, but it can't seem to change the outcome. That's because the real self has been buried underneath chronically tightened muscles. This is the tightness that was created during your childhood traumas and in the upsetting long-term family situations. Tightness is the standard way we withdraw from pain and protect ourselves.

Therefore your core has been physically blocked from expressing itself outwardly in the world for many, many years. Your deepest expressive energies of love, who you are and what you want, have been unable to expand through these physical blocks in certain directions. And locked inside the physical blocks are the emotional energies of these old, traumatic events: fear, anger, anxiety, guilt, confusion, low self esteem, etc. So when you try to express your love, by 'pushing' in the blocked directions, these negative emotions also come out.

A number of therapists say that our patterns were copied, or 'learned,' from our parents, say, after the age of three or four. But even when you realize these patterns are 'wrong,' and you make lots of effort in the 'right' way, it still doesn't always work. In fact, the old tapes may come back and seem to sabotage us again. That's because the more powerful 'learning' was forced upon us during specific incidents in earlier times than these therapists have been able to access. Without clearing the earlier experiences, a person can get frustrated about their condition: "I did the therapy. Why do I still have the problem?"

The therapists are partially correct. In order to free ourselves from limiting behavior, we have to identify what these behaviors are, when they come up, and so forth. And it's always a big help to understand what happened in childhood. Starting with my very first session, I always ask about things like what roles the person played in the family, how the parents treated them on a regular basis, what kinds of situations regularly happened even with siblings and peers, and even how old they were when the next brother or sister was born.

But the underlying problem is not in the conscious mind nor with someone's adult intentions. Consciously learned behaviors can be consciously changed once a person understands the reasons for it and makes some kind of commitment. But unconsciously learned patterns that a person doesn't know exist cannot be erased by willpower alone. Obviously you'd change what you don't want if you could.

Even self-defeatist behavior is not a problem with the conscious mind. Something else sabotages people. When someone is in an intolerable situation that they want to get out of, but don't, you can know that their earlier pattern of being controlled is taking them over. If they try to handle their problems with alcohol or food, you can also know that this pattern of avoidance, or calming himself or herself down in the short term, was also implanted in their earliest conditioning. If someone is so morose that they feel they're dying in their situation and can't see how to get out of it, you can know that in a past life, that person's imprisonment was ended only when they died. These parallels are often called analogies. But the actual, vivid, experiences always come out of people's minds. They are not conceptualized ideas. I'll describe this in great detail in a later chapter.

So in trying to help someone, it does very little good to chastise a person for not having the conscious volition to get out of their negative behavior. When they're caught up in the very strong energies of past experiences, the person you're speaking with is the frightened and helpless child, or the imprisoned and dying person of a past life. At these times, you aren't speaking to the person's conscious volition you want to influence. As my own abilities to really help people increase, I more and more work directly with that little child or hopeless person instead of trying to talk sense into them. It's much less frustrating to me and much kinder and more nourishing to the other person. And it gets more done. People who refuse to do this are caught up in an ego position that is being run by their own unconscious, overworked 'Mother imprints' from childhood.

The technical issue is one of chakra energy center focus. A person in emotional upheaval is verbally communicating through part of their brains and mouth, but they're 'living' in their bellies where those kinds of emotion are stored. Trying to communicate with that belly by addressing their heads, where intellect lies, is physically impossible. Whenever I catch myself doing it, I realize that I'd just been acting out of my own head and not out of my whole, integrated, person.

To fix the problem, it works best to gain the person's trust, get them detached from the issues that are running them, and then remove the physical and emotional embodiment of the old pattern. Traditionally, this usually calls for the expertise gained in professional practice as a psycho-therapist or as a layperson who's attended some good workshops. But many good friends handle part of it automatically and quite well.

But for 26 years I have found deep & thorough Structural Integration Bodywork is the fastest way to help most people get released from the energies of a number of past episodes of the behavior. It literally removes and eliminates them. This helps the psychotherapy go much faster and easier, for both client and therapist. And the good conscious awareness of the appropriate therapist helps the person’s development, to the amount the deeper old episode energies and tightnesses are no longer in the body and energy field.

Someone who's used to doing breath concentration in his or her lower abdomen can get a lot of help just by doing it for a few hours. It'll allow the emotional chaos to calm down and the mixed up thoughts to die away. Both of these things are just energies popping out of the past experiences. Lower abdomen breath meditation will also feed energy into the self-sufficiency and nourishment centers of our bodies.

Sometimes, what we have to do is physically move the person away from a hopeless and repressive environment and into a supportive one. Then they're out of the circumstances in which they play the role they were forced to play in childhood, or in a past life. In the new circumstance, you give them a new role to play that's much more satisfying.

In the new situation, a lot of that self-defeating negative behavior will then die away when sufficient Bodywork and release process8ng have cleared to a deep enough level and nutrition has rebuilt the body some. It will only pop up again when the person is faced with the same, or a similar dilemma that makes them play the hopeless and dying role from the deeper layers. So while the pattern is not out of them yet, it can be put back in dormancy for long enough periods to talk sense with the person and get them to go through the processes to remove the pattern that's so disruptive in their lives.

This is very similar to what the police do when they save a person from jumping off a high building. It's also similar to the alcoholic 'intervention' program where friends who already have his bags packed confront the alcoholic and then drive him to a knowledgeable and wholistic rehab center. Experts in these fields have learned that just stopping the drinking or other 'suicidal' actions is insufficient therapy; they kept seeing the same people over and over again. They have to be emotionally and physically nourished by professionals who must also try to objectively help them and their families, to straighten out all their lives.

When you understand the body oriented psychology of disastrous behavior, this course of action makes sense. Ordinary verbal communication is inadequate for people hung up in emotional crises that have inter-penetrated their lifestyles. They're too hooked into the disastrous physical action. A lot of the current trauma is in their bodies and they are usually nutritionally depleted. The way to help them quickly is to first fix the immediate physical problem by disconnecting them from their hopeless attitude and the trauma material and malnutrition in them. This is done by bringing in an adult who can give the person the acknowledgement and nourishment in adulthood. And for doing a lifelong personal growth, doing the method for what they were lacking in their childhoods and which has been lacking in their adult lives for a long time.

Scolding only shows that you are 'cross-transferring' your own patterns of fear and the need to fix the situation. The role you play in the person's unconscious drama is his (or her) accuser, just like Mother accused and scolded him for improper behavior when he was a child. The reason for scolding was to try to regain control of the situation. When you act this way as an adult, it means that your own Mother's fear inside of you has been activated by the other person's condition and you are unconsciously letting her inadequate behavior take over your mind and play it's role. Your own inexperience and frustration will connect you into the same kinds of emotions in your unconscious mind's scenarios.

These kinds of behaviors can be good 'flags' for our own internal awareness. Whenever we get caught up in personal, self-centered emotions, we can know that our own inner patterns are unconsciously running us. Technically, it's called trying to help someone from the third chakra that embodies fear and control. To really help people, we have to be effective from the fourth chakra which embodies the understanding of others' needs as well as our own love and compassion. Developing this ability requires self-awareness and some processing of our own, because nearly everybody grows up with fear and control reactions. So both the helper and the 'helpee' can use a crisis to develop their own personal growth.