Things in The Body. Andrey Ermoshin
of sensations in psychotherapy
To continue the conversation about schools, dealing with sensations, the method of bioenergotherapy (BEST), developed by E. I. Zuyev (St. Petersburg) should be mentioned first. BEST, as no other manner of work, enables a person to transfer to the practitioner (the operator) the nuances of body sensations. The peculiarity of BEST is that in the process of massage, which is more than just the mechanical interaction between the practitioner and the patients (which, rather, should be called work on the movement of sensations in the body) the latter are asked “strange’ questions: about the consistency of movement in the body “sensations’, the color of the inner space and other characteristics of the “body scheme’. The patient, for example, reports that their head is filled during the manipulation. “With what?” – the operator asks. The patient: “Air (water, milk, resin, lead, etc.)”. The practitioner holds the shoulder blade and asks again: “What am I holding?” The response is: “A chicken”.
Zuyev’s followers gently call the evocation of those felt images to be the product of «illusions’, the «suggestive effect’. They use this curious feedback to adjust their operational efforts, as well as to divert the patient’s attention towards the process of performing manual therapy procedures. Representatives of the BEST school also suggest: «The immersion in figurative reality is an integral part of deep diagnosis, since the patient «gives’ those images that are embedded in the structures of the subconscious. The creative application of the knowledge of psychoanalysis has limitless possibilities here.7»
We can say that the psychocatalysis of body sensations is the development of BEST ideas in the direction of the psychotherapeutic usage of the ability of man to recognize the «schemes’ of a body.
Spontaneous detection of sensations
“A stone in soul’ is one of those images most often experienced by patients, but it’s not the only one. “Jellyfish’ or “octopuses’ of fear, sitting in the stomach and launching their “tentacles’ in all parts of the body. “Clouds’ of anxiety in the chest, forcing the patients to wring their hands and run around the room. A “mass’ of anxiety, bursting in the forehead, preventing them from sleeping. “Lumps’ of grievances in the chest, preventing them from breathing. “Balls of despair in the throat, squeezing tears from the eyes (“globus hystericus” in Latin). “Brain-eating snakes’ of doubt in the head and “steel plates’ of situation control in the back of the head, raising blood pressure to pre-stroke levels. “Lead shoulder straps’ of responsibility hanging on the shoulders, flattening the spine. Patients often describe their sensations in these terms.
The objectification of feelings in artistic speech
In everyday and poetic language and in proverbs, one can meet such expressions as: “my problems swell my head’, or “cats scratch my heart’. Joy is usually described as big, and grief as heavy. Doctors speak about the “neurasthenic helmet’, though it is not known how to get rid of it.
It is possible to give a lot of quotes from popular songs, for example:
«Don’t go to him, don’t go, he’s got a granite stone in his chest.»
Here is an example from a novel: «A young woman is standing in a dark and cold hallway, near a tepid stove, warming her hands, waiting to be called for dinner- and, having pursed her dried up lips, thinking… about what? About Rodion? It is all nonsense, that she has poisoned him, nonsense! But what if she really has poisoned him… my God! What must she feel? What tombstone is lying on her secretive soul!8»
There is no need to add to the list of excerpts because the reader will be able to recall such collocations, used to describe sensations in the body during the experience of various emotional states.
Snakes in the head is not a sign of schizophrenia
Being a student of the clinical school, I used to perceive the evidence of patients about their feelings as a part of the information needed to help establish the diagnosis and verify the effectiveness of the treatment. If patients told me about the “daggers in their backs’, “the devil on their shoulders’, “worms in their heads’, I thought about senesthopathy, and schizophrenia.
Today, while working through «a given’ energy structure rather than an innate genetic one, I often met the descriptions of «strange’ feelings experienced by my patients. For me, the style of such descriptions is important. It can be epileptoid-photographic, cycloid-colorful, or schizoid-abstruse, or organically flattened. Knowledge of the patient’s character remains essential, but no less important is the fact that there is practically nobody who is unable to describe what is felt. The body experience, (or «experiences of the body’) is a phenomenon which is quite natural to people of any constitutional and genetic type and culture.
Bodily experience, conscious or unconscious, is constantly presented in the normal human sensory system. The only real «strangeness’ of descriptions of body sensations in the somatopsychotherapeutic process, is that they are made in the form of describing objects, which was not done before. It will be discussed below.
Sometimes patients can be surprised by the nature of their perception when referring to their feelings. They even ask in embarrassment: «Do you have a lot of crazy people like me?» The perception of what is felt in images is not a sign of mental illness. On the contrary, the ability to perceive indicates mental health. If we talk about diseases, it turns out that «snakes in the head’ are more a sign of pre-stroke than schizophrenia.
During the observation of the object descriptions of experiences it was found that the results of self-examination of the body sensations can serve, firstly, to activate the processes of natural self-regulation in the body (through the inclusion of the feedback mechanism) and, secondly, to organize accelerated changes in the mental status of the patient through focusing on this process.
An overview of the work with sensations
If we talk about the main issue of psychotherapy, it is, in my opinion, as follows: to get quickly to the mental charge which is «knocking down the patient’s energy circuit’ and decide on what to do with it.
There are a number of approaches to solving this issue, e.g. psychoanalysis with its method of free associations and catharsis while understanding the «primal scene’; gestalt therapy, which aims to modify the expression of feelings through finding a «formula’ of constructive appeal to the «addressee’, etc.
SPT implements a specific approach. In the diagnosis, it suggests turning to body sensations, finding unresolved experiences by their «mass’ (the technique of «objectification of sensations’), and in the therapy – calming down without preconditions, (the technique of «zeroing’). The special issue is obtaining new experiences.
Phases of work with sensations
Diagnostic phase
1. “Where?” (Sensations, associated with the experience – at the level of head, chest, abdomen?)
2. «What?» (Is it something big or small? Light or dark? Heavy or lightweight? The image of what is it?)
Evaluation phase
1. Can it be bigger or smaller?
2. What parts of the body are «de-energized’?
3. Did it emerge recently or long ago?
4.
Manual for BEST operators, St. Petersburg, 1991 / / E. I. Zuyev. The healing tree. M.: Soviet sport, 1995. (There is a description of the practice of «Philippine operations» and «transpersonal psychotherapy» performed by the author of BEST.)
Bunin I. Village // Moscow: Pravda, 1988, p. 139.