“dams’ or “specks of dust’ and, sometimes, one needs to “pull the spring back’ or “remove those debris and oil the mechanism’ in order to keep the machine going.
The chilliness of culture cools down the heat of the spirit
Self-regulation and self-healing are the part of our regulatory system, but their potential is not limitless. M.E. Burno, whom I consider one of my teachers, called nature “a wise fool’. A fever is supposed to help our body fight the infection, but if the temperature gets too high, it causes problems, too. When it comes to our psychological health, then our excessive worries are similar to high body temperature. Then the chilliness of culture helps the heat of the spirit cool down to a reasonable temperature. Sometimes, one needs to “turn up the heat’ to speed up the processes which “have frozen.”
Nature does not restore everything automatically, and it looks like it left a part of its responsibilities for restoring the peace of mind to a human being hoping that we will be able to do it. So, we have to live up to nature’s expectations!
Emergency protection
I often compare the kind of protection that activates in the case of stress to an airbag in a car. This airbag saves our lives at a moment of the crash, but it never goes back to its place again. You cannot continue your way once it has been activated, and the car needs to be serviced. Our autonomic system works the same way: if it activated in a dangerous situation, it cannot switch off itself once activated. It is as if nature tells you: “I have saved your life, and you’re on your own. I haven’t really thought of that moment with calling the reactions back.” People tend to accumulate these “upsetting episodes,” and that is why they need to make a special conscious effort to restore psychological balance.
The brightest example of a psychological “dead-end’ that forms under the influence of the natural mechanisms is a phobia. Frightening information “impresses’ the body to such an extent that a mere reminder about the situation which caused this fright leads to a recurrent reaction of fear, even if the situation is no longer relevant, and a person understands that too.
The problem is that this frightening information led to the triggering emergency protective mechanisms, which do not switch off automatically and get fixed in the psychosomatic profile of a person.
One can use their mind, just like a steering wheel of a vehicle, to navigate through life. However, this principle works only under normal conditions. In extreme situations, automatic single-action safety mechanisms come to our rescue, and once they act like our airbags, moving forward comes to a halt for a certain period.
Healing from phobia does not require a lot of time, but it does call for a special approach: one needs to extract the information that entered the body at a moment of frustration, and now it is set deep in the mind of this person. Greyness or blackness is to be found where it entered the body, and where it moved to, and what it “hit,” and then it should leave the body the same way it came into it. As a rule, it is found in the stomach or in the area of solar plexus where the information tends to hit; then it comes out through the top of the head as black smoke. As a result, a person begins to feel the balance in life and can “steer’ it as he or she did before, that is: using intellect and mature coping mechanisms.
It is rather difficult to imagine any process of restoring balance without this procedure of “letting the smoke out’, which might seem odd at first sight. Without the procedure, “cleaning’ the autonomic depths of our nervous system, the feeling of fear, can last years, even if the central nervous system “came to its senses’ and realized that the danger has passed.
This “object that we discover in our body’ and the way to work with them is described in my previous works (Ermoshin, A. 1999, 2008, 2010).
Later, we will have a look at the most significant elements of this work in case of foreign languages. This way, we will only help our nature, and we will not introduce any alteration, which means we will act only when automatic regulatory processes fail to do their job. Psychocatalysis is a temporary suspension of a “manual control’ that restores normal functioning of a self-regulation mechanism. Reasonable decisions (the work of our intellect) help the profound wisdom of our body find its way out of a dead-end, which the body drove itself into while solving the problem and using the subconscious in-born strategies of problem-solving triggered by emergency situations.
98 dollars
The decisions themselves, when found, seem to be very simple. There is a joke about a mechanic who made a couple of circles around a broken car, listened to the sound of the engine and then hit it once with a hammer. The engine started working well again. The mechanic writes a cheque for 100 dollars. “Why?” “One dollar for using the hammer, one dollar for the hit, and 98 dollars for finding the right place to hit.”
The connection with the processes that take place at the autonomic level of our nervous system is carried out through our sensations. I do not exclude that the processes at this level cannot be regulated by other methods.
Access via sensations
Each mental process has its own “autonomic accompaniment’: reaction of the blood vessels, muscles, changes of metabolism and of temperature in the brain or the body, as well as changes in electrical conductivity of the tissues. They can be registered objectively and subjectively.
The body electricity
The body electricity can be considered a detector of internal processes built into our body. I am very grateful to Professor A.A. Tabidze for his collaboration in 2012 when we were establishing the correlation between subjective sensations of the patients and some objective parameters. Prof. Tabidze was measuring the intensity of a current at 12 specific places on the wrist and on the sole of the feet (Nakatani-Klimenko method) before and after the psychotherapeutic sessions that I was conducting. In cases of connection with strong emotions, the test revealed considerable positive dynamics: energy channels manifested levelling of conductivity levels. At the same time, one could also observe a correlation between subjective and objective channels. However, if the problem of the patient had a chronic and not only psychogenetic character, then improvement was not as fast.
Changes in brain activity in different states can be registered by modern methods of neurovisualisation, with the help of positron emission tomography (PET). The results of numerous researches are published online, especially on the websites dedicated to the research in the field of hypnosis.
Areas of hot and cold in our body corresponding to the different states are registered by a thermograph.
It is known that “lie detectors’ actively exploit this phenomenon to confirm, if the information given by the respondent is true or false. However, a person can discover a lot about him/herself without any machines, simply by immersing in one’s sensations. Ability to “self-scan’ seems to be this wonderful mechanism offered by nature in order to give us an opportunity to find out the characteristics of our state of mind and ways to participate in its improvement.
Information provided by our internal sight is as relevant as the data on the radar for an air-traffic control officer responsible for airplane traffic in the sky.
Somatopsychotherapy
Karl
