Psychosomatic: It’s Not ‘In Your Head’
Psychosomatic is widely understood as ‘it’s in your head’.
I totally disagree.
It’s core idea is that ‘the head’ is not separate from the body.
It’s beyond a mind-body link. It’s mind-body oneness.
What happens in us, happens in our mind and body simultaneously. What we experience, we experience in our mind and body at the same time.
Psychosomatic is not an excuse to write off someone's experience as imaginary.
All reality is experiential.
A flower is red because you experience it as red. It is black to a colour blind friend.
An itch is as real as you feel it is.
A pimple is as nasty as you experience it to be.
Recognising the 'psychosomatic' aspect only adds dimension to understanding your distress and helping you heal it.
It gives us the tool to see, and work with, both your experience of distress and the problem/symptom causing you distress.
It doesnt mke your concerns unreal, less real or invalid.
Every reality is experiential.
And every disease is psychosomatic.
So is health!
Remember the 'healthy body, healthy mind' adage?
You can't have one without the other because they are, but one.
Our whole organism is but that, a whole organism.
The parts of our whole regulate and dysregulate together. And ultimately, that's what psychosomatic is - a recognition of the wholeness of psyche (mind) and soma (body).
More of my writings on the BodyMind:
