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I recently came back from a run. It’s surprising to admit those words. I believe it could have been many years since my last. However I found out recently that my levels show somewhat raised cholesterol, and doctors suggested to perform intense workouts regularly.

For the first time ever in living memory that the reason to be active has been my physical health. During earlier years, I exercised because I wanted to be thinner. At times I ran to manage nervousness – I was merely escaping from the worry, without confronting it. On other occasions, I jogged because I sought to improve with jogging. It signified the meaning to me back then to create a better life.

Exercising with new motivation now got me thinking about the approaches I’ve connected with my physical self over my lifetime and how this is changing as I progress from early adulthood to being a middle-aged person. I believe not I’ve honored my physical form, not fundamentally. I’ve valued it just for its functions and the objectives it served me: aiming to appeal; escaping emotions; achieving a quicker 5K run. Up to now, I failed to grasp that my body represents me, it is my life, rather than a tool for outcomes.

A great deal has been written for ages about the separation involving physical and mental aspects – which it’s reassuring to know, I won’t summarize now. What resonated most fascinating is the Freudian perspective that mental and physical selves are naturally unified from birth, because physical development requires psychological development and the reverse is true. The infant’s physical sensations – such as the bodily feeling of hunger – drive the mind to cultivate the capacity to perceive hunger as an emotion that can be sated by nourishment; and the psychological solace and satisfaction consistently provided by feed after feed nourishes the child’s mind just as the milk nourishes them bodily. Likewise emotional occurrences – like the wish to rise and grab an object, and the determination to attempt repeatedly – are the reason and method muscles grow stronger. From our earliest moments, mind and body are intertwined in shared growth as connected as DNA strands.

However I have noticed, in sessions with my therapist, that my mind and body might experience a distinct connection – a less unified and somewhat abusive. My mind might utilize my physical self to retain and manifest elements that my consciousness considers undesirable or intolerable. In my sessions we realized that there are particular emotional states that I fear I can’t handle; in place of experiencing them in my mind, I unintentionally shift them to my physical self, where they get stuck as corporeal issues.

I often had digestive discomfort – unrelated to my diet, but was a type of bodily backlash of the more acidic feelings I couldn’t digest mentally. This wasn’t an intentional act, but once it was raised into my consciousness in sessions, and my dread and insecurity and frustration and alarm could be felt and put into words instead of converted to physical sensation, it vanished. I seldom experience from indigestion currently.

The most severe episode I experienced this terrible acid reflux, I was unable to sleep for multiple consecutive nights. I believed I was forfeiting my mental stability. I consulted my doctor, who organised multiple diagnostic procedures, but no issues were found physically wrong. It turned out to be an alternate medic who suggested that the root could be emotional. My therapist did not disagree. I was surprised, but I also knew it was accurate.

Whenever someone endures a corporeal problem, they might feel insulted upon hearing that there might be a psychological cause. They can experience as invalidation, being told that their symptom isn’t real. Certainly it’s a real phenomenon – some face their pain discounted or wrongly assessed. Yet occasionally it’s possible that the physical symptoms are real – without doubt – and the source is mental, the subconscious utilizing the physical self to express some pain or fury or whatever emotion awareness fails to handle. Sometimes, we may believe our emotions only has value only through expression as bodily symptoms. We persistently neglect our psychological well-being personally, in social contexts and culturally; for what reason can we allow the shocking reduction of psychodynamic psychotherapy on the NHS?

My experiences have shown me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable if we remain trapped without realization in modes of connection, internally and socially, that are rooted in devaluation, manipulation and dealings. These dynamics tend to be simpler to identify “in the world” in broader culture. It’s likely more challenging to consider how they got out there, and to identify these forms inside us and within our closest relationships, in the dynamics of our psyches.

But persistence pays off. After donning my jogging shoes again after such a long decade, going outside not for bodily change, or to get rid of an emotion, or to beat a running record, {it