Focusing with "Psychosomatic" Illness
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Cobi writes: "Can Focusing be used to heal from psychosomatic illnesses? If so, how would I go about doing it?"
Dear Cobi, Often people don’t know whether or how much of the symptoms they are experiencing are emotionally based, and how much physically based. It’s a good thing we don’t have to know the answer to whether an illness IS psychosomatic or not, in order to be with it in a Focusing way. Focusing can be used to help with ANY kind of illness, not just those categorized as psychosomatic.
There are two main approaches to working with illness in a Focusing way. The first is to start with the felt experience of the symptoms. Barbara McGavin tells how to do this with cold symptoms in her article "Focusing with Small Physical Ailments."
The second approach to working with illness that may be psychosomatic is to assume that there is something in you causing or benefiting from the illness, and then inviting a felt sense of that to come and be worked with in a Focusing way.
For example. a person might be experiencing numbness in the right arm. One way to work with that would be to sit quietly and invite a sense of that area, as it feels right now. Noticing what words or images describe it freshly, as if you’d never felt it before. Waiting for a sense of its emotion, as if IT had its own emotion. And so on, just as you would do Focusing ordinarily.
Or, you could sit in a Focusing way and give this kind of invitation in your body: "I’d like to get to know the part of me that is creating or benefiting from this numbness in my arm." Giving that invitation, and just waiting, with awareness in the middle area of your body, throat, chest, and stomach especially.
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What Happens When We Exile Our Feelings
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When I was growing up, anger wasn’t an option. I never saw my mother angry. My father’s sarcastic comments were a very convoluted way of saying that he was depressed and unhappy with himself… a connection I didn’t make until much later. My own angry feelings had no welcome, no room to form and be felt. After I was in my twenties and learned Focusing, I had to recover that whole side of myself, and discover that not only anger, but also self-assertion and inner strength had been exiled in my family.
The exiling process is a natural one; it’s how we protected ourselves from emotional experiences that would have been unwelcome in our families, or that felt overwhelming at the time. Like sending a person into exile, parts of us were sent away, far away, into a territory called "that’s not me."
When feelings are exiled, the process of having those feelings is stopped, short-circuited. Something that needs to form in us, cannot form. The energy of those feelings is diverted, and something else happens instead.
One thing that may happen is illness. Emotional experience, pushed firmly away, eventually becomes "somaticized"–a bodily condition or symptom. The symptom literally carries a message: Some life process has been blocked or stopped.
We can bring back our exiles by starting with our symptoms, both the physical and the emotional ones. And doing Focusing: gently, compassionately listening to what is more, what is under, what is wanted and not-wanted. There is a way through the stuckness… a way that the body itself knows.