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Bodymapping
& Somatic Pain
By
Ray Bishop, Ph.D.
“The
Body is the Map of the Mind”
-JD Landis, Solitude
Most
of us have had clients whom, despite having
received a variety of Touch therapies and traditional
medical treatments for chronic pain, have not
found relief. Once a chronic or serious underlying
disease is eliminated as a cause, it is often
postulated that there exists an underlying emotional
or psychological component to that pain that
has not been accessed and acts as a block to
recovery. I would like to consider a few aspects
of this thorny issue and propose an effective
client-based approach to this problem.
In an effort to relieve pain, most body working
and touch therapists examine physical symptoms
supplemented by information provided by the
patient. The client's body is in a sense
“read”, what the patient reports is
factored in and the appropriate protocol is
applied. But there are many disciplines that
try to go beyond this. What they share in common
are theories replete with connections between
specific “organ systems” and emotions
(Chinese medicine) or links between specific
geography and emotional issues (Huna Kane).
What these systems employ are a set of descriptors
called bodymapping. More modern examples are
found in Lowen's The Language of the
Body, Kellerman's Emotional
Anatomy and Myss'‚ Anatomy
of the Spirit. The underlying premise
of bodymapping systems is that there exists
a one-to-one correspondence between specific
locales of pain and specific emotional states
or purported physiological malfunction. This
cause and effect relationship then dictates
what treatment is to be used. Often, for these
practitioners, patient feedback is less relevant
than what their bodymapping system dictates.
Sometimes, they even seek to define a root cause
or source of the errant emotion, perhaps residing
deep within the patient's repressed psyche
or a specific landmark of the body.
In the world of Rolfing, for instance, we “read”
connective tissue patterns and infer structural
causes for our client's site-specific pain
or compensatory patterns. But even Dr. Rolf
bodymapped, as exemplified by her agreement
with Feldenkreis that all chronic flexor patterns
in the body are about fear. There is abundant
literature that supports the link between psyche
and soma (for example Energy Medicine and the
several volumes of other writings of Jim Oschmann);
and few somatic therapists would argue that
they "touch" only the physical body. Most bodyworkers
accept the notion of somatic memory although
they differ greatly on the best ways to access
and release traumatic material stored in the
soma. But why should we bother at all with causation,
with trying to link an event to a specific injury?
What we find is that this may in fact be important
in some circumstances, especially where there
is pain involving emotional trauma - not only
because clients seem to need it, but also because
such an “understanding” may in fact
help relieve the client's pain! It is certainly
challenging to find a means of helping clients
understand not only the physical but emotional
sources of their pain. But can this be accomplished
without having to resort to elaborate and rigid
body mapping models based on theories that read
more like myth than science and that link causes
and effects in highly improbable ways?
Bodymapping
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