Mindbody Writing: What I learned breaking pens and tearing pages.
If you’re an oh I never cry kind of person, if nothing seems to touch you or move you that deeply, this is for you.
Few things might be more impactful — and more challenging — than giving space to what has been avoided for a long, long time.
Because that was me. With the exception of brief outbursts, I didn’t allow myself a lot of emotions. It was difficult (and expensive!?) to re-connect with my heart and body. Every week I stepped into a bland office with tired carpets and waited for the dreaded words: “How does that make you feel?”
I was not feeling anything.
If anything, my body felt empty. There was a void. And tension. Like someone holding a door from bursting open.
The head was my safe space. I wanted to think about my life, not feel it. Kudos to my therapist who gently prodded me back to my body when I tried to divert and tell a story.
Anger might have been the hardest to access.
Hot flashing anger. Boiling anger. Stewing anger. Even today, anger is a tough one. I still push it away. If I get angry, I may feel a short pull, a hint at something happening. Then it gets bottled up and placed in the toxic waste storage somewhere down in my guts. Anger does not feel safe.
I had to learn, like a toddler, that experiencing anger was not the same as being an angry person. I had to teach myself not to feel guilty for anger simply arising. I had to grasp that being angry at someone I loved did not threaten to break our bond.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to act from a place of anger. I don’t want my life to be filled with anger. No, like all feelings and thoughts, it arises and vanishes. The anger burns off. The better my overall state, the more centered I am, the less interesting it is. (This was where meditation changed my life profoundly.) But the self-denial, I found, leads to a dissociated existence, to a disconnect from my truth.
It creates tension and numbness in my body. It leads to behavior that is hard to explain — like suddenly avoiding a person or place. It leads to the willful destruction of the gift of time to experience distraction and release.
Then I climb down the ladder and open the anger barrel. Ah. That’s what’s going on…
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ― Carl Jung
I have found different ways to access that space. What seems to work best is movement, movement that lets the body express and release without the mind as an intermediary. Workouts, dance, TRE, breathwork all seem effective. And, yes, even writing — which has the advantage of being available for free to anyone at any time (well, provided some privacy).
It’s dead simple, but not easy.
I learned this technique from the books of the late Dr. John Sarno (I shared it here with other notes on journaling). Years ago, Jim O’Shaughnessy mentioned Sarno to me, but I was not listening. Sarno focused on chronic pain, particularly back pain, and that was not a major issue for me.
Last year, one of my stepbrothers used Sarno’s method to overcome long COVID. The way he described it was very moving, as if he was dropping the weights he had been carrying by communing with his heart. It blew my mind.
Strange as it may seem, people with an unconscious psychological need for symptoms tend to develop a disorder that is well known, like back pain, hay fever, or eczema. — The Divided Mind
“John Sarno was a rehabilitation-medicine specialist at N.Y.U.,” writes Sam Dolnick at the New York Times. A doctor frustrated with his tools which didn’t seem to be effective. His encounter with psychology made him see “his own physical ailments — an irritable stomach, itchy skin, shrieking headaches — as manifestations of his emotional well-being.” Mind and body appeared to him as one system and chronic pain often as a psychosomatic phenomenon — a physical symptom caused by psychological factors (he called it TMS).
I don’t know whether he is right about pain being a ‘distraction’ but I don’t doubt the connection between mental and physical health.
As with Freud’s patients, I found that my patients’ physical symptoms were the direct result of strong feelings repressed in the unconscious. — The Mindbody Prescription
The medical community thought Sarno, who called himself ‘a heretic’, went too far. “Because his colleagues wouldn’t listen,” writes Dolnick, “he bypassed the journals and instead wrote best-selling books, conversational in tone, that detailed the link he saw between emotional distress and physical pain; he sold more than a million copies.”
I didn’t suffer from chronic pain, but I was familiar with the issue of bottled-up emotions. How else could they manifest? What issues was I risking down the road?
Sarno focused on rage perhaps because that was his predicament (“I am furious!” he said. “It’s there all the time! I’m in a rage!”). What about the other stuff we push away? The sorrow, shame, guilt, envy, fear, all the hurt and judgment and nasty stuff we would rather avoid.
What if Sarno didn’t go far enough?
“It is perfectly acceptable to have a physical problem in our culture, but people tend to shy away from anything that has to do with the emotions.” — Healing Back Pain
I wanted to know the truth about how I felt — the embodied truth, not the story my mind would come up with. And I wanted to drop the weight. I needed to know how Sarno had helped people.
For some patients, knowledge was enough. That’s why Sarno’s books analyze the condition, the treatment methods, and (Freudian) psychology. Unfortunately, Sarno buried a key idea among his many pages (kudos to his student Nicole Sachs for re-surfacing it): if knowing about the connection between psyche and body is not enough, you can choose to face and release whatever you are holding.
The best description I’ve found is in the chapter ‘treatment’ in The Divided Mind. Barely five pages of a “daily study program.” It’s that simple.
* Make three lists with all the sources of your emotional pain:
* One list for your past: “Anger, hurt, emotional pain, and sadness generated in childhood will stay with you all your life because there is no such thing as time in the unconscious.”
* One list for your current life circumstances: “List all the pressures in your life, since they all contribute to your inner rage.”
* And one list for your personality traits, whatever contributes “to the internal emotional pain and anger.” For example: being a people pleaser, self-critical, a perfectionist, very driven, shy, self-sacrificing etc. — “The child in our unconscious doesn’t care about anyone but itself and gets angry at the pressures to be perfect and good.”
* Set aside time and “write an essay, the longer the better, about each item on your list. This will force you to focus in depth on the emotional things of importance in your life.” I called it write Until the Heart Catches.
* Ideally, do this daily. More realistically, commit to it as an experiment, say for a month, then regularly to check in.
This is done by hand. With pen and paper. I know you all want to type it and have AI analyze it. Or speak it into a transcription app and avoid typing altogether. That may be effective in different ways, but in this what matters is not insight but to have an emotional experience that was previously avoided.
The point of the pen is movement. We need to move from head to body and stay with discomfort. We need to see the words take shape and be able to stare at them. We need to feel the emotional charge. It’s work. If you stay at the level of trivial chatter, your experience will likewise be trivial.
Yes, your hand may cramp in the beginning. It gets better.
Yes, it may be illegible. That does not matter. We’re not writing to share.
This is about healing, growing, and a chance to get closer to your essence.
What happens on that page is for your eyes only. It may be effective to destroy the pages later on. I haven’t tried that yet, but I know it can be useful to ‘release’ written statements — say a letter of forgiveness — to the ocean, fire etc.
Occasionally, this writing yields creative sparks. Ideas and insights, songs and poetry, maybe waiting for you. There is gold in your shadow. When that happens, you just write the spark up somewhere else. Keep the mindbody writing between yourself and the universe.
A few things I’ve learned doing this many times:
* Turn off the phone. Practice discipline. You may feel the urge to go to the kitchen, the bathroom, to text someone, check the apps, to do work, to do anything but experience what has been avoided for so long.
* Set a timer. It can take a while to go deep. I often start at the level of story with my gaze outward (“my problem is [person] is [doing]”). Give yourself enough space to go beyond the surface. Keep writing until you find the trail of feeling, then discomfort. Look for I feel [X] and, frankly, I’d rather not…
* Stay with the body. The mind will try to distract you. For the purpose of this exercise what happened is irrelevant. The story does not matter. All that matters is whether you can give yourself permission to feel what your unconscious is holding.
* Privacy. This is about experiencing emotions that don’t feel safe to feel, let alone express around others. Even with my therapists and my IFS coach I censored myself. The more privacy you have for this work, the better.
* Mindbody experience. I’ve broken pens, punched through pages, sobbed, cried, yelled, and cursed. I tend to shift back and forth between writing auf deutsch and in English. Many of my pages are illegible. Sometimes the letters get very large, at other times the writing is tiny. Allow yourself a full body experience. Give your parts the space to express themselves the way they want to.
* Try speaking. Try reading the emotionally difficult/juicy stuff out loud. Don’t think or dictate but rather let the hand write and then say out loud what appeared.
* Let go. We’re not trying to make this our reality. The goal is to visit the dragon’s cave and return to the village. Say what needs to be said, cry if you feel like crying, and when you’re done, close the notebook and leave it behind on the page.
* End with soothing. Things might get loud and wild and you might feel raw and upset after. Give yourself time to calm down and comfort yourself. I’m not joking. Don’t do this and hop on a work call right after.
* Find a couple of self-care rituals as rewards for doing the work — a walk in nature, yoga nidra, a nap, hot bath, soothing music or guided meditation..
* Add self-love and forgiveness. We’re looking to meet ourselves on the page as honestly as we can. You might bump into shadow that can be difficult to face. That’s valuable, but we also need to make sure we don’t stay in that mindset. Aside from soothing self-care, end with an affirmation to love and forgive yourself. Perhaps find someone to share that love with. Share a hug.
* The weirder this sounds, the more important it is. If everything love and forgiveness gives you the ick, try something like Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant.
I’ve used mindbody writing for life circumstances like money or writing, for relationship and family issues, for hang-ups like my avoidance of intimacy, and for the big leaps I have not allowed myself. I could easily find dozens more for which I haven’t explored with it yet.
Like my reluctance to ask for help. Gotta be independent! Can’t rely on others… oh. Is that so. I wonder what feelings are hiding in that space. Or my teeth clenched at night. I wonder what wants to be expressed there…
Still, I’ve found it very effective already. I feel lighter and less tense. My story has been changing. I find peace and bliss on the other side of broken pens and mad pages.
It is simply one way I meet my darkness and stuckness to release it, one page at a time.
Maybe it’s time to start the work?
I hope this helps.
— Frederik
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