Anxiety Rx: A New Prescription for Anxiety Relief from the Doctor Who Created It by Russell Kennedy

Author:Russell Kennedy [Kennedy, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Awaken Village Press
Published: 2020-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

58

On Integration

When you neutralize and integrate your old wounds, they leave the body and go back into the mind in an organized state where the energy can become integrated in a form of growth. It is the reverse of what happened when you were young when the energy was too much and you became disintegrated in a form of protection.

This integration is what happens during childhood in families with a strong sense of attachment that can fully support children through the trauma so that the negative emotional energy is metabolized, digested, and neutralized.

The story of my patient Alanna illustrates this concept of integration.

Alanna came to me when she was fifteen, just after her parents had divorced. Alanna developed a significant issue with OCD. (I’ve often joked it should be called compulsive obsessive disorder, because shouldn’t we put it in alphabetical order?). Alanna would have elaborate physical movements like tapping her chest five times before getting in the car or turning around in a clockwise circle three times before entering a room. She also developed disordered eating (though stopping short of any clinical diagnosis).

Alanna’s parents had an “amicable divorce,” but Alanna felt very polarized—compelled to be close to her physically distant father and resenting her mother, even though her mom was the one that provided most of the support.

Over the six years we spent working together, Alanna did therapy that focused on her body, called somatic experiencing therapy, along with traditional psychotherapy. Somatic experiencing is a form of therapy created by Dr. Peter Levine that tunes into the trauma stored in the body. My wife is a certified somatic experiencing practitioner, and she has taught me a great deal about the process of healing trauma using the body. Working with this modality has confirmed what I first saw during my LSD experience—that my pain had more to do with the alarm stored in my body than the machinations of my mind. Healing trauma, it has become clear to me, is less about talking about it and more about feeling through it. When I say you can’t think your way out of a feeling problem, this is exactly what I mean. I believe that in the very near future we are going to see the field of psychotherapy as a whole move in the direction of using more of this type of body-based therapy, along with psychedelics.

When I met Alanna, she had a very rigid posture and her voice was tense and muted. In therapy, she was encouraged to trust her body and become aware of how tightly she held herself.

Alanna had been unable to feel (and therefore metabolize) the grief of the dissolution of her family. She would tell me that because the divorce of her parents never got “ugly” and because her mom and dad were amicable towards each other, she couldn’t understand why they needed to separate in the first place. It was like she didn’t believe it was happening, so she couldn’t grieve a loss she didn’t feel.

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