Body Myth 4: The Body Is Out of Control and Must Be Dominated
Do you see your body as something you have to constantly control — masterfully riding it until it gives you what you want? This myth about the body centers around the idea that if you are not controlling it in every moment, your body will become something despicable, or it will collapse emotionally and fall apart. So you work to control it, altering it in whatever ways you think will get you love and acceptance, as well as safety and protection from harm. It is a fact that to feel loved and accepted is a primary human need, so fear of losing this feeds Body Myth 4.
For instance, you may discipline yourself to diet and exercise, not as an act of loving self-care, but rather in an attempt to create the body you think will make you more lovable, safe, or protected.
This form of self-judgment about your body may be based on cultural norms, the media, or friends and family. To have an acceptable body, you may feel you have to live your life on a diet or constantly work out. Controlling what you eat in this way and pushing your body physically beyond healthy limits are both natural outcomes of believing Body Myth 4.
At a deeper level, this body myth may be fueled by unresolved trauma. If you have a history of feeling overwhelmed by traumatic events, then the alarm bells of the nervous system may continue to sound in your head and body long after an event has ended. In general, the external world may feel overwhelming and out of control. This could, in turn, cause you to exert extreme control over the areas of your life that you can control.
Witnessing the effects of pain and trauma in others can also be traumatizing. Consider the high number of people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after witnessing a terrorist act.
If, when you were a child, someone you loved wailed and cried uncontrollably whenever they felt emotionally overwhelmed, as an adult you might find that similar sounds put you into an alarm state. You might become hypervigilant even though you are not personally in danger. You could find your insides going numb, the way you did as a child, to control your own fearful feelings.
All of the above can be a huge impetus to clamp down and control the body and its reactions to a life that seems threatening.
Control at All Costs
James came sauntering into my office with his clean-cut good looks, muscular physique, and big smile masking his deep pain and anxiety.
It did not take long for his pain to surface, first reported as numbness. “I can’t feel what you are talking about in my body. I have no idea what you are asking me to do or feel,” James reported to me.
When I asked him what his childhood was like, James sarcastically replied that it was “normal.” He was the eldest of three boys. When his dad would come home from work, his mother would report the antics of his sons that day, and his father would discipline them by sticking their heads in the toilet and flushing it. When I asked how that abuse had affected him, James displayed his degree of self-judgment by saying, “What abuse? We deserved it — we were really bad.”
Upon further inquiry, it became apparent that James was echoing what his father had said to them. James was quite certain that he had not been a good child and that his father had “only been trying to keep me in line.”
James described how he had spent his life trying to please his overly critical father, who was so self-centered that he never really knew James or his other sons. This is codependence on steroids. His father was an alcoholic who drank at night and took his inner angst out on his sons, physically and emotionally. This had taken a heavy toll on James, who had a huge tender heart battered by years of abuse.
By his fifteenth birthday, James was as tall as his father. One evening when his dad came home drunk and started to abuse his younger brother, James ended up pinning his dad to the wall. That was the last time his dad hit anyone in the family. He stopped drinking shortly thereafter, but his inability to show love to his sons continued.
James was in his early thirties when he came to see me. He was a Navy SEAL who had hardened his body through grueling workouts and training. He rarely visited his parents, so dealing with his father was no longer the problem. What plagued him was that he was unable to let his tenderness emerge in his marriage and with his own children, and he desperately wanted that.
Whenever James had a difference of opinion with his wife or kids, and his emotions began to surface, he felt threatened. His body response was to go numb and withdraw. If pushed further, he would become enraged. This scared everyone, including James.
James did not want to reenact his own childhood, and yet he felt helpless and out of control of his body and mind. In those situations, his emotions seemed to belong to someone else. He tried to keep himself under control by working out relentlessly every day. After an especially hard workout, he would come home tired and finally sleep well at night.
I began our sessions by asking him to take his awareness inside, to follow his breath and let it deepen as he felt his entire body all the way to his feet on the floor. For weeks he practiced the basic inner-awareness exercise (see chapter 4, “Exploration 1: Opening Awareness,” pages 55–59), but all he felt was continuing numbness.
All James’s Navy SEAL discipline came in handy, since he stuck with it, week after week. I asked him to be patient and keep returning his awareness within, simply being kind and not judging. I asked him to act toward himself the way he would with his best buddy.
After several months of this daily practice, the numbness started to change. His purposeful yet nonjudgmental attention to inner sensations, no matter how uncomfortable or downright painful they might be, was paying off.
He was learning to cultivate his curiosity, his openness to discovery, rather than his habitual pattern of clamping down on all feelings and sensations. James was building his capacity to be with himself, no matter what showed up in his awareness.
Then we moved to the next stage, where James allowed himself to fill up with nurturing sensation, creating an inner container of nourishment for himself that helped him feel stronger and steadier. His numbness was dissipating layer by layer as he felt fuller and fuller.
With a steady container of sensation to depend on, James felt safe enough to have issues surface. Initially, all he felt was a general muscular tension throughout his body, as though he were tightening down for protection or preparing to run.
Then actual early memories began to surface. We worked through them together, holding and cradling the tender abused little boy that he had been. Slowly, James came to understand that he had not been a bad child at all. Finally, he recognized himself for the sensitive, caring brother that he was. His sadness emerged, and his tears flowed freely.
Within that strong, fit, man-body was a little boy who was still defending himself against the blows of his father, from whom he only wanted love.
The painstaking process of teaching James to feel his own body again, without immediately rushing in to control it, required my patience and willingness to move at a careful, purposeful pace that worked for him. We could only move as fast as the slowest part of him felt safe to go.
Initially, James could not relax and turn off the fight-or-flight response. Feeling anything would set him off. In those moments I would help him to slow his process so as to grow a greater sense of grounding and build a bigger, stronger container to hold his emotions.
As the months passed, he developed trust in the process. As he continued the daily practice of calming himself and dropping inside to explore his feelings, James eventually began to have a different experience. He was recognizing that it was paying off.
His wife remembered why she had fallen in love with him. Once again, James was able to see her and his children for the wonderful human beings they were.
Even though there was occasional backsliding into the old behaviors, this happened less and less, and James’s huge heart and loving tenderness emerged to the delight of those