If emotions are the link between the body and the mind, it makes sense why unregulated negative emotions (e.g., fear and anger), particularly when repressed by those who are suffering from trauma, understood as dukkha, can make them feel dissociated. The practice of mindfulness can serve as a bridge between the body and the mind; in combination with other holistic approaches, mindfulness can help trauma sufferers regulate their negative emotions, hence, allowing them to experience higher degrees of emotional resilience. To explicate the importance of working with negative emotions references will be made to the mind-body problem since it lies at the philosophical foundation of all the social sciences. Also, the relationship between the mind/consciousness and the body/the unconscious vis-à-vis selfhood will be discussed in relation to psychoanalysis, Buddhist psychology, and mind-body medicine.
If emotions are the link between the body and the mind, as Candace Pert (2004) argues, then the repression of negative emotions not only severs said link but also takes a toll on our health, as Henry Dreher (2003) shows. One of the main goals in this paper is to articulate some of the ways trauma sufferers can regulate their negative emotions and become resilient. To this effect, mindfulness,2 along with other holistic approaches, is proposed as a remedy because it can serve as a bridge between the body and the mind.
For the purposes of this paper, some theories of emotion will be unpacked with reference to a brief unfolding of the mind-body problem, which lies at the philosophical foundation of all the social sciences. According to Dreher (2003), when it comes to strong (or negative) emotions, we basically have two choices: either to express or repress them. Indeed, our choices depend most of the time on a multifaceted interaction between several, nearly infinite, biopsychosocial factors. Nevertheless, if we accept Pert's (2004) wonderful premise that we are hardwired for bliss then it would make sense to argue that emotional expression and processing (or disinhibition) strengthens the healing system, which we can conceptualize as a mindful body, an embodied mind, or the amalgam: bodymind. We know we ought to express our negative emotions, but how to do so is the question. To this end, we will try to explicate an understanding of the complex nature of emotions by referencing literature on psychoanalysis, Buddhist psychology, and mind-body medicine to shed a light on the intricate relationship between the
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert Beshara, Department of Psychology, University of West Georgia, 1601 Maple St., Carrollton, GA 30118. Contact:
Stanley (2012) argues uniquely that we ought to ground discursive (or critical) psychology in mindfulness following the ‘affective turn’.
mind/consciousness and the body/the unconscious, which will be framed in the unfolding arguments as two sides of the same coin. An idiosyncratic understanding of trauma will also be explored with an emphasis on the following negative emotions: fear and anger, and their connections to shame and anxiety, which are but a few of the conditions that afflict trauma sufferers, and make them feel limited to say the least.
Etymologically, the word emotion meant “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation” (Harper, 2014), which resonates with the purpose of emotions from an evolutionary perspective: a process that involves a response to some stimulus motivating us to take action. The relationship between emotion and movement in relation to trauma will be explored later on with reference to Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE).
Even though all humans experience emotions, they are hard to define. Perhaps, before we attempt to define them, we ought to delineate between feelings, emotions, and affects since these terms can be used interchangeably albeit they do not actually signify the same thing. Eric Shouse (2005), using a Deleuzian lens, writes that “[f]eelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal”. By prepersonal, he is referring to the abstract quality and translinguistic nature of affects. Shouse (2005) then goes on to add that “[a] feeling is a sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled. […] An emotion is the projection/display of a feeling. Unlike feelings, the display of emotion can be either genuine or feigned. […] An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential.”
In the more traditional literature, however, emotion is sometimes classified under affect along with mood, temperament, and sensation (Johnson, 2014), while other times, affect is classified under emotion and is equated with feeling as the subjective/mental experience of the more objective/bodily emotional process (Reber, Reber, & Allen, 2009). Clearly, there is unresolved confusion regarding the use of these terms, so for clarity's sake we will be mostly referring to emotions to refer to subjective states that involve the body and the mind.
The history of psychology is full of different theories of emotion, a survey of which is beyond the purposes of this paper. In general, however, most of the theories of emotions, at least according to Johnson (2014), fall under three broad categories of evolutionary (or biological), social, and internal (or psychological). Psychologists agree on the fact that first we perceive some stimulus (e.g., a thought or a situation) then we have an emotional response to it followed by a bodily response. The main disagreement has to do with whether in the emotional process our perception is more cognitive/evaluative, or more non-cognitive/reflex-like. The empirical studies to this day are inconclusive regarding which theories are more valid (Johnson, 2014). What if the emotional process, unlike the presupposition of most psychologists, is non-linear in the manner of chaos theory?
To unpack what the primary emotions are and why we experience them, a classical place to start is Robert Plutchick's (2001) psychoevolutionary theory of emotions, wherein eight primary emotions are laid out as necessary for our survival, namely: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, and joy. Plutchick's theory overlaps to some
extent with Jaak Panksepp's theory of primal emotions: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY (Panksepp, 2010), which is a much more sophisticated extension of Freud's theory of drives: libido and aggression. Perhaps, the fifty-one mental formations (or seeds) identified in Buddhist psychology represent an even more elaborate system that categorizes all of our potential or unmanifest affective traits and/or states into groups and subgroups (Plumvillage, 2014). This type of knowledge may not be empirical in the most conventional sense, but the 51 mental formations are a result of a millennium of contemplative practice and consensus, hence, it is valid experiential knowledge.
In an effort to refrain from writing about the regulation of negative emotions in a totalizing fashion, one caveat must be emphasized: we all deal with negative emotions in different ways as informed by our specific biology, cultural heritage, personality, social context, etc. So the push here is not for some universal solution to regulating negative emotions, but rather for establishing guidelines that could help many of us, who have had traumatic experiences in the past, become more resilient. Also, it is worth noting that negative emotions are not inherently bad, they ultimately have survival value as signals of maladaptation and danger. Negative primary emotions, such as fear or anger, are acute and present-oriented unlike disorders that are chronic, be they past-oriented (e.g., depression) or future-oriented (e.g., anxiety). Because trauma impairs the down-regulation of negative emotions (Xiong et al., 2014), trauma sufferers get into a habit of repressing their negative emotions in the face of life's stresses as a coping strategy, which can lead to a pattern of response rigidity.
In an interview with Tricycle Magazine (Shaheen, 2013), Mark Epstein shares some unique insights regarding his peculiar interpretation of the Buddhist term dukkha, which is often translated as suffering, anxiety, stress, or unsatisfactoriness; he argues:
[A] lot of what Buddhism is teaching is basically how to acknowledge all of the traumas that are around us. That's what the Buddha was talking about with the word dukkha, that everything is dukkha, what did he mean? The first noble truth. There is dukkha everywhere. There's trauma everywhere and we're all in this sort of in between state where we know it but we don't want to admit it and then we're kind of stuck. I'm trying to address the stuckness or the pretense one might say. […] We all want to be normal but we're all secretly traumatized in one way or another and pretending otherwise.
Epstein expands our understanding of trauma beyond the conventional pathological framework by reinterpreting trauma as a form of spiritual suffering that we all go through in life. Some have more intense experiences of dukkha than others, and/or experience it
more frequently, but the fact remains that we are born into a world of pain and suffering. Now, the pain will always be there because we grow old, get sick, and die, but the suffering is optional and can go away; this is where healing comes in, especially when facilitated by the practice of mindfulness.
Although emotion has been researched for decades, it was not at the center of major public debates until the publication of Daniel Goleman's (1995) internationally best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence, which in many ways, along with Howard Gardner's (1983) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and other research along similar lines, challenged the Western culture's bias toward linguistic and logical-mathematical types of intelligence as exemplified by standardized testing (e.g., IQ) as opposed to other equally (if not more) important forms of intelligence, such as inter/intra-personal abilities.
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist (2009) gives an explanation of this Western bias, informed by his research on the neuroscience of split-brain patients, wherein he argues that the West has historically favored the more detail-oriented left-brain hemisphere over the more whole-oriented right-brain hemisphere. If we accept his well-supported hypothesis then we may conclude that the mind-body problem, which has baffled philosophers and psychologists in the West for centuries, and Cartesian Dualism on which the problem rests, are inherently the result of too much emphasis on the left-brain hemisphere. This conclusion may not be applicable in other cultural contexts, where the emphasis is not on the left-brain hemisphere, or where the brain is not even conceived of as the seat of consciousness.
Perhaps, it is appropriate at this point to state the current author's position regarding the mind-body problem. There is something appealing about the electromagnetic theories of consciousness, for electromagnetism (similar to bodymind) has baffled scientists for a long time because originally they had conceived of it as two separate phenomena that interacted mysteriously as opposed to two aspects of one phenomenon. Double-aspect theory (DAT) is a position that was championed by Baruch Spinoza and whose tenets are in line with some of the main teachings of the Buddha, particularly relative to the understanding of selfhood. According to DAT, the body and the mind are considered two aspects of one substance. To Spinoza, that substance is God; to the Buddha, it is ultimate reality, which is another way of saying Śūnyatā, or emptiness.
Reflecting on Epstein's idiosyncratic understanding of trauma, was René Descartes traumatized? Maybe. Was he suffering? Definitely. Was he anxious and stressed? Undoubtedly. Speaking of doubt, Descartes argued that we know we are alive because we can think about and doubt our existence, but who is the one who is doing all this thinking and doubting? Certainly, no homunculus. Vietnamese Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh (2007) reformulated Descartes's famous cogito ergo sum3 to “I think therefore I am not”.
It is curious to note that Descartes (1998) equates ‘meditation’ with thinking, which is the opposite, of course, of the Buddhist understanding.
In other words, the trap that Hạnh is alluding to here in a koan-like manner is that overthinking can lead us to get sucked into a procastinatory and solipsistic downward spiral; and it is the exhaustion from this process of mental looping that can make us feel out of touch with our breath, body, the present moment, and all of reality. Said differently, why equate our being with neurosis?
Moving on from thinking to ontology, Hạnh (2007) offers the following response to Shakespeare's Hamlet, “To be or not be, that is not the question”. The logic in Buddhism is that ultimate reality is beyond being and nonbeing, beyond birth and death. According to the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism, the Right View is that of Interbeing, which is known more traditionally as Pratītyasamutpāda, or dependent origination. How can there be birth and death when energy, according to the first law of thermodynamics, is neither created nor destroyed under normal conditions? Birth and death inter-are just like the body and the mind inter-are, they are both two aspects of the same phenomenon: emptiness.
Dukkha (or trauma) is the result of our attachment to impermanent things like our self and its aggregates. We have established already that negative emotions have an evolutionary purpose: they help keep us alive. But what about attachment to negative emotions, is that not suffering? When we repress negative emotions, we turn our dynamic identity into a static one, and the repressed emotions can manifest as disorders or dis-ease (e.g., Irritable Bowl Syndrome) because ultimately they represent unexpressed energy. An example of a static identity, which is a product of overdiagnosis and pathologization, is identifying oneself as, ‘I am that trauma guy’.
Instead of psychology's essentialist view of the self, in Buddhism there is no separate self; also known as anattā. This notion of not-self refers to the fact that the self is made up of non-self elements, as Hạnh (1998) would say, namely the five skandhas, or aggregates of form (body), feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. In this particular Buddhist framework, when we use mindfulness we realize that we are made up of elements, which are similar to the tripartite structure of the psyche in classical psychoanalysis, subpersonalities in psychosynthesis, complexes in analytical psychology, and parts in Internal Family Systems Model (IFS), and that we are interconnected with everything that is. We do not identify ourselves with any one of the five aggregates, and we definitely do not attach ourselves to or deny any of them. Instead, we begin by being mindful of our breathing, by following our in-breath and out-breath. That way we can return to our body in the here and the now. With mindfulness comes concentration and insight, which are helpful tools that can aid us regulate negative emotions.
In the Plum Village tradition, there are fifty-one mental formations, or saṃskāra, which are conceived of as wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral seeds that we are born with and which exist in our Store Consciousness, or ālaya-vijñāna. Store Consciousness is one of the eight consciousnesses according to Buddhism, and in many ways it is similar to the Unconscious. The above-mentioned seeds can manifest in our consciousness for many reasons. If we experience anger in a situation, for instance, we can impulsively react to someone, or act mindlessly in way that we may regret later. Alternatively, if we become
mindful of our anger without attempting to suppress it, we can take care of it; this process can be described as a nonviolent, holistic approach to regulating negative emotions.
In the context of the Four Noble Truths, we can then examine our negative emotion by first of all recognizing and naming it: anger. Subsequently, we can concentrate on what gave rise to it as we follow our breathing. With consistent practice, since this is not magic, we may get an insight or two about the source(s) of our anger. Instead of blaming others or situations (i.e., secondary causes), we try to understand why anger manifested in our conscious experience (i.e. primary cause).
At first sight, mindfulness might strike one as a form of suppression, but it is a practice that over time can give us more freedom in terms of how we choose to act when faced with a given challenge, such as negative emotions. Nevertheless, since the emphasis here is on a holistic approach, mindfulness will be situated alongside other approaches, such as movement (e.g., TRE), while bearing in mind the importance of psychotherapy, psychoeducation, lifestyle changes, etc., which cannot be covered exhaustively in this paper.
Paradoxically, mindfulness as a practice is more body-centered than cognitive, albeit some psychologists have co-opted mindfulness by including it into their therapeutic approach (e.g., mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and dialectical behavior therapy). Mindfulness as a practice comes to us in the West from the rich and long history of different traditions within Buddhism, but the cognitive-behavioral approaches that many are familiar with remove mindfulness from its original context. Some of the things that are lost as a result are depth and meaning. Where is the affect that we have lost in cognition? Buddhism can be interpreted existentially as being nihilistic, or ontologically as being idealistic, but the deeper appeal, as far as this author is concerned, has to do with Buddhism's realistic and practical outlook on life.
In perhaps the most popular form of psychotherapy today, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT),4 affect is completely left out in favor of cognition and behavior, rendering CBT a quick albeit superficial approach that addresses the client's symptoms without unraveling the underlying problem(s) that gave rise to said symptoms. CBT is a two-dimensional therapeutic model because there cannot be action without affect.
Hạnh (1998) uses a beautiful metaphor when he writes about how we can deal with our negative emotions. He compares anger to a crying baby who needs attention and care from her caregiver. The practice of mindfulness is the practice of soothing our suffering, like a mother taking care of her crying baby, but it is also the practice of watering our wholesome seeds of loving kindness, joy, compassion, and equanimity.
According to Hạnh (2013), “Reuniting body and mind, which become alienated from each other, reunites us with ourselves. Once we have come home to ourselves, we can be fully present for ourselves, fully present for others, and fully present for the planet” (p. 1).
According to Hofmann and Smits (2008).
This is a paradoxical statement since there is no essential or separate self in Buddhism. The self cannot exist in a vacuum, and it is made up of non-self elements (i.e., the five skandhas) as has been already established. Nevertheless, there is a relational or social self, which has a functional and integrative role. He argues, “[T]he key to happiness is being fully integrated in body and mind. Much of our suffering comes from an unnecessary division of mind versus matter” (Hạnh, 2013, p. 1).
Hạnh (2013) speaks of the body as our home. What kind of space is the body? Is it a temple? Is it a storage room? What kind of a relation do we have with our body? Do we take care of it? If so, how? If not, why? The energy of mindfulness, he argues, can help us make peace with our bodies, which is vital for those of us who have gone through traumas early on in life, because then the body is associated with shame. These types of self-reflexive questions pop up frequently during mindfulness practice.
Our body can only be in a singular place at any given moment, whereas with our mind we can be in the past, the future, or anywhere in our imagination. This creative power or near-magical ability of the mind is a double-edged sword because it can help us solve the most difficult mathematical problems and create artistic masterpieces, or it can be an overwhelming distraction making us feel anxious, insomniac, or depressed, especially when we have stuck, unreleased, or repressed energy in our bodymind. Therefore, Hạnh's (2013) emphasis on presencing is particularly important, “If you find yourself in the present moment, it means your mind and body are together” (p. 5). Again, this sheds a light on the possibility of the mind-body problem being a personal struggle with automacity, forgetfulness, or mindlessness. Remember Descartes?
There is a mysterious intelligence to the bodymind (i.e., it knows how to heal itself) beyond the level of the intellect, which often interferes with the healing process. If we trust the healing process and we surrender to it by letting go of the past, the future, and our projects, we can become free from our negative emotions, hence, transform ourselves. This is an insight regarding perhaps one of main the goals of therapy and it resonates with the essence of Buddhist teachings because mindfulness as a state of witnessing can help us accept our suffering and release it without feeling overwhelmed during the process.
This discussion on emotions would be incomplete without addressing consciousness as well as the unconscious, but these are loaded terms that mean different things in distinctive systems of thought.
In psychoanalysis, repression is the basis for neurosis (or anxiety); it makes us more rigid as we feel paralyzed by too many choices. Maybe repression is connected to the Western bias for detail-orientation outlined above, and perhaps that connection is at the heart of the mind-body problem. But does repression exist or is it only speculation? It depends on how we define repression. David Archard (1984) writes of “repression or the repressed idea as the proto-type of the unconscious” (p. 33). For a more elaborate definition, Dino Felluga (2011) writes, “psychological symptoms are often condensations or
displacements (caused by repression) of deeper, unconscious impulses or buried memories”. Simply put, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make what is unconscious conscious, so if we can learn how to express our negative emotions in a mindful way then technically we would be freer, but it is a balancing act because how do we express our anger without overwhelming others and ourselves with rage? And how do we befriend our shame and embrace our vulnerability? The former has to do with our fear of rejection, while the latter may be our greatest strength (cf. Brown, 2010).
In Integration of the Cognitive and the Psychodynamic Unconscious, Seymour Epstein (1994) identifies two ways of knowing: one associated with feelings (Experiential System) and one with intellect (Rational System). Dissociation between the two systems outlined above, which we can loosely think of as the body and the mind, is a result of repression. According to Epstein (1994):
[R]epression occurs when a person has tacit thoughts or impulses that are too guilt arousing to be consciously accepted. […] The repressed material then strives for expression, thereby generating conflict with the forces of repression and resultant tension and displacement, which is manifested in the form of symptoms, dreams, and slips of the tongue. (p. 716)
What is the possibility of Descartes's legacy being an outcome of his neurosis and his unconscious emphasis on the detail-oriented left-brain hemisphere? This Western legacy of modernity of his, which gave us more problems and questions than solutions, is a legacy of dukkha. This is not an attempt to pathologize Descartes, but if we accept the First Noble Truth as a fact, that trauma is a given in life, then we can think of Descartes's philosophy as a symptom of his suffering just like this paper is the product of blood, sweat, and tears.
On the ghost of the mind-body problem, Archard (1984) argues that psychoanalysis, or what he calls ‘Freudianism’, is inherently dualistic; said dualism is known as the problem of two minds: the conscious and the unconscious. Sigmund Freud may have conceived of psychoanalysis as a metapsychology project but not without internal contradictions. Although he was initially trained as a neurologist, some of his theories were more philosophical speculations than hypotheses that could be empirically tested in the laboratory. In other words, there is a conflict between Freud the monist neurologist and Freud the dualist philosopher.
The unconscious in psychoanalysis often comes across as this abstract entity that exists in some mysterious realm in the mind. An alternative to this outdated rendition of the unconscious would be to conceive of it as literally the body, which takes us into the world of somatic psychology, whose adherents drew a lot of inspiration from the work of l'enfant terrible, Wilhelm Reich. Somatic psychology gave primacy to the body (and energy) instead of language (and meaning), as is the case in talk therapy. The term bodymind comes out of this tradition, and as a reconceptualization it is but one proposed
solution to the mind-body dichotomy. Perhaps, it would be even more sensible to conceive of a bodymindworld since we are enmeshed in an intricate web of relationships -à la Daniel Siegel's (2010) indefinable concept of Mindsight and its connection to what he calls “the triangle of well-being” (p. 11), which is comprised of brain, mind, and relationships.
In an audio book titled Your Body Is Your Subconscious5 Mind, Pert (2004) rests her arguments on her previous work on the molecules of emotions and makes the case in many ways for this notion from somatic psychology of a bodymind.6 Drawing from the field of psychoneuroimmunology, she argues that the role of emotions is to integrate so that the whole organism can act in a unified behavior; therefore, there are no good or bad emotions, but less and more challenging ones; ultimately, the key to resilience is regulation, or how often we express or repress negative emotions. When we bottle them up, they build up pressure because they are literally fluids on the molecular level.
In regulating negative emotions, the understanding becomes that traumas, and old memories in general, are mainly stored in the body/unconscious and not in some mysterious invisible realm. Pert (2004) emphasizes the primacy of emotions stating that they are essential for our survival, nevertheless; she claims that “[w]e are living in a culture where emotions are denied, ignored, suppressed”. She argues that free will makes us unique among primates thanks to our having a frontal cortex, which is responsible for things like executive planning and mindfulness, and which fully develops around our early twenties. Studies on long-term meditators show them to have a very active frontal cortex; for example, Matthieu Richard was named “the world's happiest man” (Taggart, 2012).
Regarding her theory of emotion, Pert (2004) asserts that every psychoactive drug works because it mimics an internal informational substance (IIS) inserting itself into a keyhole or binding to a receptor made by said IIS. Drugs or emotions, through the release of neuropeptides, trigger different altered states, which have different memories, different postures, and different behaviors associated with them. According to Pert (2004), there is no fixed hierarchy in the psychosomatic network of information rending it like a “systems tree” (Capra, & Luisi, 2014, p. 280), but she avoids defining information claiming that scientists do not really understand information because they belong in a metaphysical realm.
To delineate between unconscious and subconscious, Michael Craig Miller (2010) writes, “As for the term ‘subconscious’, Freud used it interchangeably with ‘unconscious’ at the outset. […] But he eventually stuck with the latter term to avoid confusion. […] Although the word ‘subconscious’ continues to appear in the lay literature, it is rarely defined carefully and may or may not be synonymous with ‘unconscious.’” To unpack the current understanding of the unconscious by most psychodynamically-oriented therapists, Miller (2010) argues that the consensus is that the unconscious does not refer to a neuroanatomical structure, but rather to “a complex, but familiar, psychological phenomenon”.
Which she defines as a field of information and energy.
Pert's (2004) most important claim is that emotions are the link between the body and the mind, and if that is the case then this is where the solution to the mind-body problem lies. Mindfulness can be thought of as a bridge between the body and the mind, which can help us deal with our suffering in general and our negative emotions in particular; therefore, mindfulness can be conceived of as one strong solution to the mind-body problem because it links the body to the mind through emotion regulation.
Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something because the mind must always have an object - breathing as an object brings us back to our body. The subject-object split, a variation on the mind-body problem, is a function of grammar as Friedrich Nietzsche has pointed out with his famous ‘lightning flash’ example (Nietzsche & Smith, 1996, p. 29) wherein there is a subject and a predicate although what is being described is one process.
We sometimes say, ‘I am angry’ when we mean, ‘I feel angry.’ In the first example, we completely identify with our anger, which is an ontological fallacy. In the second example, we recognize that we feel angry, but that we are much more than our anger, but the question remains: who is the ‘I’ that feels angry? It is the ego, which is part of the self or psyche. The ego is not equated with the self here because the ego is ‘who we think we are’, while the self is ‘who we are’, which constitutes the conscious and unconscious parts of our bodymind. But if there is no essence to the self as we have previously established then what are we referring to exactly?
What is being dispelled above is the myth of individualism, or the notion of a separate self, in favor of a relational self (cf. Gergen, 2009; Kwee, 2013), or a functional self. In other words, we are talking about a dynamic or flexible identity, or one that is in a constant state of flux. Mindfulness as a practice can help us return to this very realistic understanding of our impermanent self, so we can dwell in the present moment realizing that we already have more than enough conditions to be happy. By being mindful of our breathing, we return to our bodies and we can appreciate the miracle of being alive, which we tend to forget as we focus on other less important things. At the end of the day, what is more important than breathing?
Let us reiterate that emotion implies movement; we act based on our experiences of emotions. In addition to mindfulness, movement can help a great deal with the release of repressed emotions. Trauma therapist David Berceli (2009, p. 5), who developed Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), theorizes that:
[T]he difference between the human animal and other mammalian species is that after a traumatic event has ended for animals in the wild, they utilize an innate ‘trembling’ mechanism [or tremors] that discharges this high biochemical and neuromuscular charge from the body thereby facilitating a spontaneous recovery from the traumatic event.
Berceli's finding supports the primacy of energy, understood as the body and emotions, which is one of the core tenets of body-oriented psychotherapy.
Dreher (2003) dedicates almost an entire chapter in his book to the repression and expression of strong (or negative) emotions. He starts off the section on emotions as follows, “The interconnectedness of the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems surely suggests a unified healing system” (Dreher, 2003, p. 16). He goes on to write about the difference between chronic and acute stress, particularly in terms of their relative effects concerning immune functioning in humans; he argues that “people who experienced the shock of a serious accident and the attendant loss of control [aka trauma] had marked increases in levels of endogenous opiates, resulting in weakened immunity” (Dreher, 2003, p. 19). He then compares ‘learned helplessness’ in animal studies to repression in humans, which he defines as simply ‘the nonexpression of emotions’. Clearly Dreher (2003) is not referring to repression in the psychoanalytic sense, but there could be an overlap between these two uses of the word, for in his model repression, as a freeze response, is mostly a conscious coping strategy (suppression?) but sometimes comes across as an unconscious defense mechanism following the theory of drives.
Later, Dreher (2003) then lays out his main thesis about the ‘opioid peptide hypothesis of repression’, namely that “habitual repression of strong emotions results in chronically high levels of endogenous opioids, which in turn cause immune deficits that reduce the person's resistance to infectious and malignant disease” (p. 20). Clearly, the repression of negative emotions can take a toll on our health, which is why it is important to know how to regulate them; something that Dreher (2003) does not explore at all in the chapter. Next, Dreher (2003, pp. 20-21) explains some of the reasons as to why we repress negative emotions as follows:
[I]n many social settings (e.g., family, school, work) we get the message the expression of strong emotion—anger, fear, grief—will exacerbate interpersonal tensions and hasten rejection or opprobrium. Our response is often helplessness, and our long-term coping strategy may be repression. […] the release of opioid peptides is our organismic attempt to quell pain or at least to establish the bliss or bonding associated with interpersonal closeness. If emotional pain or loss is repressed and never resolved, the continuing synthesis and release of endogenous opiates may result, with unintended injurious consequences for our health and well-being.
He does not, however, address other strong emotions, which are wholesome, such as joy and happiness. Could their repression lead to health problems, too?
From an evolutionary perspective, repressing negative emotions can have survival value if we seek acceptance since rejection on one level can mean symbolic death, but we no longer live in small tribes, which alludes to the connection between stress and the city in late capitalism. The results from the biological studies though challenge our evolutionary tendencies, or in Dreher's (2003) words, “A long-term incapacity to express emotion is maladaptive because it disables people from protecting themselves in relationships, meeting their needs, and experiencing the full spectrum of feelings” (p. 21). He does not, however, address how we may express our negative emotions in appropriate ways. Perhaps, he has no solution in that area. Most likely, the solution is holistic and lies at the intersection between psychoeducation, psychotherapy, a healthy lifestyle, a supportive community, and an enriching spiritual practice (e.g., mindfulness).
In a language that brings Lacanian psychoanalysis to mind, Dreher (2003) defines illness as “a signifier that must be properly interpreted” then he explains that “illness signifies that imbalance, psychosocial, emotional, nutritional, physiological, reigns in the mind-body system and that efforts made to restore balance will yield benefits in both the psychospiritual and physical realms” (p. 21).
Where does energy fit into this conversation? It is something we all experience, but most of us will find it hard to articulate, if not impossible to empirically verify, since it seems to belong in the realm of metaphysics; phenomenologically, however, it can be understood as embodiment. To this effect, Pert (2004) talked about the vibrational principle behind the molecules of emotions, the idea being that we are flickering flames and not hunks of dead meat as some biological reductionists would have us believe, and that the brain is not always in charge. As a matter of fact, she spoke of chakra regions as mini-brains, which is a pretty unusual thought from a pharmacologist trained at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Negative emotions need to be expressed; otherwise, their repression could lead to various types of psychosomatic ailments. Psychotherapy (e.g., body-oriented psychotherapy), an enriching spiritual practice (e.g., mindfulness), movement (e.g., TRE), a healthy lifestyle, a supportive community, holistic medicine, and psychoeducation are all resources that can help us regulate our negative emotions and make us more resilient, especially if we feel dissociated from our body due to early traumatic experiences—not mentioning the challenges of everyday life (e.g., stress).
If emotions are the link between the body and the mind as Pert (2004) claims then mindfulness is the bridge that can help us connect the body to the mind by simply concentrating on our breathing. After all, “It's only in the here and the now that we can encounter real life, that we can be in touch with our body and the other wonders of life available in the here and the now” (Hạnh, 2013, p. 83).