Beyond Sarno !!

The conclusion that you only have to connect with the repressed emotions and process them to cure stress disorders is what I believe is a very faulty premise. Humans are extremely complex systems and anything that is out of harmony can have consequences throughout the entire body.

Let me give an example that is not about connecting with old repressed emotions that can have a major effect on body tension.

When children grow up in a family that fails them in critical developmental stages they come to believe that they have little worth and that who they are at their core is of no value. As they mature that awareness of being worthless is so painful they, we, began to construct an artificial self. This becomes a personal lie they tell themselves to shield against the pain of worthlessness, and as they construct this false self they use use what they believe the outside world will value.

I like to use the analogy of a hermit crab, the little crab has no shell of its own and his body is very soft and vulnerable to all sorts of predators. As it grows it has to leave the old adopted shell and with great haste find new one. Once he finds a shell of a dead creature he moves in. It is not his shell so he sets about to make a shell look like what he thinks it should look like. With a little crab spit and things he finds on the ocean floor he attaches them to his shell until he is satisfied that he has created a new identity.

The problem is our inner core knows the truth. It knows that we're not all the things we purport to be and this sets up a condition called cognitive dissonance. This can best be described as a inner personality earthquake..... Two warring sides unable to align themselves into a congruent whole.

If this were not enough to cause anxiety and extreme inner tension there's a second factor at play. No matter how much denial you evoke and how much you attempt to repress the truth of who you are, a part of you knows the artificial self is a fraud. When we have a part of our personality that is fraudulent we are forever at risk of being found out, and an even greater risk that we will find yourself out and will be worthless.

A common path for wounded adult children is over compensation. Doing too much, trying to become too much, climbing the next ladder or head down, blinders on rushing towards the next goal at all costs. So much better if you are perfect and your ducks are all in a row.

This false self tends to cause behaviors that perpetuate the cycle of true self-denial, false self-expression and ways of being in the world that used to be termed neurotic. The core fear is if you should be found out to be truly worthless annihilation will follow.

If you have any question that this creates anxiety, tension or a myriad of body mind disorders and diseases consider what it would feel like to be circling the cosmic drain headed toward certain annihilation with nothing to save you. This is what the child personality has come to believe that grows up in a family that does not allow a true self to form.

 

I think there are some parts in the Presence Process book that may appeal to you. It talks a lot about how this manufactured identity is put in place as a way that we can gain acceptance. By concentrating on being present you can learn to give this acceptance to yourself.

I'm guessing that there are many book talked about here that may say some of the same things- it's just this is one of the few I've read.

 

But maybe our true, authentic self is another false front too? Endless reflections in a hall of mirrors? During the Renaissance no one went deep inside and tried to find and express their "True authentic self". All that kind of stuff began during the Romantic Revolution around 1800. Ties in with the rise of individual and the American and French revolutions. So much of our thinking is based on historically defined conventions, and all of us are Post-Romantic whether we'd like to admit it or not.

 

According to the Presence Process model there isn't much self when you become present. I had some resistance to that when I was reading it and thought, "well then what's your value? how do you judge one person against another? how do you know whether you are doing a good job with life?". Then I realized I preferred this radically different model where you don't ask those questions.

Even if you aren't so radical in defining the authentic self I don't believe that it's endless reflections. The onion metaphor is more apt where you start shedding layers of dishonesty and think you're finished but then realize there's still more stuff that you aren't quite being authentic about.