Fighting emotional armor

[TheStarchDefenders]

When I was in massage school I was taught how to work with people who, while getting a massage, may just begin crying for what seems to be no reason, but it is actually the release of emotions stored as a type of physical tension. (As explained by the instructors.) An example being a client my teacher had that began crying and knew the physical tension my instructor worked out had been from a car wreck. Later I learned of people using tension as a type of armor. Say a child is getting a stern talking to about hitting his/her brother/sister. The child may tense up and stay that way in some areas as a defense against emotional damage. Then comes the field of study. (Bioenergetics) "Emotions are a form of energy, Reich believed. If they overwhelm us, we may tense a muscle, or set of muscles, to stem the flow of feeling. The problem is that a one-time muscular defense can lead to chronic tensions when we suppress the emotion again and again. "
Then, while reading a book called Gates of Fire I came across this: "The Spartans have a discipline they call phobologia, the science of fear…Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system…Fear spawns in the body, phobologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself…Under the oaks, in the still half-light before dawn, Dienekes practiced alone with Alexandros. He would tap the boy with an olive bough, very lightly on the side of the face. Involuntarily the muscles of the trapezius would contract. “Feel the fear? There. Feel it?” The older man’s voice crooned soothingly, like a trainer gentling a colt. “Now. Drop your shoulder.”" This seems to be a fabrication, but it seems to have merit in the world of Bioenergetics. So, I got into bed and put on headphones and listened to different songs to try and feel how my body responded to the emotions that arose. I tried to feel all of the different parts of my body. I tried to focus my mind on the arch of my foot or my toes etc, and I got the feeling that the energy that should have been focused in my toes had somehow crept higher up. I felt a lot of these seemingly misaligned points of energy. Also, I felt the fear responses to certain kinds of feelings and situations that arose in my thinking based on the lyrics. I got the feeling I could stave off these things by being more aware of them. I felt I could prevent them as they came on when I was aware of them and were I to remain so. I saw it as kind of reinforcing a sort of negative armor in the terms of bioenergetics. Thoughts?

 

[Thalassa]

Yes, your emotions live in your body. It's one of the things yoga seeks to correct. Position your body and your mind will follow. It's no joke.

I get and give massages regularly. Some people even respond to being massaged in a fearful way, like they'd fuck you before they'd let you touch their feet or something.

A reiki practitioner once told me (a few months ago) that I was highly receptive, that she thought it was awesome how open I am to being touched and being treated in an energetic/healing format.

I honestly think it's because of my career in adult entertainment that I have this ability. Do not laugh. It is one of the therapeutic/healing professions, and any one with any intelligence is either going to carry a very interesting psychological manipulation of people or a really profoundly deeper understanding of things like touch and sexuality to other parts of the human psyche.

Men in particular need these things, because they're socialized to not show emotion, and even when they do, they tend to only want to do so with women.

I are angel of mercy, not angel of death.

I also think it's cool that you're exploring your body's own physical reaction to something like music. I kind of take this for granted because I danced for most of my life in some form, and that you're doing it in such a focused way on something like tension.

Since I've started doing breath work (from yoga) and starting studying Taoism and some Zen Buddhism, I can really catch myself creating anxiety scenarios in my head, or making myself upset. It's incredible. Its in your body, your breath, etc.

 

[TheStarchDefenders]

Yes, your emotions live in your body. It's one of the things yoga seeks to correct. Position your body and your mind will follow. It's no joke.

I get and give massages regularly. Some people even respond to being massaged in a fearful way, like they'd fuck you before they'd let you touch their feet or something.

A reiki practitioner once told me (a few months ago) that I was highly receptive, that she thought it was awesome how open I am to being touched and being treated in an energetic/healing format.

I honestly think it's because of my career in adult entertainment that I have this ability. Do not laugh. It is one of the therapeutic/healing professions, and any one with any intelligence is either going to carry a very interesting psychological manipulation of people or a really profoundly deeper understanding of things like touch and sexuality to other parts of the human psyche.

Men in particular need these things, because they're socialized to not show emotion, and even when they do, they tend to only want to do so with women.

I are angel of mercy, not angel of death.

I also think it's cool that you're exploring your body's own physical reaction to something like music. I kind of take this for granted because I danced for most of my life in some form, and that you're doing it in such a focused way on something like tension.

Since I've started doing breath work (from yoga) and starting studying Taoism and some Zen Buddhism, I can really catch myself creating anxiety scenarios in my head, or making myself upset. It's incredible. Its in your body, your breath, etc.

It is interesting to think that men being taught to "be strong" may just be turning themselves off. I will have to discuss this with male friends IRL to see what they think. Reiki is a bit iffy for me. I have studied it some, but don't know that I trust it. Yessss! The anxiety scenarios are what seemed to be where the music lead. Good way to describe it. Thank you for responding

 

[INTP]

yea emotions have a bodily effect on you, you can even see it in animals(scare a mice and it starts to shit). jung also proved this with his word association test and by jung emotion/affect, is accompanied by physiological response by definition:

Affect

By the term affect we understand a state of feeling characterized by a perceptible bodily innervation on the one hand and a peculiar disturbance of the ideational process on the other [5]. I use emotion as synonymous with affect I distinguish—in contrast to Bleuler (v. Affectivity)—feeling from affect, in spite of the fact that no definite demarcation exists, since every feeling, after attaining a certain strength, releases physical innervations, thus becoming an affect. On practical grounds, however, it is advisable to discriminate affect from feeling, since feeling can be a disposable function, whereas affect is usually not so. Similarly, affect is clearly distinguished from feeling by quite perceptible physical innervations, while feeling for the most part lacks them, or their intensity is so slight that they can only be demonstrated by the finest instruments, as for example the psycho-galvanic phenomenon [6]. Affect becomes cumulative through the sensation of the physical innervations released by it. This perception gave rise to the James-Lang theory of affect, which would make bodily innervations wholly responsible for affects. As opposed to this extreme view, I regard affect as a psychic feeling-state on the one hand, and as a physiological innervation-state on the other; each of which has a cumulative, reciprocal effect upon the other, i.e. a component of sensation is joined to the reinforced feeling, through which the affect is approximated more to sensation (v. Sensation), and differentiated essentially from the state of feeling. Pronounced affects, i.e. affects accompanied by violent physical innervation, I do not assign to the province of feeling but to the realm of the sensation function (v. Function).

 

[KDude]

This seems to be a fabrication

Yeah. There isn't much known about actual Spartan regimens. I don't know where the writer is getting that from. We do know from outsiders like Plutarch that they lived in a culture that regularly aborted infants who weren't "up to snuff", and put children through intense training from an early age. They also had a simple class system where Spartans were master race and everyone else was a slave. That probably does wonders for the ego. Secondly, they were all gay, so it created strong bonds in the ranks. It gives a whole new meaning to "watching their back". Add it all up and you get a formidable band of warriors. I doubt these other psychological mechanisms were necessary.