Posture & Self-Esteem

You say you feel assertive but I can tell from looking at your body that you don’t feel that way. You are trying to override with your mind the honesty that your posture cannot hide. You are scared. You lead with your chin and roll your shoulders forward. This protects your heart and shows the world you are headstrong. You are not open to new ideas and protect yourself from emotional closeness. Of course you do, that was an adaptive strategy effective earlier in your life.

How we carry our bodies and hold ourselves says a lot about how we feel. Much of the posture that we have today is not the result of proper body mechanics and functionally correct alignment. Most of our posture developed as a reaction to the emotional environment we grew up in. That posture becomes our normal way of moving through the world and stays long after the emotional environment changes. Even when our present situation is good and as adults we are more in charge our posture often does not change to reflect that. A protective body stance and dysfunctional habit patterns we learned about how to carry ourselves remain.

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) developed the idea of muscular armour: the expression of the personality in the rigidity of the body. His writing influenced many body workers and psychotherapists most notably Alexander Lowen (Bioenergetics), Arthur Janov (Primal Therapy) and Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy). Counseling with someone trained in posture and how it affects self-esteem can be transformative. At Counseling on Burnside together
with Backs on Burnside (A Chiropractic and Massage clinic) we take a look at the whole person and not just the content of their issues.

Perpetual Anxiety

“I can’t believe how tense my muscles are when I tune in and do a body scan like you taught me.”  My client was reporting in on the body awareness focus that is part of our clinic. He had no idea prior to coming in how tight certain muscle groups were. What he didn’t know was that without thinking about it he was acting on a biological imperative.

“We have evolved into a species prone to anxiety.”  This quote caught my attention at a recent workshop my wife Gail Karvonen D.C. managing chiropractor for Backs on Burnside and I attended on:  The Immune System:  The Mind-Body Connection Who Gets Sick and Who Stays Well.  The context for this quote was that through the process of natural selection the individuals who survived were the ones who paid attention to their fear. Individuals who did not pay attention to their fear often did not survive long enough to have children. It isn’t just a habit that we feel this urgency to act on our fears. To feel fear and act is more of an instinctual response. We are hard wired to notice and act on our fears.

We live in a world that has many triggers for anxiety. The speed at which we transport ourselves and the crowded environments many of us live in all demand our attention. In all the information we process there are many cues to trigger anxiety. Anxiety while not always fear is a signal to pay attention to our feelings and do something. How we handle our emotions and the emotions of others around us will be determined by how we handle the anxiety we feel.

It was no wonder that my client was feeling so tense and had developed pain and tightness in his particular tension carrying zones. What he was learning at our clinic was putting him back in charge of his body and giving him some ways to deal with his anxiety in better ways. For the world we live in anxiety management is a necessary skill. To effectively manage anxiety we need 3 things:  a way to recognize anxiety and differentiate it from other feelings, a regular practice time to decrease anxiety and new habits to replace old habitual unhealthy ways we deal with anxiety.

When my client and I first laid out a plan for making lifestyle changes he was excited and made good progress. After a few weeks he began to fall back into old habits and sabotage his recent progress. Now we were into the work of therapy, developing and making time for lifestyle changes was not enough. Together we had to look at the secondary gain he received from engaging in his old unhealthy habits. In his case he needed to join a group to use the support, feedback from others and accountability to sustain the changes he wanted to make.

We all have found ways to manage what seems like our perpetual anxiety. What matters most is how do these ways serve us and those we care about long term.  Are we meeting our greater goals or do we overeat, use other substances, excessively worry and attempt to control things we have little or no control over. How are you doing with implementing the 3 strategies to effectively manage anxiety?

Breath, Posture and Self-Esteem

“Do you know how you are sitting, especially your posture? ‘Yeah, I am curled in.’ You are rounding your shoulders & protecting your heart. So, what would it be like to repeat to the group what you said but put some more breath into it and open up your posture?” As she does this my client reports she feels more confident and has a stronger voice. It is the effect on the group members that is most profound. “I felt more emotionally connected with you.” “I felt what you said rather than just agreeing with what you just said.” Just a slight change in posture and awareness of breath translates into an immediate effect.

Breath is the link between the conscious and the unconscious. When we don’t focus on it breathing is automatic and happens without thinking. When we focus on our breath we notice more, we link with our bodies. In Gestalt therapy we call this breath and body focus, proprioceptive awareness. Breath awareness is the link to the unconscious, to knowing more about ourselves right now. All it takes is focused attention to become aware of the chest, are we breathing freely? Where in our lungs are we breathing? Are we narrowing our chest? Lower lobe breathing is relaxed and most efficient. Breathing in the back lower lobes gives us more power to bicycle up a hill or confront a bully. What does our normal posturing say about our self-esteem? I could say a lot about that but it is best to find out on your own. Messages we hear from others don’t have anywhere near the power of direct experience.

At Counseling on Burnside we focus on process and experimentation. Breath awareness coupled with attention to our posture can have a profound effect especially as we practice the lessons learned during therapy in our daily lives. We can change habit patterns moving from a defended posture to one that is more open, effective and powerful.