My office window looks out on what used
to be the Fly-by-Night Club in Spenard. So, when it comes to
thinking about summer visitors and family, it’s only natural to
think of Mr. Whitekeys’ song, House Guests from Hell.
Having been a House Guest from Hell (apologies to
you-know-who-you-are) and having hosted a few, I could offer the
usual advice, but I’d rather discuss another variety: the house
guests that set up shop in our bodies — namely mechanical
restrictions, but especially those with content. By content, I mean
emotions, beliefs, attitudes, or issues. Often this content becomes
the glue that holds the restriction in place, sometimes for decades.
One of my patients is a good example. She and her family flew
Outside to visit in-laws last Thanksgiving. Shortly after arrival,
she, her husband, and all three kids took sick — with the swine flu,
no less. Talk about House Guests from Hell! To be fair, the swine
flu arrived in the house before the guests arrived. But months
later, after much reflection, my patient had an insight: Not only
does her family always get sick when they travel and visit, she
realized, she expects them to. When last we talked, she was rolling
up her sleeves to better understand the origins of that expectation,
and to change it.
Her expectation is an example of the content hellion on which I’d
like to focus. Because it is precisely these guests (whether ours or
someone else’s) that we’ve taken on and parked in our tissue that
prevent us from having the health and lives we want. If it hasn’t
already, mechanical restriction (with or without content) will
eventually lead to symptoms and illnesses for which medicine has no
ready answers.
Anytime we experience emotional overloads — by definition, more or
stronger emotions than we can handle at a particular moment — we
store it in the tissue. We do this for a very good reason: so it
doesn’t drive us crazy, so we can survive, and so we can continue to
function.
Overloads are so commonplace that even the most fortunate of us have
lots of content stored in our tissue. In other words, our house is
full of unwanted guests. And either by sheer number or exceptional
individual effort they can produce a little hell on earth.
Whether they involve content or not, all mechanical restrictions
produce internal friction and are pathological — they lead to
disease. Depending on their location and nature, some restrictions
are more troubling than others. Core issues and deeply-felt
afflictive emotions (anger, resentment, grief, sadness, hatred,
jealousy, rage, etc.), like house guests from hell, can keep us
stymied, twisted, or acting a role which does not reflect our
authentic self.
Over the years, that content becomes increasingly disruptive — both
in our tissues and our lives. Our symptoms may be our spirit’s way
of getting our attention. If you are leery of revisiting this old
garbage, take some courage from the knowledge that you aren’t the
same person who stored it years or months before. You’re now older,
wiser, more mature, and have more resources. Pretending it’s not
there or it’s not garbage doesn’t make it any less stinky. As often
as not, you’ve already worked through it in your mind. As such,
it’ll be easy to evict it from your tissue. Enough generalizations,
however; let’s look at some examples!
In the course of a session while trying to release a restriction
behind her stomach, a patient suddenly blurted “I hate myself!” It
turns out that when my patient had complained as a teenager about
Dad’s abandoning the family and Mom’s inability to settle in one
place, Mom invoked the notion (which was not very helpful in this
situation) that daughter had “chosen” her family and, therefore, had
only herself to blame. And blame herself for having chosen so poorly
daughter had! Given the intensity of her self-loathing, it’s amazing
that my patient has made as many good choices as she has. It took
her a few days to transition to self-acceptance and self-love, but
she did it and now her stomach has the freedom it needs to function
properly and stop causing spinal challenges.
While I was freeing the frontal bone of a patient with chronic
sinusitis, she disclosed that her father had neglected and belittled
her, while showering attention and affection on her big sister. Her
father had blamed his favoritism on my patient’s “whiny” voice. The
real truth was that Dad hadn’t been ready for the responsibility of
two children and shifted the blame to his second daughter. As a
child, my patient had accepted Dad’s explanation as a way of dealing
with the hurt and his behavior. Successful as that strategy may have
been at the time, it continued to take a toll decades later:
co-workers made snide comments about her voice and mistreated her.
In my presence her voice is unremarkable. If it had been whiney as a
child, there was a perfectly good reason. As soon as she banished
this old belief that her voice was the cause of dad’s mistreatment,
her sinuses cleared and her co-workers’ mistreatment stopped.
Bodywork makes finding content easy. When restrictions in the body
fail to respond to purely mechanical approaches, we investigate
further. A few simple non-leading questions typically suffice to
identify the origin and nature of the problem. Then it’s usually
just a matter of deciding it’s time for the guest to leave. The key
is giving yourself permission to say, “Enough already. Leave.”
As more parents and mentors work on their own issues and teach
children not to take on other peoples’ content, our households and
neighborhoods will become healthier and happier.
Mike Macy uses
CranioSacral Therapy and Visceral Manipulation to help patients
evict unwanted content and mechanical restrictions from their
bodies. Call Healing Journeys at 907 272-4325 or email
mmacy@acsalaska.net.
