Every issue is a tissue issue. Bioenergetic analysis has two main principles. First, any limitation of motility is both a result and a cause of emotional difficulties. It arises as a result of an unresolved infantile/childhood conflict, but the persistence of the tension creates present-day6 emotional difficulties that clash with the demands of adult reality.
Second, any restriction of natural respiration is both the result and cause of anxiety. Anxiety in childhood situations disturbs natural respiration. If the anxiety-producing situation persists the disturbance becomes structured in the thoracic and abdominal tension. The inability to breathe freely under emotional stress is the physiological basis for the experience of anxiety in initial and subsequent stressful situations.
In verbal therapy you can control what is happening. You get an interpretation. You can discuss something. You can agree or disagree. But in bioenergetic analysis, you are out of control. Your body takes over. Your body begins to vibrate. You may start to cry spontaneously. People are frightened when their bodies take over, because it can open up feelings that scare them.
So many childhoods have been about "don't reach for what (whom) you want", "don't protest - shut up and put up." "Don't cry (or I'll give you something to cry for). "Don't be who you are (messy, noisy, dirty, active) be the way I want you to be."
The more demands that are put upon you as a child, the more you have to give up your true being and live up to the image someone else wants.
This does not make you a better person. You are only a frozen person. Numb to your feelings, stunned in your thinking, and held hostage to your own imprisoned body.
We grow up as a child with so many traumas, so much lack of fullfillment, so much pain and despair, that you can't stand it any more. The only way to stand it is to deaden yourself.
Health has to be measured by the innate vitality, the aliveness of the body.
Bioenergetics is a form of therapy that involves work with both the energetic processes of the body as well as understanding of the personality. Dr. Alexander Lowen, founder of Bioenergetics, has said, "Every stress produces a state of tension in the body." Normally, the tension disappears when the stress is relieved. Chronic tension, however, persists after the provoking stress has been removed as unconscious bodily attitude or muscular set. Such chronic muscular tensions disturb emotional health by decreasing an individual's energy, restricting his or her motility, and limiting his or her self-expression. It becomes necessary, then, to relieve this chronic tension if the person is to regain his or her full aliveness and emotional well-being. This is "Bioenergetics."
