Transcript

One of the most peculiar ideas of psychology is that emotional difficulties can end up in the body, we can understand that a difficult event might get lodged somewhere in the mind, but how and by what mechanism might a difficulty get remembered or stuck in our bodily selves? Can a kidney really remember a sorrow?

Could a wrist or a femur hold on to the memory of a punitive parent or a painful divorce. But mind and body are not impermeable entities, a lot of emotional traffic flows between them. When we are sad, some of the grief in our minds may well find a home in our shoulders. When we are terrified, some of the fear from our imaginations can grip onto our lower vertebrae. The difficulty is that our organs lack eloquence, they are not by design, particularly well suited to explaining how terrible a relationship is or how difficult it once was around our mother.