The Parallels.
Where Body Meets Mind.
Welcome readers,
In beginning to workshop for this clinic, I was thinking a lot about what it really was that I represented, I decided to sift back through the archives, of books, podcasts, and courses that I’ve engaged with, to find the core of what it is that I believe about the human body and the mind. And I want to share this with you progressively over the first few series of blogs that I’m going to write. I hope to cover even just a smidge of the learnings that underpin my approach to care.
So I just wanted to share with you a bit about my journey to this point. About 5 years ago, I had gotten to a place where my knowledge of the human body was relatively comfortable. I understood joint mechanics, anatomy, fascial links, muscle patterns and motor control, and I knew relatively confidently how to make people with injuries feel better. Ankle sprains, shoulder pain, back and neck pain, were all my bread and butter, and my patients would come in, we’d assess, treat and they’d walk out with a plan to feel better. We went through this process for a few weeks and they’d be happy and healed! However, there was a group of clients that were a little hard to “tame”. And they were the ones who had been experiencing pain for a long time. They had more complicated histories, often involving stress, trauma, poor health care experiences, challenging relationships, and injury after injury that they just couldn’t seem to get on top of. Their pain was different. It behaved differently and didn’t respond to all the “hacks” I had developed over the years. I delved straight into a Master in Pain Management, and this is where my deep-seeded interest in the mind and body connection was totally invigorated. The very first lesson you learn in the course is that Pain is defined as: “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.
Crazy right? It’s simply an experience. Pain is not in the tissue. It doesn’t even need something to be damaged or broken to be produced! What this really means is that pain is always a deeply personal experience, and it is influenced to varying degrees by biological, psychological, and social factors. This was the missing link. These patients that had been slipping through the cracks needed more support for their minds. I wanted to understand these connections, and so I set out reading as much as I could, stumbling quite fortuitously across a book related to psychotherapy called Mindsight by a guy called Daniel J. Siegel. He’s a prominent Psychotherapist whose work has been revolutionary in his field. At the time, I was still squarely working as a purely musculoskeletal physiotherapist and many of my colleagues at the time were wondering why I was so interested in the psyche. What I had always felt, but hadn’t been quite able to articulate is that healthy minds and healthy bodies go hand in hand, and in reading this book all the parallels were illuminated. It really gave me a framework for trying to support my clients bodies and minds!
So firstly, what causes an unhappy mind? Siegel suggests that a lack of mental well-being and psychological health comes from rigid, chaotic, and unbalanced patterns of behaviours, interactions and thinking. So, what would this look like? The ridiculously stubborn partner who can’t see things from another perspective? Or the overly emotional colleague that cries when you ask to borrow their pen? At a very basic and overly simplified level we have two hemispheres in our brain – the left side which is responsible for logical processing and could be considered the more ‘academically’ focussed side, and the right side - traditionally considered more pertinent to creativity and emotional intelligence. If we are too rigid in our thinking and lose the balance between right and left activity then we can ultimately lose our ability to function effectively. For example, someone who has experienced damage to the left side of their brain may not be able to make logical choices and may have difficulty making complex decisions – this can become paralysing. Damage to the right side of the brain may lead one to lose their emotional sensitivity, which can poorly effect relationships and one’s ability to exist in a social world. Obviously, this system is significantly more complex but you get the point. We need balance and this is exactly the same for our bodies!
Bodies need balance, and let me tell you why: If you’ve seen me in a purely physiotherapy capacity, I’m sure you’ve heard me harping on about waking up your deep muscle system. This is largely because a lot of injuries and pain are caused by an overactive superficial system and/or an insufficient or weak deep system – ultimately an imbalanced physical system. For example, when our deep neck muscles are too weak to hold our head up our upper traps become too dominant, one can experience neck pain and headaches. Or the low back pain that is caused by the classic pattern of bodily rigidity I see in my daily practice – this can come in the form of over activity in your abdominal wall muscles. One too many planks has meant that your obliques are in overdrive and your deeper core muscles haven’t had a chance to activate to support your lumbar spine. Or in the case of chronic pain, over protective rigid patterns of movement (and thought) have left the deep system struggling to activate. So ultimately, a system without balance, is a system in trouble…
How about a chaotic system? I’m sure most of us can relate to a chaotic mind… where you feel like you can’t focus, you’re unable to achieve simple tasks because your thoughts are moving a million miles an hour. This is the same for a chaotic body. When I think of a chaotic body I have some bizarre visualisations (akin to the wacky waving giant inflatable tube seen at a car dealership on a windy day)… but what I really mean is disordered movement and confused movement strategies. Often pain and poor performance are the result of a chaotic body. A finely tuned and optimally functioning body knows what needs to happen first in order for the next part of the chain do their job and so on and so forth until you have happy pain free movement. Again, in the case of chronic pain, this organisation goes out the window. Movements are often initiated from anything but the ‘sore spot’, but that spot is part of a chain, and without its participation all other parts of the chain get overloaded, and inevitably will start complaining too.
An acronym that Daniel J. Siegel uses in Mindsight to describe the optimal state of mind is FACES: flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy and stability. He suggests that psychological well-being and ideal functioning will come from possessing these 5 attributes. This blew me away, as this is exactly what I’ve always aimed to achieve with you, in your bodies. Let me break this down a little more:
Flexibility: This is an easy one: Happy bodies have flexibility – they have enough length to achieve the tasks at hand. They can bend without buckling, and they can stretch without tearing. Flexibility of mind means that it can flow, living from moment to moment with ease.
Adaptability: In the same way a mind a mind needs to be adaptable to respond and shift to life’s rollercoaster without being derailed, every physical body needs to be able to change its strategies in response to new situations or demands. If we are walking across and a car comes speeding past, we need our body to be able to react quickly and adapt its course to get us out of the way. Interestingly, pain often comes when we lose this ability. Our body is designed to adapt. If we hurt our ankle for example, it’s appropriate to adapt and spend the next few days with an increase in weightbearing on the uninjured side. The challenge however is when we run out of options. When we’ve exhausted our adaptive potential, and no amount of weight shifting, rotating through the thorax and relying on other parts of the body will help offload. We get stuck. We need to maintain or restore this adaptability through our bodies and minds.
Coherence: Coherence of mind allows us to communicate and participate in the world. Equally, bodies need to have logic and consistency, and their movement strategies need to make sense. For example, it does not make sense to try and use your upper traps to hold your head up all day long, this is not logical, it’s an incoherent pattern and can lead to pain and dysfunction.
Energy: We obviously need energy as energy is the basis of movement and life really! But I think it’s more than this – we don’t just want to have energy, but we want to be efficient in the way we use it! We want to make sure that we don’t use all our minds energy on simple tasks like preparing breakfast, imagine how long and unproductive your workday will feel? Equally, if we use 3x the amount of energy necessary going for a walk because our pattern is so inefficient, we will feel weak and tire too quickly. A main goal of performance enhancement for example, is working on this efficiency. We want to move as powerfully and as easily as possible, with the least amount of effort.
Stable: Now I don’t want you guys to confuse this with rigidity – which we’ve already discussed is a sure-fire way to get yourselves in to physical and mental ill health. Stability for me here implies the body’s ability to be reliable – such that it isn’t easily upset. For e.g. we want to reliably count on our knee mechanics and patterning to absorb the shock while we are running, so that it doesn’t give way and we injure our ACL. Our body needs to be in control and steady through all movement, so that you can count on it like a steady friend who is always there, ready to go in different situations and isn’t going to give up when things get tough.
I guess the point of these lengthy ramblings, is that I wanted to share with you my framework for assessing and treating bodies and minds. These elements of flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy and stability are what we aim to help you achieve at GK connect – both in your body and mind. So feel free to reflect a little and see if you feel like your body and mind has all these skills. If not, give us a ring, and I’d love to work with you!
Gina😊