Psychosomatics vol. 2 – teeth, swallowing, nausea and stomach – what does the body tell us?
Psychosomatics and the stomach
Food enters the mouth first and is ground by the teeth. We bite with our teeth. Biting is a very aggressive action, an expression of the ability to “grab”. Just as a dog gnashes its teeth and thereby documents an aggressive threat, we also talk about “showing our teeth” to someone, meaning our determination to defend ourselves. Bad or diseased teeth indicate that someone has difficulty expressing or using their aggression. This connection does not become harmless because of the remark that today almost everyone has diseased teeth, which can be determined even in children.
That is certainly true, but collective symptoms only indicate collective problems. Aggression has become a central problem in all socially developed cultures of our time. “Social adjustment” is sought, which translates to: “Suppress your aggression!” All these repressed aggressions of our dear and peaceful, socially well-adjusted fellow citizens resurface as “diseases,” disrupting the social community in their perverted form just as much as in their original form.
Clinics are therefore the modern front lines of our society. There, repressed aggressions wage fierce battles against their owners. There, people suffer from their own malice, which they have not dared to discover and consciously work through in their entire lives. It is not surprising that in a large number of patient images, aggression and sexuality are always encountered. Both are problem areas that the man of our time most strongly suppresses. Perhaps someone would now object that the increased crime rate and violence, like a sexual wave, speak against our argument. However, this should be answered by the fact that both the lack of aggression and the outbreak of aggression are symptoms of the fact that aggression has been repressed. Both are just different phases of the same process.
Psychosomatics and the Stomach
Only when aggression does not need to be repressed and is thus given a space from the beginning in which this energy can be experienced can the aggressive part of the personality be consciously integrated. Integrated aggression is then available to the entire personality as energy and vitality, without either tenderness or wild outbursts of aggression. But such a state must first be created. For this, the opportunity must be offered for it to mature through experience. Repressed aggression only leads to the creation of shadows, which we must nevertheless confront in the perverted form of illness. What has just been said applies to sexuality, as well as to all other psychic functions, in an analogous way. Let us now return to the teeth, which in the animal and human body represent aggression and the possibility of profit. Here reference is often made to some primitive peoples, whose healthy teeth are causally derived from a healthy diet. But among these peoples we also find a completely different attitude towards aggression. In addition to the collective issue, the condition of the teeth can also be interpreted individually. In addition to the aforementioned aggression, teeth also show our vitality, our life force (aggression and vitality are just two aspects of the same force, but they evoke different associations in us).
Let’s think of the expression: “You don’t look a horse in the teeth when you give it as a gift.” The background to this phrase is the habit of looking at a horse’s teeth when buying it, in order to assess its age and vitality by their condition. The psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams also interprets the loss of teeth in dreams as a sign of loss of energy and potency. There are people who regularly grind their teeth at night, sometimes so vehemently that they have to be prevented by artificial, special clasps so that their teeth are not completely destroyed by friction. The symbolism is obvious. Grinding teeth in our symbolic use is a solid term for impotent aggression. Anyone who cannot admit to the desire to bite during the day must grind his teeth at night, until he has dulled his own dangerous teeth and rendered them harmless. Anyone with bad teeth lacks vitality, and thus the ability to get a grip and bite on something. He will therefore have difficulty chewing on his problems or will break his teeth on them. Thus, a toothpaste advertisement will describe its goal with the words: “… so that you can bite hard again.” The so-called “third teeth” make it possible to pretend to the outside that vitality and usefulness that we no longer have. But this act – like any other prosthesis – remains a deception and is similar to the trick of announcing your timid, spoiled puppy on the garden fence with the warning “sharp dog.”
The dentition is only a “bought sharpness”. The gums are the basis of the teeth, in which they are laid. Analogously, the gums will represent the basis of vitality and aggression, true confidence and self-confidence. If a person lacks this portion of confidence and self-confidence, he will never be able to actively and vitally face problems, he will never have the courage to crack hard nuts or resist. Confidence must give this ability the necessary strength, just as the gums give strength to the teeth. But the gums cannot do this if they are so sensitive and vulnerable that they bleed from every little thing. Blood is a symbol of life, and so bleeding gums show us more than clearly how confidence and self-confidence run out of life force at the slightest challenge. Swallowing after the teeth have ground the food, and we swallow its mush. By swallowing we integrate, we receive – swallowing is embodiment. As long as we have something only in our mouths, we can still spit it out. But once we have swallowed something, this process is difficult to reverse. We have difficulty swallowing large morsels. If the morsel is too big, we cannot swallow it at all. Sometimes in life we have to swallow something, even though we don’t really want to, for example, getting fired. There is bad news that we find difficult to swallow. In such cases, it is easier to swallow something if a little liquid is added to it, especially a good sip. In their jargon, alcoholics say that someone who drinks a lot is a gulper. An alcoholic gulp is usually intended to facilitate or even replace the swallowing of something else, something that is difficult to digest.
We swallow what is liquid, because there is something else in life that we cannot or do not want to swallow. Thus, an alcoholic replaces eating with drinking (a lot of drinking leads to loss of appetite) — he replaces swallowing hard, solid food with a softer, simpler sip from a bottle. There are a number of swallowing disorders, for example, a feeling of a lump in the throat or a sore throat such as angina. In such cases, the person concerned must always ask himself: “What is there in my life at the moment that I cannot or do not want to swallow?” Among swallowing disorders there is also a very original variant, namely air swallowing, also called aerophagia, which literally means devouring air. The term explains what is happening here. We do not want to swallow, to embody something, but we feign readiness by “swallowing air.” This hidden resistance to swallowing is then expressed a little later by belching or rectal expulsion of air. Nausea and vomiting Once we have swallowed food and taken it in, it can still prove difficult to digest and sit on someone’s stomach like a stone. But a stone — similar to a stone — is a symbol for a problem (so there is also a stumbling block). We know how a problem can sit on the stomach and spoil our appetite. It is largely dependent on the psychological situation. Many expressions show this analogy between psychic and somatic processes: that has spoiled my appetite, or I feel sick when I think about it, or I feel sick when I see it. Nausea signals the rejection of something we do not want to have and therefore it is difficult for us to stomach.
Psychosomatics and the Stomach
Nausea is intensified by vomiting food. We get rid of things and impressions that we do not want to have, embody, integrate. Vomiting is a massive expression of defense and rejection. Thus, the Jewish painter Max Liebermann, in view of the state of politics and art after 1933, said: “I cannot eat as much as I would like to vomit!” Vomiting is “non-acceptance”. This connection also becomes clear in the well-known vomiting of pregnancy. It manifests an unconscious defense against the child, or rather, against the male seed, which does not want to be “embodied”. Continuing this thought, pregnant vomiting can also be a rejection of one’s own feminine role (motherhood). The next place our — not vomited — food reaches is the stomach, which primarily has the function of receiving. It receives all the impressions that come from the outside, it receives what needs to be digested. The power of receiving requires openness, passivity and readiness in terms of commitment. With these characteristics, the stomach represents the female sex. Just as the male principle is marked by the ability to radiate and be active (the female element), so the female principle shows readiness to receive, commitment and the ability to desire (the water element). On the psychic level, it is the ability to feel, the emotional world (not emotions) that is realized here by the female element. If a person suppresses the ability to feel from consciousness, this function will sink into the body, and the stomach, in addition to the physical impressions of food, must now receive and digest psychic feelings as well. In such a case, not only love goes through the stomach, but something also hits the stomach or we “devour” ourselves for something. In addition to the ability to digest food, the stomach also has other functions that can again be attributed to the male sex: the production and release of stomach acid. Acid attacks, it is corrosive, it dissolves — it is unequivocally aggressive.
A person who is not happy or satisfied with something is said to be acting sour. If a person fails to consciously control their anger or turn it into aggression, so that they prefer to swallow their anger, their aggression and acidity are somatized in stomach acid. The stomach reacts sourly, producing an aggressive fluid on a material level, in order to process and digest immaterial feelings — a difficult task, in which a lot comes back to us and presses upward, in order to remind us that it is better not to swallow feelings and leave them to the stomach to digest them. The acid rises because it wants to be expressed. But a person with a stomach problem has problems with this. They lack the ability to consciously deal with their anger and aggression and thus resolve conflicts and problems responsibly. They either will not express their aggression at all (they will gorge themselves) or they will show excessive aggression.
Both extremes do not help him, because he lacks the background of self-confidence and a sense of protection as the basis for independently overcoming conflict, which we have already discussed in the case of the gums. Everyone knows that an irritated stomach with too much acid has difficulty digesting poorly chewed food. But chewing is aggression. If aggressive chewing behavior is lacking, this will again fall on the stomach and it will produce more acid. A stomach patient is a person who does not want to afford conflict. He unconsciously longs for childhood. His stomach wants mushy food again. So he will eat pureed food, food that has already passed through a sieve, through a filter and thus proven its harmlessness. There can no longer be any hard bits in it. Problems remain in the sieve. Stomach patients cannot tolerate raw food — it is too raw, raw, dangerous. So they will first kill the food in the aggressive cooking process, before they dare to eat it.
All spicy foods, alcohol, coffee, nicotine and sweets are too much of a stimulus for a stomach patient to cope with. Life and eating should be free from all challenges. Stomach acid leads to a feeling of pressure, which prevents further reception of impressions. When using medications to suppress acid, belching most often occurs, which brings relief, because belching is an aggressive expression towards the outside. We took a breath and released the pressure. Therapy with tranquilizers shows us the same connection: medication artificially breaks the connection between the psyche and the vegetative tract, and in severe cases this step is also done surgically by surgically cutting certain nerve branches in the patient that are responsible for acid production (vagotomy).
The close connection between the psyche and gastric secretion is well known from Pavlov’s experiments onwards. By synchronously giving food and ringing a bell, Pavlov was able to induce a so-called conditioned reflex in his experimental dogs, so that after a while the sound of the bell was enough to cause the gastric reaction common to the sight of food. The fundamental attitude that feelings and aggression are not expressed, but directed inward, against oneself, ultimately leads to ulcers, the formation of ulcers (a stomach ulcer is not a complication in the sense of new creation or growth, but a perforation of the stomach wall. In a stomach ulcer, instead of external impressions, one’s own stomach wall is digested – one digests oneself.
A stomach patient must learn to become aware of one’s own feelings, to consciously process conflicts and to digest impressions. Furthermore, one must become aware of one’s own desires for infantile dependence, maternal protection and love, and to admit this precisely when these desires are well hidden behind a facade of independence, ambition and self-sufficiency. Here too, the stomach shows the truth.
With stomach and digestive problems, one should ask oneself the following questions:
1. What can’t I or don’t I want to swallow?
2. Am I eating for something?
3. How do I relate to my feelings?
4. Why do I act sour?
5. How do I deal with my aggression?
6. To what extent do I avoid conflicts?
7. Is there a repressed longing in me for a children’s paradise without conflicts, where I am only loved and cared for, and I don’t have to bite myself for it?
Based on the book Rudiger Dahlke - Illness as a Path
*Keywords: psychosomatics and stomach, Digestive tract, illness as a path, psychosomatics, gestalt psychotherapy, somatic experiencing therapy, psychotherapist Zagreb
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