Your Body Speaks Its Mind

What are your symptoms and illnesses telling you about yourself? In Your Body Speaks Your Mind, renowned teacher and bestselling author Deb Shapiro shows how understanding your body's 'language of symptoms' can increase your potential for healing. She explains the interconnectedness between your physical state and your emotional, psychological and spiritual health, and reveals: How unresolved emotional and psychological issues can affect your physical health; How feelings and thoughts are linked to specific parts of the body; How you can take steps to heal your body with your mind, and your mind with your body. Your Body Speaks Your Mind shows you how to initiate communication between body and mind, and decode the priceless information your body is giving you, in order to achieve better health and a greater sense of wellbeing.

Activate Your Unique, Built-In Healer The language your body speaks is energy. Just under the surface of your awareness, your body, mind, and spirit are using energetic signaling to communicate constantly with one another. This clear and practical guide teaches you how to understand and “speak” energy so you can participate in your body, mind, and spirit’s unique creation of self. Easy-to-use explorations, exercises, and practices enable you to tap into your internal guidance system and activate your body’s innate capacity to thrive.

Shapiro explains why unresolved psycho/emotional issues can affect physical health, how feelings and thoughts are linked to specific body parts, and steps to take to heal the body with the mind, and to heal the mind with the body.

This book is based on the work done by a group of British and Italian psychoanalysts who have been meeting twice yearly since 2003 to study clinically the relationship between the mind and the body of their patients. The analytical dyad became the focus of a dialectical movement between body and mind and between subject and object. Containing contributions from a range of distinguished British and Italian analysts, this book covers such key topics as somatic symptoms, the embodied unconscious, bodily expressions of affect, sexuality, violence, self-harm, suicide attempts, hypochondria, hysteria, anorexia and bulimia, and splits and fragmentation associated with the body. The theoretical understanding is inspired by various psychoanalytic theoreticians, including Freud, M. Klein, Winnicott and Bion and their theories on sexuality, infantile sexuality, libido, aggressiveness, death instinct, Oedipus complex and mother–child relationship. Offering new advances in theoretical thinking and practical applications for clinical work, this book will be essential for all psychoanalysts and mental health clinicians interested in understanding serious mental disturbance that is represented in the body.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From renowned mental health expert and speaker Dr. Gabor Maté, this acclaimed, bestselling guide provides insight into the mind-body link between illness and health, and the critical role that stress and our emotional makeup play in an array of common diseases. In this accessible and groundbreaking book—filled with the moving stories of real people—medical doctor and bestselling author Gabor Maté shows that emotion and psychological stress play a powerful role in the onset of chronic illness, including breast cancer, prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and many others. An international bestseller translated into over thirty languages, When the Body Says No promotes learning and healing, providing transformative insights into how illlness can be the body's way of saying no to what the mind cannot or will not acknowledge. With great compassion and erudition, Dr. Maté demystifies medical science and empowers us all to be our own health advocates.

For decades, health care providers have worked as though there were a monolithic wall dividing the ailments of the mind from those of the body. Theorists on either side developed separate languages and philosophies to explain symptoms. This distinction has left many clinicians unable to treat successfully patients whose symptoms—such as headaches, conversion paralysis, and seizures—arise from the place where mind and body meet. In this book, the authors describe a powerful narrative therapy, one that relies on the wisdom and everyday language of patients' real-life stories instead of the expert knowledge and professional language of the clinician. This approach can be used across all categories of somatic symptoms, from factitious ones to medical illnesses such as asthma or migraine headaches.The authors show how somatic symptoms are often related to unspeakable dilemmas, as in the case of a child who, after discovering a parent's marital infidelity, is afraid to disclose the secret and begins having blackout spells for which a neurologist can find no physiological basis. These dilemmas can be understood only if a clinician creates the kind of relationship in which privately held stories of fear, shame, and threat can be told safely. Detailed case studies and numerous brief examples vividly illustrate techniques for helping patients escape the dilemmas that bind their bodies by finding new language and stories that can free them.In an innovative section, the authors rethink the current ideas and practices of psychopharmacology. Rather than “treating” a brain disease, a clinician uses medications to recalibrate brain systems that register alarm, thereby opening new possibilities for therapeutic change through speaking, listening, reflecting, and relating.This book offers all clinicians—psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, nurses, physicians, and family therapists—a way to use language to help patients resolve bodily symptoms. It avoids the stigmatization that patients and families so often experience—and the frustration clinicians feel—when struggling to find answers for mind-body problems.