PREVIOUS: Attachment & the Body #3

SITE : Bodily ownership & self-location

WOUNDED : What sits at the core of insecure attachment is shame, which is triggered when some undesirable part of the Self is threatened to exposure, & often starts with a jolt of hyper-aroused fear**. This is centered in the amygdala, which fully develops at about 8 months in the womb. So even before we’re born, we can experience powerful emotions of fear & shame. (MORE….)

When someone has had an attachment rupture, especially in early childhood, it can be a lot like food poisoning – you’ll never forget it, & you know it isn’t something you’d choose to repeat.
But having been raised with narcissist. alcoholics, & daily PMES stressors (Physical, Mental, Emotional, Spiritual) we end up associating even positive traits with shame, fear & a sense of danger. Ironically, without Recovery early trauma keeps getting re-enacted throughout our life.

** INFO : Estrogen enhances fear. Testosterone blunts fear & drives status-seeking, which creates an increased vulnerability to shame.
HEALING : To shift out of feeling shame requires self-Compassion.

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STRESSED :  In a large analysis that looked at over 80 studies, up to 80% of children with a history of parental maltreatment &/or chemical abuse had disorganized attachment. In contrast, only about 15% from low-risk families.

Adults with Disorganized attachment feel more anxiety about their body than the other styles, & have trouble managing the resulting emotion dysregulation. In the context of “failed protection,” bodily self-disorders seem to be related to not having achieved (or been prevented from having) a sense of effectiveness in childhood – to physically “act on one’s own behalf” – starting as early as age 4 months.

One possibility for managing emotion dysregulation is to gain internal self-permission & then activate the inborn capacity & desire to take actions, which will allow the person to calm themself & make constructive changes for self-protection. Developing this resource is for the pleasure of being the cause or source of one’s own behavior, & less about results.

Body OWNERSHIP
It’s the experience of one’s body being one’s own, a central part of human consciousness which determines the boundary between the Self & the external world, a crucial distinction in perception, action & cognition.

⬅️  The 3 components of embodiment:
Top  Self-location refers to the experience of the Self being located at the position of our body
Center: Ownership relates to perceiving the body as the own, as the source of sensations.
Bottom : Agency relates to the feeling of control over one’s own actions – motor movements of the physical body & its desired intentions

Through body-ownership illusions, people can embody artificial bodies that are processed as belonging to or substituting their physical body (and > Illusion testing study ….)

Bodily SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
It consists of 3 distinct components:
❖ the experience of owning a body, including a sense of agency for bodily actions, affected by information coming in thru the 5 sense
❖ of being a body with a given location within the environment, &
❖ taking a first-person, body-centered, perspective of that environment.

Human adults experience a ‘real me’ as being housed in ‘my body’ and is the ‘I’ of physical experience & mental thought.
We use the sensations from the body to identify & label our physical condition & emotional state.
This combination is the basis for a ‘concept’ of Self’ – through the continuous integration of new sensory & cultural data from 6 different representations of the body ⬇️  (Details in pdf)

 

 

 

 

 

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Body DYSMORPHIA Disorder (BDD)
There is a link between eating disorders & mental health. Co-occurring problems are usually the underlying cause of eating disorders such as BDD.
Often beginning as early as age 12, body dysmorphia is about imagined physical  imperfections. It causes intense emotional distress, adding to whatever self-hate may have developed from being abused & neglected by family, school &/or religious environments.

For BDD teens, contributing factors include the pressure of finding a purpose in life & feeling isolated. What started as
—-> parental control about eating, peer pressure, being ridiculed or marginalized
—–> became fear of abandonment, no self confidence, & a poor body image**
—–> which got twisted into an intense dislike for one’s body unrelated to weight
—-> which spiraled into an obsessive focus on certain body parts.
** These mental health issues contribute to full blown eating disorders, as well as substance abuse, social anxiety, and self-harm.

NEXT : Attachment & Sexuality,, #1