Therapy’s best-kept secret about control issues
Conditions including anxiety, addiction and chronic pain are often driven by a constant sense of being out of control. More than any other complaint, control issues plague the clients in my therapy practice. Maybe they feel like everything in life is totally out of control, or they’re a self-proclaimed control freak, compulsively managing everything. Either way, they feel like they’re on the brink of completely losing it at any moment.
Experience has taught me there are three common stumbling blocks to treatment of control issues. First, these clients don’t usually lead with concerns about their control issues. More likely, what brings them through my door is one or more of the following conditions:
anxiety or other mental health issues · poor impulse control · eating disorder or weight loss goals · addiction · chronic pain · poor focus and attention · insomnia · poor digestion ·stress related illness
This list of seemingly unrelated issues bears a common underlying thread, which holds the key to resolving them. And so, it might seem straightforward to address what’s underlying the control issues. But this brings me to the second stumbling block.
There’s an inherent challenge in broaching this underlying issue with clients. The conversation is over before it begins because the source of control issues often has to do with something from the past that’s long forgotten as insignificant or blocked out of the memory completely.
You see, when we suffer painful experiences, the mind’s natural defense mechanism is to forget. And so, telling a client their issues stem from something traumatic from their past is often met with a kneejerk, “yeah, but nothing really bad like that has ever happened to me.”
The truth is, most of us have some or many experiences from our past that threatened our sense of safety. And it’s all too common for those experiences to manifest as a trauma response in the body. This is evidenced by a mental health system that’s been overwhelmed since the added stressors of pandemic.
The challenge is that when many people hear the word trauma, they automatically think I’m talking about the other guy. This may be because the word trauma is associated with the extreme events of war, gang rape, human trafficking, and the like. Or, because the mind has rationalized and made sense of something awful that happened.
“I’ve dealt with that. I’m over it.” I hear this on the daily.
And yet, these past insults have embedded their lasting impact in the nervous system of the body. The feeling of being on the brink of losing control is an echo of a time in the past, a time when there was a threat or perceived threat to life or limb. The body and brain hold onto the experience of danger from a past event even as the memory lets go. Breathing and heart rate are rapid and muscle tension and pain build while digestion grinds to a halt. This happens even while the mind knows logically that conditions in the present moment are safe.
Once a client uncovers control issues and comes to recognize they’re rooted in a trauma response in the body, we come to the third stumbling block. There’s an artificial line drawn in the sand between mental health and physical health. This puts an unnecessary limitation on treatment options. Generally, talk therapists aren’t trained or licensed to work directly with the body. And physical therapists aren’t equipped to work with mental health issues.
Mental health professionals including Peter Levine, Pat Ogden and leading psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk have been shouting from the rooftops for decades that addressing trauma’s roots in the body is necessary for effective treatment of a myriad of mental health disorders. Undoubtedly, body-centered approaches are slowly making their mark on the field of mental health.
I’ve been swimming upstream from the other side of that manufactured division between mental health and physical health. I do a hands-on therapy that treats the body. It’s called CranioSacral therapy (CST). CST relieves strain patterns in the body to support optimal nervous system function.
But more than that, CST bridges the divide between physical and mental health. Dialogue techniques practiced by advanced CranioSacral therapists are used to address and release trauma from the body and restore nervous system balance.
CranioSacral therapy is trauma treatment’s best-kept secret; it walks the line, addressing both physical and mental health.
I feel called to contribute to the body of scientific literature about efficacy of CST. However, many peer-reviewed journals accept submissions about either mental health or physical health; a single intervention that addresses both is still too frequently considered Avant Garde, or even ‘woo’.
With increased incidence of medical burnout, researchers are working to bridge this gap. Pockets of resiliency courses, mindfulness programs and yoga classes are cropping up throughout the medical community, though not without criticism from naysayers.
It’s been six years since I first got an abstract published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork and then presented a research poster at the American Massage Conference. After that, all continued efforts were stymied. Until now.
I recently submitted an abstract to the 33rd annual Boston International Trauma Conference, an event spearheaded by Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. It was a longshot because the conference is held by a psychiatrist and attended primarily by mental health professionals. So, I was thrilled when I learned my abstract was accepted.
I’ll be presenting a research poster in a virtual forum open to all registered attendees of the conference. The poster presents a case study of a client with control issues along with every condition on the bulleted list above. I’ll share about the CranioSacral approach to balancing the nervous system into relaxation, and the process of releasing the impacts of trauma from the body. I’ll then share data that shows a statistically significant decrease in anxiety along with an update of the client’s sustained recovery from opioid addiction.
So, here’s the bottom line. If you’re troubled with feeling on the brink of losing control (and other things on the list above), this is not a life sentence. The negative impacts of threatening events can be discharged from the body. The nervous system can heal; anxiety can resolve. And once the internal environment is relaxed, control issues fall away. That’s because internal out-of-control feelings are typically what drive control issues in one’s external environment.
With internal relaxation, adverse coping mechanisms like eating disorder and addiction can then be addressed, along with other mental health and attention issues. Further, physical symptoms and conditions like tension and pain, insomnia, digestive dysfunction, and stress related illnesses can be better managed once the nervous system is regulated.
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