Internalized Stressors: Who Needs Therapy

With the introduction of the phrase "stress reduction" in the 1970s, and with the subsequent incorporation of that expression into our language by the 1980s, it has become all too apparent that reducing external stress factors in our lives is a good idea when creating strategies for better living. We generally seek out stress-free places for vacation, and we pace ourselves in job, home, relationships, childcare, and leisure, with the intention of staying out of the dreaded burn-out stress zone.

Science reports over the past decade link lifestyle stress with diminished immune response, accelerated tumor growth, and decreased absorption of nutrients. But what about stress responses that seem to be independent of external circumstances, such as upsets and interpersonal discord that occur even when we’re on vacation and at our most relaxed? And what about stress responses like panic attacks or negative "self-talk" that occur when we’re alone, and seem to be self-induced?

To the body, stress is stress, whether it is externally or internally generated. As a therapist, I am more interested in the internally-generated stressors, because they pollute the inner landscape of well-being and consistently result in making the outer world a trigger for unhappiness. Outer stressors we can avoid, but we carry inner stressors wherever we go.

Based on a psychoneuroimmunology-based principle that what’s out there goes in, and what’s in there comes out again (that is: how learned behavior becomes a map for future interaction), internally generated stressors originate externally, and then are internalized. And just as external stressors can be eliminated by external changes, internalized stressors can be eliminated by internal changes. Deep-feeling therapy seeks to uproot these internalized sources of "poison." Good weeding requires pulling every weed, root and all.

An external event becomes an internalized or imprinted one when the body’s response ingrains itself in the emotional memory of the person. From an anatomical point of view, emotions play the role of a tagging mechanism, flagging any experiences that need to be stored in memory with a high charge. Emotions associated with painful events help keep the body alert for similar threat or harm. In the case of positive experiences, emotions trigger and ingrain in memory an endorphin response to reinforce pleasurable or need-fulfilling experiences. Emotions provide a gut-level recognition of what is good and bad, what is to be avoided and what is to be sought out.

Rather than being ruled by the Pleasure Principle of the Id, or the Reality Principle of the Ego, as Freud maintained, I believe we are ruled by the Avoidance-of-Pain Principle of the Body. Because painful experiences are tagged for self-protection by being stored with a high emotional charge in the memory system, and because pain must be avoided, conflicting forces of store it vs. stay away from it are resolved by the innate ability of the organism to do both at once The memory splits into fragments--literally. We are responding to stress in the present through fragmented memory circuits. For an incest survivor, for example, sexual encounters or even ordinary sexual feelings can trigger the emergency body-response from yesteryear and render an essentially harmless event a catastrophe. Stored pain robs us of joy.

The central approach in therapy, therefore, must be to take pain out of storage, even if it hurts. We are led to believe from recent scientific articles that emotional memory cannot be erased, only re-framed. But keeping pain in storage, that is, repressed from consciousness, keeps the re-framing process from happening. The only way to make a ceramic vase is to first put the lump of clay onto the potter’s wheel. It serves no purpose sitting in the bin. Dealing with trauma only cognitively is the equivalent of discussing the theory and origins of clay without digging into the clay bin. Intellectual discussion cannot produce a real vessel. Talk therapy alone cannot heal real wounds.

Uprooting internalized pain means reversing the body’s own mechanism of imprinting, by tracking down and eliciting the initial elements of trauma before they were fragmented by a survival response. Contained within pain is the magnet that draws the splintered memory bits together, and ultimately, the glue that reconnects them.

To feel childhood pain in its original format neutralizes the organismic "need" to avoid situations or persons that evoke that pain. Very simple logic, no? Feeling childhood painful experiences doesn’t necessarily mean regressing to childhood, because the fact is that a non-integrated, repressed childhood memory rarely feels like something that happened long ago. It just never went away. It would more than likely feel like current reality, because it has become so deeply woven into the fabric of our adult experience that it may not even be recognizable as childhood pain any longer. But childhood pain it is, nonetheless. I haven’t met anyone yet who has not carried some pain from the past into the present, and who also hasn’t lost some degree of pristine enjoyment of the present because of it. Once that pain is revealed, all the associated conclusions about self and reality are loosened, and the possibility for joy reemerges.

In that regard everyone needs therapy. Like a hairy dog picking up unwanted burrs and thorns in a field of brambles, we, too, just from being in a world of human interactions, inevitably pick up and carry within our psyche inhibiting notions about what is real and true that prevent us from fully responding to the moment. Therapy serves as a thorough "comb-out" of limiting beliefs, from the superficial to those more deeply entangled in our intimate sense of self.

The knotted hair of the dog has to be cut, which will initially leave the dog’s coat scraggly and irregular, but in the long run cutting out the burrs will bring out the creature’s innate beauty. Hopefully, the stigma that used to be attached to therapy and counseling are gone for good, so that all of us can shine.