The Man Who Had Lost His Head
A Bodyworker’s Detective Story
by
Robert Schleip
Dr. John B, a 40 year old surgeon comes to get
bodywork sessions. He has an interesting story: about 3 years ago a kid jumped
into his upper back while he was swimming in a public pool. He suffered strong
whiplash-like symptoms from that impact, including vegetative and emotional
reactions, to such a degree that he had to rest in bed for about a week. Yet
soon after that he recovered well and returned back to his previous
active-happy-healthy lifestyle.
About 2 years later he unfortunately injured his head
again: While loading something in the trunk of his car the trunk door fell down
on his head. He got a strong bruise on his head from that, but no signs of a
commotio cerebris or vegetative reactions. Yet since then he developed a
peculiar and annoying weakness in everyday life: he keeps bumping his head
involuntarily into doorframes, lamps, windows, car-door frames, etc.. This happens
"at least twice a week" (usually more often) so that his head is now
constantly covered with several recent bruises.
John comes across as an intelligent, active and open
minded man who is very successful at his work. He usually accompanies his
head-bumping adventures with a good dose of humor and doesn’t allow them to
take his enthusiasm away that he has for life, not only for his work, at which
he seems to excel, but also for his private life with his young daughter and
last not least for playing basket ball once a week in a team of friends. Since
he had been a passionate and talented basket ball player since his high school
years, the once-a-week training session with some friends in town had become a
major source of his bodily sense of vitality. Yet in one of the bodywork
sessions he also shares, that somehow he feels "like getting older", since he seems to have lost the
speedy acceleration and jumping power in his legs that he had been enjoying so
much in his weekly basket ball games since his high school years.
The bodywork sessions with me work fairly well in
terms of improving his overall alignment with gravity, except that due to
always having several head bumps during the week he can’t keep the lift on the
upper end of his body between sessions. Plus the work on the legs and pelvis
does not succeed in helping him to regain the agility of his legs that he was
hoping for.
What to do? Early on I include a good deal of work on
the head and neck, yet without any resulting reduction in the number of his
head bumps during the week. In between sessions I keep thinking about his
head’s strange disorientation behavior in space. Why does he bump his head into
things? Is this a subconscious longing to repeat the two traumatic head
injuries he had suffered before? What approach would support him best to lower
the rate of head collisions?
One day I get a hold of some recent research articles
on the development of a cortical ‚body
mage‘ in humans and chimpanzees. Specially one article by a young American
primatologist Daniel Povinelli catches my attention and excitement. Due to
behavioral studies it seems that only humans and chimpanzees develop a cortical
self image of their body which includes its weight, proportions, shape and
relative orientation in space. This internal body representation allows big
apes to move their heavy bodies through the fragile canopy with non-stereotyped
movements, whereas the smaller monkeys - or those who typically do not live
much in the canopy - do not develop this new cortical feature. Humans –
although they do not live in the canopy – usually show first signs of a
cortical self concept at the age of 18 - 24 months when they start to react to
their image in a mirror significantly different than let’s say a cat or dog.
Could it be that my client John’s orientation problems have to do with an
inappropriate internal body schema? Maybe the two initial injuries have
resulted in him "loosing his head" in his brain’s subconscious body
schema of himself. Maybe the internal map on which his brain plans and monitors
his own movements in space does not have a functional and adequate
representation of his upper end. A man who has lost his had, not in terms of
the outer or anatomical body, yet in terms of his brains own internal image of
himself.
Assuming that’s true, then how can we both succeed in
re-integrating his head into his body schema? 1) Apparently just touching and massaging his
head and neck does not help much, since we have done that for several sessions.
Listening to John I am reminded of a teaching my
father had given me in my first skiing vacation as a young boy. While carrying
the skies on my shoulders I would regularly bump with their rear ends into
other people and things around me. My father‘s repeated command "keep your awareness in the very ends
of your skies, Robert" had not been easy for me to follow. Yet after
two days of paying conscious attention to their position while walking and
turning – and several dozen involuntary bumps from my side - I would not
collide with them into other things or people anymore. And that even when I was
not thinking about them at all. It was as if the skies belonged to my own body.
How then could I help John in a similar way to include
his top end into his subconscious body schema? Together with him I start to
contemplate about giving him a helmet with which he could do some careful and
conscious head maneuvering and bumping exercises in relation to some hanging
objects. Yet then comes a more practical and better idea. How about just
hanging one or several air balloons from the ceiling in his home. For example
over the kitchen table, such that he can play with subtle balloon bumps while
at home? John seems to like this suggestion – the one with the air balloons, he
did not like the ones with the helmet - and says he is willing to give it a
try, since the concept behind it makes sense to him.
A week later John returns as a vibrant man with one of
the widest smiles I have ever seen. Not only has he done the air balloon thing
I had suggested, he also has added a few funny head-to-head games with his
daughter and a balloon in between their heads. The amazing result: this has
been the first week since a very long time that he has not bruised his head
into a doorframe or whatsoever, not even once. Plus – and this one comes as
total surprise for both of us - he has enjoyed "the basket ball game of his life" this week. In his
words: "Every piece of trash I got,
I could turn into a basket". Apparently he has regained the speedy
agility of his legs and his jumping power, so that he now is able to accelerate
faster and to jump higher and with more precision than before.
In trying to explain together this dramatic
improvement, we both – John and I - suspect that it is indeed related to him
"regaining his head" again in his internal body schema. Apparently
the- altogether maybe 20 minutes of - simple exercises and games with his
daughter have allowed his brain to reintegrate his head into the subconscious
image of his own body. Makes sense, just imagine dear reader, if you are
jumping and there is suddenly an unexpected extra weight of 6 kg on the upper
end of your body. Quite likely your precision and acceleration will be significantly
impaired and slowed down.
The effect of this shift in John seems stable. Further
sessions with John are not doing much more. He does not bump and bruise his
head again in the following weeks, and he keeps the regained agility in his
weekly basket ball evenings.
What a nice and wonderful detective story! It reminds
me of what Peter Melchior, one of my original Rolfing teachers, told me during
my early years as a practitioner: "Maybe
it is more that people change 'their mind about their body' in response to our
treatments, which then results in physical changes of their bodies".
As any good – and true – success story it also leads
to several questions. For example:
·
Would the simple balloon
exercise have had the same effect, without John putting it himself into a more
meaningful social variation with his daughter? 2)
·
If he or I would have
gotten this simple treatment idea already in the first session, would he have
been already able to get the same drastic improvement out of it?
·
Maybe lots of people live
with a dysfunctional body image. How about "the
woman without a hip joint" or "the doctor who had lost his toe hinge". Could it be that
future body workers could "cure" them forever with a similar easy 20
minute intervention? I certainly would love to have more cases like this - or
to recognize them more often! – in my daily practice.
Footnotes:
1)
Based on
the convincing arguments of Gallagher & Cole it is useful do distinguish
between ‘body schema’ and ‘body image’. Body schema stands for a system preconscious,
subpersonal processes that we use to monitor posture and movement. Body image
on the other hand is defined as our conscious ideas or mental representations
about our body. In everyday life our body schema continues to operate, and in
many cases works best, when the intentional object of perception is something
other than our own body. Our body schema consists of intentional states –
perception, mental representations, beliefs and attitudes – in which the
intentional object of such states is one’s own body. There are several
interesting correlations and interactions between the body schema and body
image. See Gallagher S & Cole J, Body
Image and Body Schema in a Deafferented Subject, Journal of Mind an Behavior,
Vol.16 (Autumn 1995), 369-90.
2)
It is
possible to explain this story also from a perspective which is purely oriented
around post traumatic stress disorders: The second injury – which triggered the
‘head-less’ movement coordination in everyday life – could be seen as a
re-traumatization, which resulted in a fearful ‘splitting off’ of this injured
body part in the internal perception of the client. The gentle movements with
the head and balloon then provided an ideal ‘titration’ of this former
threatening stimulus direction., similar like somebody who had been abused by a
man with a beard, might learn in a good therapy session to perceive other
bearded mean again as non threatening. The good relationship between the client
and his daughter could be also seen as a ‘resource’ in that process of trauma
resolution, which he utilized. As useful as this second explanation concept is,
it seems more convincing to me that the improved agility in running as well as
his precision in jumping and throwing can be even better – i.e. more
specifically - explained by the above body schema oriented explanation concept.
Photo of girl with balloon: courtesy of Adam Mentzell,Certified Rolfer