SUPRESSING THE IMPULSE FOR CRYING
Due to its strong influence on the creation of chronic rigidity and its prevalence, I will discuss the process of suppressing the impulse to cry in more detail. The same can be observed with all negative emotions. We start to cry if a stronger pressure develops on the lower side of the respiratory diaphragm, which is the result of a rise in energy in the abdominal cavity, but we haven’t redirected this pressure into actions.
The next description of the process that leads to crying is simplified. We react to a change in our internal state or to pressure from the environment by raising the tone of the muscles of the lumbar part of the back, the buttocks, and the back of the thighs. Chemical processes convert into biological energy and create the conditions for anger. This increases pressure in our abdominal cavity. This state enables the reaction to impulses and stations that disturb, hinder or endanger us. If we cannot influence them with anger, we are prevented from using our sympathetic reaction of fight, persistence, or flight, or we must limit the expression of anger if we feel a negative reaction. We do this by contracting the abdominal muscles, the groin, and the front of the thighs, which we feel as fear.
A longer lasting period of fear and an increased inner pressure must occasionally be released through a more acceptable form of anger – crying. Crying in a child usually triggers compassion and empathy, but if he cries too often, he triggers s resistance in his surroundings, which in turn suppresses this way of expression for the child.
THE EXAMPLE OF LOSING THEIR MOTHER
A child who lost their mother in a crowd will begin crying due to losing a vitally important person. He will cry only for a certain amount of time, then stop because crying became too tiring. If the mother’s absence was too long for him, and no one else approached the child to comfort, hug and calm him, the strong and painful feelings would cause the child to begin suppressing the expression of their emotions. This would happen by increasing the rigidity of the membrane and hyperventilation. This numbness decreases his pain and fear and lowers the pressure in his abdominal cavity, causing the child to stop crying. When he is forced to calm down and become aware of reality, the increasing awareness of threats and anger will cause a rise of internal energy and pressure because he does not emit them into the environment in his numb state. With this, the need to cry will appear again, a renewed attempt to call for his mother. With each repetition of this process, his cry will become weaker. The child forgets the trauma after he finds his mother or is offered care and hugs by another person.
However, if the mother died or abandons the child for whatever reason and the child remains unloved in their primary family, his state of numbness becomes chronic and very serious. No matter how much he cries, every outburst only serves to increase the pain of this loss, because his mother isn’t coming back. The child will sooner or later stop crying, the membrane will become chronically rigid and distort the conductivity and feeling of these impulses from the inside and their surroundings. The child will limit his self-expression and energy he requires to progress, his wishes and the will needed to fulfil them. He will gradually become a loner, slipping into the illusion of unresponsiveness or a state of depression, which, if it goes on for too long, causes a serious psychophysical condition.
THE EXAMPLE OF A COLD MOTHER
If the mother is present but emotionally unresponsive to the child’s needs, the situation is less tragic than in the example above. He loses himself in illusions because he cannot accept the current state of reality or is unwilling to face the demands of life. This usually happens if the mother’s childhood was filled with trauma (war, sexual and emotional abuse, unwanted pregnancy, her parents wishing she was born a boy and not a girl, etc.).
The child will cry in the fight for her emotional and physical closeness, which, in his inner separation, is unable to give it to him, he will persist in crying until it becomes too painful for him. Such a longer-lasting relationship will create blockages in the child’s transfer of feelings and emotions between the membrane and the mind, and will create many unrealistic patterns of behavior and relationships in later life. Namely, the child learns to express emotions primarily through touch and the transfer of feelings between his and his mother’s membranes.
I will now cite the self-analysis of a mother who came to me due to common migraines. It became more and more clear to her how badly she felt about herself, and she understood more and more why her daughter’s behavior was also problematic. “All roads lead back to me. I see that I have a lot of work ahead of me. With the help of learning AEQ somatics, I realized that all my feelings also transfer to the child. How much fear, unpleasant feelings, and problems were already in me during pregnancy and immediately after giving birth: fear of what the reaction would be at work because I got pregnant shortly after employment, constant cramping at work due to the unfriendliness of a colleague, fear of childbirth, the wrong position of the child or premature birth. I worried too much about whether the baby was not gaining enough weight and whether I knew how to feed her well enough; I blamed myself for my breastfeeding problems. I did not connect this constant fear and worry with my general psychophysical state. Now I know the more I understand myself, the more I will understand my child. At the moment, I’m having a hard time grasping and sorting through all my different reactions and feelings that are coming to me right now. From anger, rage, and irritability to sadness, tears for no reason, complete fatigue, apathy, insomnia, and loss of sexual desire. Fortunately, bright moments are now appearing more often in my well-being.”
A baby or young child cannot accept, understand or come to terms with the absence of a mother’s love, which is one of their natural needs. He is completely dependent on her for his survival. He doesn’t know how to grieve like adults. Even adults usually have problems with grieving and crying. Usually the important reason for this is suppressing their sadness in early childhood, making this type of expression unavailable to them.
EXAMPLE OF A MOTHER WHO CAN’T STAND A CHILD’S CRYING
The child will suppress the impulse to cry when in the presence of a mother who does not tolerate it. Because she cannot respond appropriately due to her own repressions and blockages, she reacts to the child’s cry by withdrawing or conditioning. With this, she tries to teach/force the child not to order her around by crying because she feels blackmailed. That’s when she doesn’t want to take him in her arms and comfort him. A power struggle begins between mother and child, in which the mother naturally wins. The child soon feels the mother’s negative reaction to the cry, the purpose of which is to attract her attention, love, and pity. When the mother reacts with anger and aggression, the effect of her reaction on the child is even stronger. In the beginning, the child will cry harder and harder until he realizes that this does not lead to the desired change and it is better to calm down and suppress the crying.
THE EXPRESSION OF ANGER, NEGATIVITY AND AGRESSION
The following emotions that children should not express are anger, negativity and aggression. Not long ago, children were punished all too often for expressing them, which resulted in an unequal relationship between parents and children. This is less and less common today, because today’s children are allowed even too much.
The child does not have a sufficiently developed ego for conscious, reasonable control of emotions and lives in a rather black-and-white world. As he continues to face his parents’ value and belief systems, which he does not understand, which limit and disturb him, he develops anger. Parents are too fond of seeing it as a threat to their authority. Therefore, the child will suppress his negative and aggressive feelings, and from this, the suppression of all similar emotions can develop. When this happens, parents think they have raised their children well. Parents and teachers describe such a child as hard-working, golden, or that they didn’t even know they had one. This is, of course, only a portrait of automation, which greatly affects the way of breathing, as it is based on fear. Associated with it is a hard stomach and tense neck and jaw muscles, which often leads to asthma, bronchitis, headaches, and migraines.
A CHILDS SEXUAL EMOTIONS
It may seem old-fashioned to talk about how adults once suppressed the sexual feelings of their children. The fact is that this is still happening and probably even more often today than before. Suppressing a child’s sexual feelings serves the purpose of making them potentially dangerous to the child. They pose a danger when one of the parents consciously or unconsciously seduces the child. Such behavior is even more common today than in the past. At the same time, due to the fast-paced lifestyle, the pressure on parents is greater, which hinders the appropriate flow of attention between parents. At that time, usually, one of them directs too much attention to the child, who is not ready for this, nor knows how to control the feeling of pleasure well enough. We are not talking here about the sexual sensations of the body that originate from the genitals but about the bodily sensations that are suppressed by the contraction of the abdomen and the muscles that connect the pelvis to the chest. This defensive maneuver cuts off sensation in the lower body, preventing the person from having good contact with reality. At the same time, it distorts and limits the function of breathing.
In the examples above, we can become familiar with the most common emotional reasons for chronic rigidity, which I discuss when teaching the AEQ method. There might be plenty of other reasons and situations for this, but they all follow the same physical laws of regulating internal and external pressures between the membrane and the environment. These laws enable man to react to changes in himself and the environment. This enables and determines life.
