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I have just returned from jogging. It’s shocking to admit that statement. It seems it was likely ten years since I last did so. However I recently discovered that my tests indicate somewhat raised cholesterol, and the recommendation was to perform intense workouts on a consistent basis.

It’s the initial instance in my life that the driving force to work out has been my physical health. In my youth, I exercised because I wanted to lose weight. I’ve also run to alleviate my anxiety – I was merely escaping from the anxiety, instead of dealing with it. Sometimes, I exercised because I aimed to get better in running. This was the definition to me back then to develop a better life.

Exercising with new motivation now prompted contemplation about the approaches I’ve connected with my physique during my years and the way it’s evolving as I transition from youth to midlife. I believe not I’ve respected my body, not fundamentally. I’ve valued it only for its capabilities and the objectives it fulfilled for me: aiming to appeal; escaping emotions; completing a speedier 5K run. Up to now, I hadn’t realized that my body represents me, it is my existence, instead of something that produces results.

Much has been written for ages about the split of mind and body – a topic it’s comforting to know, I’m not going to precis now. What resonated most compelling is Freud’s understanding that mental and physical selves are developmentally integrated from birth, because physical development necessitates psychological development and the reverse is true. A baby’s corporeal feelings – like the bodily feeling of hunger – drive the mind to cultivate the skill to identify hunger as a feeling that can be sated by eating; and the psychological solace and satisfaction regularly delivered by meal after meal nourishes the young mind in the same way the milk nourishes them corporally. Likewise psychological experiences – like the desire to rise and attain a goal, and the determination to persist through effort – are the reason and method muscles grow stronger. Since infancy, our body and mind are intertwined in reciprocal evolution as unified as a spiral.

Yet It’s become clear, during therapy with my psychoanalyst, that my mind and body may exist in a distinct connection – a more separated and increasingly manipulative. My mind can use my body to retain and manifest things that my consciousness deems undesirable or intolerable. In analysis we’ve become aware that there are specific feelings that I am afraid I cannot bear; in place of feeling these mentally, I unconsciously force them into my body, where they remain as bodily signs.

I often had this with indigestion – which had nothing to do with my diet, but represented a kind of physical reflux of the harsher emotions I couldn’t digest in my mind. This was not a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced to my attention in sessions, and my dread and sensitivity and rage and alarm could be felt and expressed verbally instead of converted to corporeal symptoms, it resolved. I rarely suffer from stomach problems today.

The toughest period I endured this severe heartburn, I didn’t sleep for several nights in a row. It seemed I was slipping away from my mind. I consulted a general practitioner, who scheduled all sorts of scans and tests, but everything was medically abnormal. It turned out to be an alternate medic who informed me that the origin might be mental. My analyst concurred. I was surprised, but I also knew it was accurate.

If an individual is suffering a corporeal problem, they might feel insulted upon hearing that there might be an emotional origin. They might feel as invalidation, being told that their symptom is imagined. Certainly it’s a real phenomenon – some face their suffering dismissed or wrongly assessed. Yet occasionally it could be that the bodily signs are real – certainly – and the source is mental, the inner mind using the physical self to express emotional hurt or anger or whichever sentiment awareness fails to handle. At times, we may believe our feelings only has value if manifested as bodily symptoms. We often undervalue our minds personally, in social contexts and culturally; why else do we accept the shocking elimination of psychological therapies on the NHS?

My experiences have revealed that an improved existence is unattainable if we remain trapped unconsciously in ways of relating, inside us and in relationships, that originate in disregard, manipulation and exchange. These dynamics are frequently more straightforward to spot “in the world” in broader culture. It may be more challenging to think about how they got out there, and to recognise these forms personally and in intimate connections, in the economy of our psyches.

But it’s worth persevering. After donning my jogging shoes back on post a long hiatus, heading out not to get bodily change, or to get rid of a sensation, or to improve a 5km time, {it