How do you learn to hear your body? 6 books on psychosomatics

Our body often gives us SOS signals. However, we habitually ignore them in order to treat insomnia, digestive disorders, heart palpitations, high blood pressure and headaches with doctors and medications. But how can we stop jamming the body’s signals and learn to decipher them?

Books from renowned psychotherapists specializing in psychosomatic disorders with gentle support, helpful exercises and the latest research from evidence-based medicine can help. We tell you about some of them.

Getting to the root of the problem

Catherine Tur, a physician and practicing psychosomatologist, believes that a person’s reactions to negative experiences are laid down in early childhood. In the book “Psychosomatics: the body says. How to learn to listen to your body and find the key to its healing,” she tells how experiences provoke colds, dizziness, scoliosis, bronchial asthma and other diseases in adulthood. And she presents tasks and exercises to help you better understand the body and communicate with it as an equal.

“A person lives through hundreds of different emotions, speaks thousands of words, thinks millions of thoughts, but impermissibly rarely turns to his or her own body to ask it, ‘What am I feeling bodily right now?’ If we start asking ourselves this question, we will see: the body immediately says that it is tired, sick, overeating, or does not want to do what one makes oneself do.”

Listen to the body

Often it happens that a person is tormented by insomnia, heart pain, blood pressure, but doctors throw up their hands and can not find the cause. To help comes the book of doctor-psychotherapist Alexander Kugelstadt “It’s all psychosomatics! How symptoms get from the head to the body and what to do to heal.” The author explains how the human psyche works and how symptoms swarm from head to body. And afterward, he teaches self-soothing with 36 simple exercises that will bring back peace of mind without medication or expensive treatments.

“If you map your life path, figuring out what internal images and experiences may have imprinted your current perception of the world, you can find a path to recovery by changing the way you think or a different way of relating to people at crucial times.”

Dealing with trauma

A classic of trauma literature is Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., M.P.H. and a leading expert on trauma, “The Body Remembers Everything: What Role Psychological Trauma Plays in Human Life and What Techniques Help You Overcome It.” This is a fundamental work, which once and for all will put on the shelves all the issues related to psychotraumas. The author proves that anyone suffering from psychological trauma can cope with it without resorting to self-isolation and denial of the problem.

“Trauma is known to disrupt the region of the brain that is responsible for transmitting physical sensations, the inner knowing that you are alive. These changes explain why trauma survivors become hyper-vigilant to potential threats and more withdrawn and reserved in their daily lives. They also help us understand why these people often make the same mistakes over and over again, failing to learn from them.”

Change the way we look at illness

Provocative psychologist Irina Semizorova in her book “How Sasha Became Healthy. Workshop on Psychosomatics” tells how our mind protects itself from negativity with the help of bodily reactions. She teaches how to live through difficult moments without breaking from the inside, and to cope with the stress of pandemics and global catastrophes with a special view of health as a state of strength and contact with life, to which everyone can come.

“Health is not the absence of disease or suffering. It is energy, vitality and strength.”

Helping children

Children often get sick, and parents respond by going to clinics and feeding them medicine. But can health problems – allergies, insomnia, anxiety, restricted diets – be resolved without expensive treatments? Clinical psychologist, psychosomatics expert and mom of two children Katya Tokhtarova is convinced that it can. In her book “Children’s Psychosomatics. How to help children grow up healthy” she tells how childhood illnesses and parental stress are connected, and explains how to minimize the number of sick days with the help of understandable practices.

“It doesn’t take much to change your life – you just need to step beyond the line of limiting views and attitudes, no matter what they are about.”

Listen to your wants and needs

Psychotherapist Hillary McBride suffered from an eating disorder as a teenager. That’s why in her book “Body Wisdom. How to Gain Confidence, Feel Better, and Finally Enjoy Life” is full of acceptance and insight. Drawing on her own experience, research and clinical practice, she explains how to befriend your body to help it through trauma or stress, make it more sensual and love it the way it deserves to be loved.

“When we remember our bodily self and reconnect with it, we lose the need to earn our worth. In that moment, we need to experience our corporeality and realize that this breath, these hands, these arms, these lungs, these eyes, this body are beautiful.”