The Body Wobble
FAQ’s About the Body Wobble
What’s a body wobble?
A body wobble means your thoughts and feelings are manifesting in your body. With a body wobble, your emotions are closely connected to physical sensation: what you think and feel may not be conscious, but rather, stored deep in the body. You see, some (not all) experiences of emotion that are out of consciousness, are literally physical. When you feel painful, uncomfortable or strange sensations in your body (we’re not talking about an occasional or short-term condition, but conditions that are chronic or frequently recurring) your body is talking to you.
What are some examples of body wobble?
Examples of body wobbles might include anxiety (heart racing, or sick stomach) depression, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, insomnia, physical pain. Crying is also a body experience. So is strong anger. Pain. Anxiety. Even emotions that carry a narrative (or distinct thoughts and memories) can be considered body wobbles! Whenever there’s a physical experience, you have a body wobble.What’s a body wobble?
A body wobble means your thoughts and feelings are manifesting in your body. With a body wobble, your emotions are closely connected to physical sensation: what you think and feel may not be conscious, but rather, stored deep in the body. You see, some (not all) experiences of emotion that are out of consciousness, are literally physical. When you feel painful, uncomfortable or strange sensations in your body (we’re not talking about an occasional or short-term condition, but conditions that are chronic or frequently recurring) your body is talking to you.
The good news is, investigating and staying tuned in to your body is a path to getting to see your unseen mind and developing a conscious experience of thoughts and feelings that may not be accessible yet. When you find words and reconnect to thoughts and feelings, the body no longer holds them, and problems lift.
Why is my “wobble” in my body?
Thoughts, ideas, memories and experiences get stored in the body when they happen in our early years, before we have “explicit memory” (memory storage that starts anywhere from 4-7 years old).
Our memories from before this age are called “implicit,” meaning that we have a different way of remembering them. Our body often remembers what our conscious mind cannot. It remembers stress, it remembers unhappiness, and it remembers fear, frustration, disappointment and grief.
When you have a body wobble, your body could, in fact, be “remembering” because of how implicit memory works: thoughts and feelings are remembered without your conscious awareness. Putting the pieces together of your life history and what similarities may be between the present moment and what you may have lived through can help the hidden, implicit memory hidden to rise up into consciousness, where you can organize sensations and body experiences, talk about them, and understand how to take care of yourself.
As Bessel Van der Kolk (one or our foremost Trauma experts) says: “the body holds the score.”
How do we become more conscious when it comes to implicit memory?
Dr Van der Kolk confirms for us that what constitutes trauma is not a particular event that necessarily damaged us (like a death, or molestation, or abuse.) Instead, the real trauma is one of being alone in our emotional experience.
For a child, not having a reliable ally, in a parent or elder, and having to contend with adults who are not emotionally responsive, or worse, neglectful or even abusive, creates a chronic and long-term feelings of being unwell. Your body wobble can be a sign that something inside of you was not helped to grow and thrive. Instead, you may have suffered stress and difficulty, even if you were deeply and obviously loved, that may have left you unable to cope with negative feelings that you couldn’t navigate.