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I recently came back from a jog. It’s surprising to state those words. It seems it was likely many years since my last. However I recently discovered that I have elevated cholesterol, and the recommendation was to engage in vigorous activity frequently.

For the first time ever in my existence that the driving force to exercise has been my bodily well-being. When I was younger, I ran because I wanted to lose weight. I’ve also run to alleviate nervousness – I was merely escaping from the worry, instead of dealing with it. At other times, I ran because I aimed to get better with jogging. This was the meaning to me then to create a superior lifestyle.

Exercising with new motivation now sparked reflection about the ways I’ve interacted with my body throughout my life and its transformation as I move from early adulthood to being a middle-aged person. It seems unlikely I’ve honored my physical form, not fundamentally. I’ve appreciated it just for its capabilities and the purposes it fulfilled for me: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; completing a speedier 5K run. Up to now, I’ve not understood that my body represents me, it is my existence, rather than something that produces results.

A great deal has been explored over the centuries about the division involving physical and mental aspects – a topic it’s comforting to know, I won’t summarize here. What I’ve found most fascinating is the Freudian perspective that consciousness and physique are developmentally integrated from the beginning, because physical development demands mental growth and conversely. The newborn’s bodily experiences – like the corporeal experience of hunger – motivate consciousness to cultivate the ability to identify hunger as a sensation that may be satisfied by eating; and the mental reassurance and satisfaction repeatedly brought by feed after feed nourishes the young mind in the same way the milk fuels them physically. Likewise psychological experiences – such as the wish to rise and reach for something, and the persistence to attempt repeatedly – are the cause and means physical strength increases. From our earliest moments, our body and mind are interlinked in reciprocal evolution as integrated as a spiral.

But I’ve observed, in treatment with my analyst, that mental and physical aspects may exist in an alternate dynamic – a less unified and increasingly manipulative. My consciousness can use my physique to store and express aspects that my consciousness considers unwanted or unacceptable. In analysis we realized how there are certain emotions that I am afraid I cannot bear; rather than experiencing them mentally, I unconsciously force them into my body, where they get stuck as physical symptoms.

I used to get this with indigestion – not connected to what I’d eaten, but acted as a form of physical reflux of the sharper sentiments I couldn’t digest psychologically. It wasn’t an intentional act, but once it was raised to my attention by my analyst, and my anxiety and insecurity and anger and panic became palpable and put into words in place of converted to corporeal symptoms, it disappeared. I seldom experience from stomach problems now.

The toughest period I had this intense reflux, I was unable to sleep for multiple consecutive nights. It seemed I was slipping away from my mind. I consulted my doctor, who arranged multiple examinations and assessments, but there was nothing medically abnormal. It was an alternate medic who informed me that the root could be emotional. My therapist did not disagree. I was surprised, but I recognized it was correct.

If an individual endures a bodily issue, they might feel insulted if told that it could have a mental root. It can seem like disrespect, being told that their symptom is imagined. Certainly that does happen – some face their symptoms ignored or wrongly assessed. But in some cases it might be that the bodily signs are real – certainly – and the cause is psychological, the inner mind employing the physical self to manifest certain suffering or rage or whichever sentiment awareness fails to handle. Sometimes, it’s easy to think our experience matters solely when it is expressed through the body. We persistently neglect our minds as individuals, collectively and within our culture; for what reason would we tolerate the shocking elimination of psychodynamic psychotherapy on the NHS?

My experiences have revealed that an improved existence cannot be built while caught unawares in modes of connection, inside us and socially, that are rooted in disregard, manipulation and transaction. These dynamics tend to be simpler to identify “in the world” in the general public. It’s perhaps less comfortable to consider where they come from, and to recognise these patterns within ourselves and among loved ones, in the economy of our psyches.

Yet persistence pays off. When I put my trainers back on after such a long decade, going outside not to get a better body, or to escape a sensation, or to beat a 5km time, {it