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I just got back from a run. It’s shocking to admit that statement. I believe it was likely a decade since I last did so. But I recently discovered that I have somewhat raised cholesterol, and doctors suggested to engage in vigorous activity on a consistent basis.

This is the first time in my life that my motivation to work out has been my physical health. In my youth, I exercised because I aimed to be thinner. I’ve also run to cure feelings of anxiety – I was merely escaping from the anxiety, not addressing it. Sometimes, I exercised because I aimed to get better at running. This was what it meant to me then to build an improved existence.

Jogging with altered intent at present got me thinking about the approaches I’ve related with my physique over my lifetime and the way it’s evolving as I transition from youth to being a middle-aged person. It seems unlikely I’ve honored my physical form, not truly. I’ve valued it solely for its functions and the objectives it served me: seeking approval; dodging sentiments; achieving a quicker 5K run. Up to now, I hadn’t realized that my body represents me, it is my existence, as opposed to something that produces results.

A lot has been explored through history about the division involving physical and mental aspects – a topic it’s reassuring to know, I’m not going to precis in this piece. What has struck me most fascinating is the Freudian perspective that mind and body are developmentally integrated from birth, because bodily growth demands psychological development and vice versa. The newborn’s bodily experiences – like the corporeal experience of hunger – drive consciousness to develop the skill to perceive hunger as a sensation that can be sated by nourishment; and the emotional comfort and contentment regularly delivered by repeated nourishment nourishes the young mind in the same way the nutrition fuels them bodily. Similarly mental events – for instance the desire to stand up and attain a goal, and the persistence to attempt repeatedly – are why and how physical strength increases. Since infancy, mind and body are intertwined in mutual development as unified as DNA strands.

But I have noticed, in sessions with my psychoanalyst, that mental and physical aspects can be in a distinct connection – a less unified and increasingly manipulative. My mind might utilize my physical self to retain and express aspects that my mind considers unacceptable or unbearable. During therapy we realized that there are specific feelings that I worry are too much for me; rather than sensing them mentally, I unintentionally shift them to my physical self, becoming trapped as corporeal issues.

I used to get this as indigestion – not connected to food intake, but acted as a kind of bodily backlash of the harsher emotions I failed to handle psychologically. This was not a deliberate decision, but once it was raised into my consciousness through therapy, and my dread and vulnerability and frustration and alarm were experienced and articulated instead of transformed into bodily feelings, it disappeared. It’s uncommon for me from indigestion today.

The most severe episode I had this intense reflux, I was unable to sleep for multiple consecutive nights. I believed I was slipping away from my sanity. I visited my doctor, who organised multiple diagnostic procedures, but everything was medically abnormal. It turned out to be another doctor who informed me that the cause could be psychological. My psychoanalyst agreed. I was shocked, but I recognized it to be true.

Whenever someone experiences a bodily issue, they can be offended if told that it could have a mental root. They can experience as invalidation, hearing that their illness is fabricated. And of course such cases occur – individuals may experience their suffering dismissed or incorrectly identified. But in some cases it might be that the bodily signs exist – certainly – and the origin is emotional, the inner mind using the physique to manifest certain suffering or fury or any feeling the conscious self fails to handle. At times, we may believe our experience is only valid when it is expressed as bodily symptoms. We often undervalue our mental states on a personal level, as a society and culturally; how else can we allow the terrible elimination of psychodynamic psychotherapy through health services?

Personal insights have shown me that an improved existence is unattainable while caught unconsciously in ways of relating, inside us and with others, that are rooted in disrespect, manipulation and dealings. These interactions tend to be simpler to identify “out there” in the general public. It’s likely less comfortable to think about their origins, and to recognise these shapes within ourselves and in intimate connections, in the dynamics of our minds.

However it’s valuable to continue. When I put my running shoes back on after such a long decade, going outside not to get bodily change, or to escape a feeling, or to beat a personal best, {it