The moment somebody sees you, they know far more about you than you imagine. This is because our psychology is expressed in our body. Our personalities are literally made flesh, made plain in our physical structures. As Wilhelm Reich (an Austrian psychoanalyst and early pioneer of body psychotherapy) put it, “The body is the unconscious.” Similarly, Joseph Heller (creator of the bodywork system, Hellerwork) said, “Your posture tells your story.”
On a crude level, cartoonists get this. Think about the cartoon caricatures you’ve seen of, say, the “defeated” person, the “rebellious” person, the “uptight” person, the “grandiose” person. These sorts of cartoons are obviously exaggerations, but there’s a reason we recognize them. Who we are is how we are in space.
What our structure reveals
Here are a few examples. If we live too much in the future, we might develop a pattern of craning our neck forward. Conversely, if we carry our head overly pulled back, our chin tucked in, we might be unconsciously expressing a defensive tendency to hold back. To inhibit our engagement with life.
Depression can show up as a collapsed upper rib cage. Shoulders that have crept too far forward can be part of a pattern of protecting our hearts against pain. This “shoulders forward” pattern can also be the body saying, “It’s not safe to take up space – I need to stay small.” (Of course, forward shoulders could also simply mean that we’ve slouched in front of a computer screen too much… like Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)
Meanwhile, shoulders that are excessively pulled back, military style, can be associated with control, “holding it all together” (because, on some level, we feel like we’re falling apart). An inflated chest can suggest an overcompensation for feelings of inadequacy. It can also mean staying “up” to avoid dropping “down,” out of the head and into the body and feeling.
A new possibility
The actual human realities are far more complex than these kinds of examples might suggest. It’s never as simple as, “You have X posture, therefore you have Y psychology.” Also, our physical structures express our strong, life-embracing, and loving emotional patterns as well.
Here’s the point, though. It works both ways. If your psychology impacts your structure, that also means that working with your structure can impact your psychology. This is where Rolfing© Structural Integration comes in.
Rolfing© Structural Integration
Rolfing Structural Integration is the grandmother of virtually all western modalities of therapeutic, structural bodywork (including neuromuscular therapy, myofacial release, and Hellerwork, whose creator, Joseph Heller, I quoted earlier).
Using their hands and elbows, Rolfing practitioners (“Rolfers”) work slowly with your fascia – the connective tissue that wraps every muscle, bone, and organ in your body – to create more length, space, openness, fluidity, and alignment. It literally changes your shape. You can see it in before-and-after photographs. And that can impact your personality in all sorts of surprising ways.
To take an earlier example, if someone has a “head forward” pattern because they tend to “live in the future,” and Rolfing eases their head back, that person may now have a new bodily experience of living more in the present moment. The eternal now might be more accessible and feel more natural.
Similarly, unbinding some of the structural tensions in the hips and pelvis might allow a person to feel deeper emotions. It might even help them to release some of the anxiety that makes them feel like they have to be overly “in control.”
There are countless such examples. You can read about them in detail in books such as The Spacious Body, by Dr. Jeffrey Maitland, or The Power of Balance: A Rolfing View of Health, by Dr. Brian W Fahey (out-of-print, but you can find it used for like $8), as well as in any of Dr. Ida Rolf’s writings.
Of course, there are many modalities that create psychological growth through the body –yoga, Alexander Technique, Feldenkraise, Hakomi, qigong, tai chi, breathwork, and a variety of somatic therapies. Each of them have their own unique emphases, strengths, and focuses.
But none are quite as specific to psychological change through the transformation of structure as Rolfing – and none are as direct. That’s why world-renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk recommends Rolfing for people healing from trauma. As he put it in a podcast on July 25, 2021 (Your Parenting Mojo podcast, number 141), “What Rolfing does is it actually opens up these set patterns of your fascia and your muscles, so you don’t get trapped in a body that continues to live out the fear and the terror, etc., from the past.”
Of course, these sorts of changes require our full intention and participation in the process. When Rolfing facilitates psychological change, the client is typically involved in other practices as well – therapy, yoga, breathwork, qigong, or meditation. But if you genuinely desire transformation, a Rolfer “melting” the armorings in your tissues, allowing you to occupy space in new ways, can be a potent support to that transformation.
