“To file a complaint can also mean to become alienated from the history that led you to complain, an intimate alienation that you feel in your own bodily being” (Ahmad, pg. 42)
How reclaims and complaints interferes in our own bodies?
Mind and body relation have been a topic that has overcome day and day more important, as studies showing their strong interconnection.
Lately I read an article in an online magazine called Mental Health America which says that the intestine coating functions “a second brain”. Both intestine and brain are connected physically by the vague nerve, and chemically by hormons and neutroansmitters. Therefore they are interconnected back and forth. Consequently, the intestine is the main psychosomatic organ. A good mind influences a good intestine functioning and a good intestine functioning conducts to a healthy mind.
When I swallow my complaint my body “resiente” Spanish word that means literally re-feels.
Metaphorically meant that it reacts with pain.
As a matter of fact I have a condition called “inflame intestine” a psychosomatic reaction in the gastrointestinal apparat. It started when I was 20 years old and comes and goes depending on the season. It was triggered by a family crisis, which in that moment was difficult to elaborate through words, with text. So, my body took the work of materializing into a feeling, an uncomfortable body feeling.
Ahmad says our body can be converted into an archive, as a document.
Our whole existence is involved in the process of letting a reclaim out.
In my case, I have learned that when I don´t speak out the situations that bother me, if I don´t “file my complaint” my body resents and reminds me that is important to elaborate this discomfort through speech.
Since my first intestine crisis I started a psychotherapy process, for many years in a row. That helped enormously. That safe space with an objective ear that heard unprejudiced became an effective way to file and convert those life complaints into a document that possible to be analyzed, letting it out of my body as a knit, out from my guts. The possibility to elaborate the difficulties of experience through text.
Although the psychotherapy space is a different institonalized space, and it is not conducive to bringing grievances to any formal process, It helped at that moment to organized the ideas in order to lead them in the future to other spaces of pleading. And certainly to learn how to manage my guts.
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