Body Boundary
The corporeal self or embodied self is that aspect of consciousness responsible for reception, interpretation, and regulation of the bodily experience (Sakson-Obada, 2009; Kochan-Wójcik, 2011). This means that we live in two bodies: the actual physical body versus our experiential body. Both are real and not always congruent to one another.
One mechanism by which body experience is regulated is by the presence of the body boundary. The body boundary demarcates the somatopsychic space of the bodymind as a uniquely personal and private domain. The physical aspects of the body boundary include the skin, muscles and thorax and abdominal walls. The experiential boundary provides a sense of self versus the world along with the qualities of being strong and resistant to unwanted penetration or being weak and vulnerable to outside intrusion. The boundary changes in response to the nature and quality of somatic sensory experience whether it be positive or negative. The tactile sense is the most prominent along with vision while the auditory sense provides continuous, background sensory input of our bodies in relation to the space around us although it is often difficult to distinguish between the sounds around us from those within our heads (O’Callaghan, 2009). Most people don’t understand or have never thought about their body as having a boundary except after some perceived invasion such as in injury, infection, illness, or accidental or intentional forcible intrusion. Everyday examples of body boundary protection include self-touching for self-soothing reassurance, clothing choices, exercise and other health practices, use of oral or topical agents, etc. The protection of body boundary extends from the concrete to the abstract. People who feel defensive about their bodies may dress use more cosmetics or wear more or inappropriate clothing. Others may display tattoos or wear decorative metal objects. Body anxiety from potential body boundary violation is positively correlated with body covering and alteration (Fisher, 1974).
Gender Differences in Body Boundary
Females tend to have a firmer and more secure sense of body boundaries than do males. The differences are admittedly small, but are a pervasive trend among studies. Fisher’s research showed that women tend to have a stronger sense of body integrity than do men. This may strike one as counter-intuitive in that women do express more body anxiety and dissatisfaction than men, and this finding is also a consistent trend. In studies of hospital admissions, men tend to have higher levels of anxiety toward pain and suffering than do women. Further, Fisher’s studies showed that women tend to be more open to awareness of their bodies and more comfortable about accepting messages of body sensations. Other studies utilizing the injection of adrenalin to stimulate the body to see how test subjects interpret changes in their physiology showed similar differences. Men expressed more discomfort regarding physical arousal of unknown origin than women (Cloete, 1979).
Why such a pronounced gender difference? The male psyche is founded on the function of instrumentality and the application of personal power. The unconscious vulnerability men feel about their bodies may be reflection of underlying anxiety about potential loss of power. The female role, on the other hand, is based on empathic relations with others—a focus more on others than the self—and being physically attractive. Female body attributes are an important part of social acceptance and identity definition. Consequently, the theory is that females are trained from an early age to invest more time, attention, thought, and energy into their bodies and their appearance than males, thus heightening a base level of sensitivity toward body experience. More so, women, by their distinct biological roles in human reproduction as well by their more natural inclination to empathic relations assume the role of “caretaker of the body;” not only their own but the bodies of others around them as well (Fisher, 1974). He elaborates further on this embodied difference:
“One could argue that the culture encourages the female to be more interested in her body that it does the man. Also, her role as a woman is more explicitly identified with her body and its functioning than is true of the man. The man’s role and status are typically defined in terms of his accomplishments and attainments rather than in terms of his body attributes, but for the woman her role is still largely defined in relation to the attractiveness of her body to the male and her ability to bear children” (Fisher, 1970, p. 198).
Those with weak body boundaries have a blurred body sense in relation to the environment. Persons with weak body boundaries are anxious about their physical vulnerability. They are more in contact with their internal body experience than with the external world. They experience threat to their body boundaries from without as well as from within as they often perceive their internal sensations as unacceptable or overwhelming. They desire a higher authority to guide them and so are conformists and make for good followers (Fisher, 1970, 1973, 1986a, 1986b; Fisher & Cleveland, 1958/1968). Those with weak body boundaries are more vulnerable to stress than those with more definite boundaries (Cloete, 1979). People with boundary weaknesses tend to have trouble with body spacing with others they may tend to stand too close or touch others when the situation does not warrant such intimacy or they tend to be too distanced away from others when the situation does not warrant such formality (Fisher, 1970). Women with weak body boundaries and a weak sense of body-self have difficulties in self-expression, have a stronger external locus of control, and desire the approval of others (Kochan-Wójcik, 2011).
People with strong body boundaries experience themselves as separate from other people and objects. Persons with a strong body boundary are outgoing and people oriented. They like physical movement and action. Persons with strong body boundaries perceive their bodies as being strong and healthy, and yet, paradoxically, do not overly equate their own self with their body. They are more resistant to stress than others. Such individuals make good leaders and dislike taking subordinate roles in work relationships. Even though strongly bounded persons have a firmer sense of individualism, they are more law abiding than weakly-bounded persons. This may be because they are better able to manage their own internal impulses (Cloete, 1979; Fisher, 1970, 1973, 1986a, 1986b; Fisher & Cleveland, 1958/1968). Those with a strong boundary possess what Fisher called, “self-steering behavior,” which facilitates greater personal achievement, persistence in completing tasks, and more positive interpersonal interaction. This concept is clearly related to, if not identical with, a strong internal locus of control. People with weaker boundaries have less self-steering ability and so have a more external locus of control.
The strong versus weak-bounded dichotomy is a portrait in extremes as most people have a healthy boundary that fluctuates in a dance between permeability and impermeability.
Boundary Violations and Loss of Personal Power
A basic principle of Somatic Psychology is that the sense of self and feelings of strength, power, and security come from a sense of embodiment and this all depends on the integrity of the body boundary. Embodiment is the experience of being a body and so the body is always an experiential body.
The issue of the body boundary—the demarcation between inner self and exterior world—along with the related concepts of personal power and self-confidence has long interested me. This is because I had experienced so many violations of bodily integrity in the form of a series of surgeries between one and three years of age to correct a birth defect. These surgeries were followed by physical restraints to keep me from disturbing the stitches and with no painkillers. Yes, I was able to obtain my original hospital records from 1960 and there is no note of post-operative analgesics. I suspect this was from the belief common at that time that children with their undeveloped nervous systems did not experience pain. (I found confirmation of this belief from a pediatrician who I met in a Gestalt training group in the 1990s who told me he performed circumcisions without pain killers. I was aghast.)
As I grew up, I found myself found myself to be chronically anxious, insecure, weak, vulnerable, distrustful others, and having an incredible ambivalence about physical intimacy. The surgeries had somehow damaged my identity, but it wasn’t until early adulthood that I came to see that. Insight was very difficult to get because the trauma occurred in my pre-verbal stage; I was left without words to express my feelings; a very severe case of alexithymia if there ever was one. (Alexithymia is the inability to identify or describe one’s own emotions. It is linked to depression and self-destructive behaviors.) My situation was not helped in the least by growing up in an unsupportive, negative, and invalidating family. These were all issues that took years of psychotherapy and bodywork to resolve. Luckily, I was blessed with a good degree of self-insight, jaw-clenching determination, and some really wonderful therapists.
The question as I see it is what is the relationship between the body and a sense of power? I don’t believe it comes from physical size or strength as I’ve met many people who were small and weak, but had great personal power. The clue came to me many years ago when I worked in the business sector and had to give public presentations. I was very bad at it and found public speaking very frightening. It wasn’t until after I completed a ten-session process of deep-tissue body realignment that I suddenly found myself quite calm and quietly confident when public speaking. How did this happen? The answer is presented here deals with the concepts of locus of control, empowerment, and body boundary. Trauma sustained by the body boundary results in body image distortions which serve as compensations to restore personal power. The ones to be examined here are Overbounded, Inflated-Obese, and Underbounded body structures.
Locus of Control
Locus of control is a psychological concept that refers to how strongly people believe they have control over the situations and experiences that affect their lives. The concept was developed by Julian B. Rotter (1916-2014) in 1954, and has since become a core concept in personality psychology. A person’s locus is internal if they believe they can control one’s own life or it is external if they believe that life is controlled by outside factors over which they have no influence. Locus of control is one of four cornerstones of personality theory that includes emotional stability, self-efficacy, and self-esteem (see Kormanik & Rocco, 2009 for much more on the LOC principle).
Emotional stability refers to one’s general level of mental health. Self-efficacy is a person’s ability to resolve certain situations or accomplish desired tasks. It is related to self-confidence which is a belief system regarding one’s general capacity to take action in life. These factors are all related to self-esteem which is the degree of positive regard a person has of their self. And, as will be seen, they are all related to a person’s sense of personal power and embodiment (Tengland, 2008).
Having an internal or external focus are two opposing ends of a spectrum and not an either/or state as everyone is a mixture and a person’s locus can change with the social situation. In general, though, internals are high achievers with low outer directedness. Externals are just the opposite. Most theoreticians and researchers will argue that locus of control is a facet of personality. Here I am arguing that locus of control is an unconscious function of a person’s sense of embodiment in general and of the body boundary in particular.
If your sense of embodiment is firm then you have confidence to assert yourself in the world. If it is too permeable then things seem to happen more to you than you happening to them.
Empowerment
We return to the notion of empowerment because it was and still is a powerful concept no matter how much it has been denatured by our culture. Empowerment defined from the somatopsychic point of view is the sense of being strong and capable and freely able to exert personal action and control in the world for one’s own benefit. Given that empowerment is being conscious of having some degree of power, the question becomes how much do they have and how are they going to express it? This means that empowerment is an aspect of embodied consciousness. It is argued here that a sense of empowerment arises from the primal feeling of being alive and from the neural network in the brain that governs the sense of self-agency: knowing that one can move the body by one’s own free will. This means that empowerment is something that can be developed and refined with practice which makes it a tool or a skill. To exert power means to exert it one something or someone which always means that personal power is relational (Page & Czuba, 1999; Tengland, 2008).
In a way, empowerment is just another name for strong internal locus of control.
Part 2 and Part 3 available here…
- Embodiment and Empowerment Part 2: Defending the Body Boundary
- Embodiment and Empowerment Part 3: Modifying the Body Boundary
Closing Thoughts
Locus of control is the belief in one’s self that one has personal power. Empowerment is the experience of embodied energy giving a sense of strength and vitality. The quality of the body boundary contributes to the sense of having power and direction in the world. The bodymind is vulnerable to many different kinds of threats and injuries and restoring it to health is not an easy task. Restoring the bodymind boundary requires much time, rock-like determination, hard work… and definitely some very good therapists. The good news is that there are variety of modalities readily available to help you on your way. I have written a separate blog-lecture on this: “Embodiment and Empowerment: Defending the Body Boundary.”
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
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References
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———— (1986b). Development and Structure of the Body Image, Vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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