ARMORING SEGMENTS, TREATMENT

[ Introduction ] [ Clinical Vingnettes ] [ Appearance of Armoring ] [ Treatment of Armoring ] [ The Orgasm Reflex ] [ General Statements ] [ Special Populations ] [ Concluding Statements ]

Now the dissolution of armoring, how is armoring dissolved.  In psychiatric orgone therapy, we employ all conventional modalities.  We do talking therapy, we analyze dreams, we use whatever knowledge we have gained from our psychiatric residency and psychiatric training.  We employ all the intuition that we are capable of and all of the medical art that we are capable of.  We try to be as creative as we can because dealing with armoring is a creative process, and every therapist has his own individual methods in addition to what we all do in common.  What we look for in each segment is that the individual be capable of expressing every emotion of which a human being should be capable of expressing.  We also examine to find out areas of hypersensitivity because they always reveal armoring.  For example, if you go to touch somebody's flank and they go like this (the patient jerks), you know that's an armored area.  People shouldn't shrink when you go to touch here, or there, so that an area of hypersensitivity reveals the presence of armoring.
 

The Ocular segment: Now, in dissolving the armoring in the eyes, in addition to what I have already told you about following the light and looking at objects around the room, patients express every emotion that they can through their eyes.  They express anger, they cry, they express fear, they express paranoia, looking out of the side of their eyes, and to some extent, they should even be capable of expressing some degree of psychosis.  One of the exercises for people with Dissociative Disorder is that we tell them to let their eyes go off as they often do just naturally, and then to sharply refocus on our eyes to really make contact with our eyes.  And again to let the eyes go off and sharply refocus, to learn how to bring themselves back from that state when they are not in this world.  And you also give them exercises to do at home: when you are walking in the street, look at the people coming toward you, see if you can determine the texture of their clothing, all the color that you can distinguish and what they are wearing, what is the expression of their face when they walk past a shop window.  Look at what is displayed in the window, then go back and check to see what you have missed.  When you are riding in a bus, look at the expressions of your fellow passengers.  What happens very typically is that people come in and they say, "I did what you said, I looked at those expressions and I never saw it before, everybody is either mad or sad."  So these are all things that people learn to do at home, working to make their eyes come more alive.

I had a very interesting experience with a schizoid patient.  In the beginning of my practice in my treatment room, I had no natural light.  It was artificially lit, and after a while, I was getting tired of that, so I knocked down an entire wall and put glass brick in the wall.  About six months after I had put the glass brick in, a patient who had been coming every week said, "There is something different about this room."  I said, "No, there is not."  She said, "Yes, there is."  She said, "You didn't used to have that," pointing to the glass wall.  Six months later.

The Oral segment: The oral segment usually involves some kind of facial expression.  So if the patient is walking around with a blank facial expression, we imitate that facial expression to them.  I have a mirror, I show them what they look like with that blank face.  Or, if they have a constant smile, we have a session where I sit there smiling at them as they are smiling at me, or mirroring whatever constant, chronic emotion they may reveal.  I try to imitate that and demonstrate what they are walking around with.  We practice expressing anger by biting, I give them a sheet to bite on, and try to bite a hole in it, and they practice biting at home on towels. One lady who was practicing biting at home said as she was biting, "I had an image of biting my father's finger and I know what that meant."  An interesting fact was that when she had that experience at home, she had always complained of a tightness in her throat.  Having had that experience, and having integrated into her consciousness of knowing what the biting of her father's finger image meant, her throat relaxed and she never had that complaint again.

I imitate their own voice.  With the patients who whine, which is one of the things which drives me crazy, I will whine back to them and I can do it very well.  An example of another very interesting patient, is a very big man who is Welsh.  All Welshmen like to sing and he sings in a chorus.  But he talks in a voice that you can hardly hear.  I asked him to sing and he sings in that big voice with a big chest, but his speaking voice is almost inaudible.  So we were working on his voice, and I said, "What do you think it means, the fact that I can hardly hear you speak?"  He said, "I'll tell you, if I walk into a bar and speak in this [big] voice, somebody can challenge me to a fight."  So he had learned that the small voice is safer to walk around with.

Then, as I have indicated before, when working on the neck, we do a lot of painful stimulation of the tight cervical muscles.  We do this in order to elicit the anger that is behind the stubbornness, or to elicit the fear that is in these muscles.  Sometimes, I put my hands around the throat of patients, who obviously walk around afraid of being choked to death.

The Thoracic segment: We work on breathing.  Sometimes I have to help the patient to breathe by pressing on their chests in exhalation, by releasing the chest by tickling the intercostal muscles, by painful pressure on the intercostal muscles, by hitting and reaching with the upper extremities.  Once again, we run into interesting phenomena.  A female patient was unable to reach out and call "Mama."  Every time she tried to do it, she just burst into tears.  I asked her, "Can you close your hand around my hand?" and she can't.  She can't make that much contact.  She can touch my hand but she cannot close her hand around my hand.

The Diaphragmatic segment: We work on gagging by having the patients swallow a glass of water and I place an emesis basin in front of them, and I say, "Now stick your finger down your throat, breathe deeply as you do it, and try to gag."  What happens to a lot of people is they put their finger down their throat and cough.  It gets caught, because their gag reflex has been inhibited by a superficial cough reflex.  The model for a gag reflex is a one-year-old infant in whom the milk goes down and the milk comes up.  That kind of reflex is lost in many adults who are thereby unable to gag.  If given Ipecac, maybe.  He cannot gag and we sometimes spend hours just working on loosening his gag reflex, because when the gag reflex is released  patients experience a great deal of emotional release, because very often for the first time the person is able to sob, or to scream, because holding that gag reflex is a lot of emotional repression in this area and in the diaphragmatic segment.

Then, also, I have patients do an exercise like Santa Claus, they go "Ho, Ho, Ho," moving this segment which very often turns into involuntary laughter and then into sobbing.

The Abdominal segment: Work on the abdominal segment is generally a matter of either painful pressure on the abdomen or tender stroking of the abdomen, to let whatever is held there come through.

The Pelvic segment: To work on the pelvic segment, that's generally an area at which we must spend a great deal of time because there is a great deal, as I have indicated, of anxiety in that area.  One can precipitate a great deal of trouble if one approaches this segment too quickly or too precipitously.  Now in working on the pelvic segment, one of the first places that we work is the thigh adductors.  These are what Reich called the morality muscles, muscles that hold the legs together like this.  So we apply painful pressures to the thigh adductors, and we also work on tightening and releasing the pelvic floor, and this helps to loosen the pelvic armoring.

Also working in this area, we do a lot of talking about sexual experiences from very early ages, sex-negative experiences with one's parents, one's neighbors, or one's family.  This is a period in therapy in which a great deal of guilt is released verbally, and in which a great deal of physical work is done orgonomically.