Secret #86: Your Body Is Talking. Are You Listening? with Manuela O'Connell
episode
Life's Dirty Little Secrets Podcast | Breaking Silence Around the Secrets We All Carry
47 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What does the “mind‑body split” mean in Western psychology?
We're all very human and fallible, and yet we live in a society that rewards pretending we're not fallible, or the range of acceptable fallibility is narrow. We are constantly comparing our insides to other people's outsides and feeling inadequate and guilty, even ashamed. Trying to blend in means parts of ourselves must disappear and we must then live in fear that we will be found out. Here, together, we will create a space where we can laugh, cry, and carry our suffering and hurts lightly in the service of being deeply human. This is life's dirty little secrets.
Welcome to Life's Dirty Little Secrets. I'm Emma Waddington.
And I'm Chris McCurry, and today we are very pleased to have returning to us Dr. Manuela O'Connell. She is an acceptance and commitment therapy therapist and trainer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she conducts workshops and seminars in both English and Spanish bridging psychological science with real world application. She is the co author with Robin Walzer of the Act Workbook for Anger Managing Emotions and Taking Back Your Life with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. And she's a contributing writer to book The Heart of Act. And again, with Robin, Justice Spring, they've come out with another great book, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Deliberate Practice to To Develop and Enhance Skills in Act.
Her work combines therapy with body wisdom, which is today's topic, exploring how listening to our bodies can help us feel more flexible and resilient. And she helps people move beyond just talking about their problems and actually feeling their way through them. She previously appeared on Life's Dirty Little Secrets alongside Dr. Robin Balzer for episode sixty-seven, Living with Death, where they helped us explore existential responsibility and how act helps us meet endings of all kinds with presence and choice. So we are very pleased to welcome her back. Thank you for being airmanuelo.
Mm-hmm. Thank you, Eman. Thank you, Chris. I'm so happy to be here again.
Excellent. So what's before us today, and we were talking a little bit before I hit record, was the body and how there's particularly in Western societies, and we'll get m into this more, this split or dichotomy dichotomy or even conflict between the body and the mind, the head, however we want to like describe these things. So tell us about About your perspective on this, Manuel, in terms of what's going on with this dichotomy, this split between the body and the mind, cognitions and body, whatever we wanna just however we wanna describe.
Well, for me it's a very interesting topic since being a psychologist, we usually talk about mental health. Even talking about that is like the rest w where is that embodied in a way? So I think we have in psychology a long standing tradition of not including that much somatic or other aspects or felt sense or Even more physical stuff around mental health. And it became for me an issue because I have uh chronic disease. And when I was diagnosed when I was nineteen, nobody knew what was happening to me. And they tend to kind of tell, Well, that's psychological. No, it's your body. It's psychological, it's your body. And since I with answer, I found my way through what was happening to me with more somatic approaches before getting into psychotherapy.
So I can say that being here and talking about this, it's really rooted in my own experience of suffering and seeing that the way to accept this chronic disease that I have and find a flexible way to deal with it and it opened me uh like a new world doing that came from a more somatic perspective at the beginning. So I'm very interested in what is happening with psychology. When I train people, it's like we're talking and there's a mind there. But we usually don't pay much attention to the embodied aspect of our clients and our own. Even though that probably They are having a conversation too. both bodies are having a conversation too.
Well, I know certainly when I was being trained, we didn't talk about the body. You know, it was all cognitions, it was all and I was trained
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does the “mind‑body split” mean in Western psychology?
0:02–7:12
2
How did Manuela’s chronic‑illness experience lead her to somatic approaches?
7:12–13:56
3
Why do psychologists often overlook embodied awareness in therapy?
13:56–20:14
4
What does it actually mean to “listen to your body”?
20:14–26:03
5
How does the body signal safety or danger through the polyvagal system?
26:03–32:04
6
How do culture, puberty, and social media shape our relationship with the body?
32:04–38:21
7
What practical exercises can help someone become more embodied?
38:21–43:48
8
How has tele‑therapy changed the way therapists tune into bodily cues?
43:48–47:44
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Life's Dirty Little Secrets Podcast | Breaking Silence Around the Secrets We All Carry
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