ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the difference between verbal and body languages, explain how the body speaks the psyche, and explores a broadened attitude towards medically unexplained symptoms and chronic pain. Body psychotherapy views bodily symptoms and pain as neither somatic nor psychic, but carrying both aspects. It understands people as psychosomatic systems, and therefore every physical symptom has a psychological expression and every emotional happening manifests physically. Body psychotherapy proposes an interaction between body and emotions, where symptoms constitute a language with encoded messages that might provide a bridge to deeper knowledge. From cellular protein expressions to complex social behaviours, each human experience is organised and articulated by somatic, emotional, cognitive, and relational aspects, with each facet influencing the other. Listening to the somatic manifestations as a language that expresses meanings would shed light on a variety of aspects. Somatic cues accompany the patient’s words and reveal meanings which augment, elaborate, or contradict what the patient communicates verbally.
