Balance Between Mental and Physical Activity. There are increasing reports of young people committing violent crime such as children shooting children or being violent towards each other. The tendency towards violence as a way of releasing emotion is on the increase. It is as if some great destructive force has taken over the minds of the young and programmed them for destructive purposes. Why are they doing this? We used to think that senseless violence was an American illness but exactly the same tendencies can be seen in all major European cities. A need to destroy where there should be a need to create. We forget that the brain is a machine and functions on two levels. One function is creative thought and the other is physical action. These two functions should work together so what is learned can be applied. But for this to happen the body and mind have to have equal opportunity for expression. The mind needs to express physically what lessons it has been taught. Of course it helps enormously if the young mind has an adult to whom it can turn to verbally express its new experiences or emotions. Expression of thought is everything to the growing mind and when this is not possible the intensity of the thought grows until it becomes stronger than the ability of the mind to prevent an outburst of action. Young children through to teenagers need to be able to express themselves and this often takes the form of a verbal release at the end of the day after school. All day the growing adult has been in an intense learning situation without the opportunity to release physically or verbally the energy of what has been learned. There used to be greater opportunities for physical expression in sport and work experience programs but all this has generally given way to computer games and other forms of mental technology. Far from releasing mental stress these forms of expression add to the dilemma. As the energy of the mind intensifies so the force of the release when it happens will be proportionately greater.
Its all about balance between mental input and physical release. The body needs to release regularly the accumulated thought energy to stay in a balanced, mental, and sometimes physical, condition. Violence is often the result of not being allowed to express physically an earlier intense mental situation. As an example the child who is physically and especially verbally, abused. The feelings and thoughts at the moments of abuse build as energy within the child with no opportunity for expression. This energy does not dissipate over time but remains like an unexploded bomb ready to burst on anyone who later says or does something to trigger a release. At the moment of release they will have no understanding of why they are acting in the way that they are. There is just an incredible need to physically express trapped thought energy. I am convinced that such a situation is often the cause of manic depression. I once had a patient who was manic and when we went back to the cause he remembered that at about 5 years of age he was playing with a group of older boys in a barn. For fun the older boys stood him on a table, tied his hands behind his back, put a rope around his neck and over a beam then pretended they were going to hang him. Its impossible to imagine the depth of fear that must have been in that little boys mind. Everything in his mind was saying ‘run’ but of course that was impossible and the energy of what he was thinking could not be expressed physically. At this point the balance between thinking and physical reaction become separated. The fear intensity of the moment builds to incredible proportions but because this cannot be converted into physical release the connection between the two is lost. From this point on the child grows to be either all thought or all action. There is no balance between the two. When the mind is working the release of action is prevented and as the original cause was one of fear we have a very depressed human being. One who cannot act and who will even perhaps be suicidal because the original thought that caused the problem was one of death. As the mind energy is being released the physical energy is building until eventually the bodies physically energy is stronger than the thought energy. When this happens physical energy is released and blocks the thinking that would balance the physical reaction. Because there is no balance between thinking and action the suffer goes into hyper mode and rushes around acting unreasonably. Schizophrenia is caused in much the same way. At some point early in childhood the patient was in a situation of not being able to physically react to an intense thought situation. At this time what the child is thinking becomes magnified in the mind. When the thoughts are released in adult years what the child heard is played back as voices he hears in his head. If the child was told, under threat, ‘I should kill all people like you’ he will in later release these words in his mind and believe he hears someone talking to him, telling him to kill.
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