An Interview with Ronen Goddard, PhD

By Joanne Pizzino, MD, MPH

Functional Medicine is the science of diagnosing and treating root causes of illness. As a functional medicine physician, viewing the whole person is a requirement, rather than a catchy marketing phrase. This means looking deeply into not only cellular and genetic function, but it also includes our entire environment. We have external environments: our homes or other buildings we spend time in, our family and friends, our community. We also have internal environments, including our emotions and interoception.

Interoception is our very personal sense of what is going on with our bodily organs. If we notice what is happening during different emotional states, we quickly realize that emotions include various interoceptive sensations. For instance, with anxiety, we may have a rapid heartbeat, or sweating, or butterflies in the stomach. We may get red in the face with anger, feel tension in the jaw or other muscles, notice a feeling of pressure inside, which can include actual rise in blood pressure. With sorrow, there may be an actual heaviness, often in the chest, or a feeling of lethargy. And, of course, we know the sympathetic nervous system is triggered when the body responds to the emotion with tears, shouting, or even turning away in disgust. 

In this column, I interview Tom Ronen Goddard, PhD, a somatic energy psychotherapist skilled in helping my patients uncover interoceptions that lead us to specific ways the energy of traumas and stress are held in the body. We can then apply specific therapeutic movements or postures to release this energy, freeing the body to turn on homeostasis through the parasympathetic nervous system.

DR. PIZZINO: Can you tell us how traumatic or stressful experiences end up being held in the body?

DR. GODDARD: It can happen in childhood or when we are older that we get hit with a situation and we don’t have what it takes to fully process it. You can see why it would happen more frequently when we are young because we have fewer emotional and cognitive tools to cope with a stressful or overwhelming situation. Think about this example: Your parent says something that angers you. And then you start to feel the energy of anger arise and your parent says, “I don’t want your anger here. Your anger is not welcome here.” You don’t know what to do with that, so you stuff it because that’s what’s required of you. You have to do this to be safe, perhaps at least emotionally safe and in some households to be physically safe. So, you stuff that anger energy in your body and in your subconscious and lock it away.

And that can then find its way into muscles and nerve pathways that remember that event at a subconscious level. We call these neural networks. So, these neural networks remember that stuffed energy outside of your conscious awareness, in your body. That then becomes a reminder for future events.

Some other unrelated event years or even decades later will trigger this unprocessed energy in your body. This can become a problem because we don’t have any awareness that this is going on. So, we act automatically in a response. We might act out with over-the-top anger that seems out of proportion for the event at hand, or it might cause us to not take a course of action because we have some unconscious fear of going there, wherever “there” is. Our body remembers, but we may not remember in our conscious awareness. And so that’s a way of describing how it happens: We can’t process an energy, it becomes stored in our body, and then somehow it informs how we view the world and how we respond to the world reflexively, subconsciously. 

DR. PIZZINO: And how might these energies show up as physical illness?

DR. GODDARD: One way to look at this is the physical response to stress. Stress can be physical, mental, or emotional, and all release a variety of hormones, especially cortisol. Elevated cortisol levels are associated with all sorts of illnesses, including diabetes, high blood pressure, memory issues, immune dysfunction, IBS, and more. In fact, it’s hard to imagine many illnesses that aren’t associated with elevated cortisol. And if we’re insensitive to our own symptoms, we’re more likely to leave those symptoms untreated. And therefore, even the ability to catch early stages of illness before they develop into more serious illness is impaired. In fact, our ability to notice what is going on in our bodies all along the way in the progression of an illness is impaired because of our emotional scars.

DR. PIZZINO: What are some of the clues you use when working with functional medicine patients to help you uncover emotional root causes that might be contributing to their illness?

DR. GODDARD: There are certain ways of holding the body, certain ways that weight is distributed in the body, certain muscular patterns that you can see in a body that are revelatory because these held energies can actually impact the way we develop over the course of our lifespan. Even in adulthood, these held energies can change the shape of our bodies.

So that’s a basic beginning point that I evaluate working with someone. There are certain body shapes that speak volumes about what has happened in this person’s life. Then I inquire about what the client feels in his or her body at that moment. And then I listen for: “Is this held energy or is this an actual physical injury or a feature of the disease?” This is based upon a careful intake so I know about any injuries that might impact their ability to work with energy.

Once we’re informed about that through the conversation about the body, then I might ask: “Do you feel any emotions associated with this?” But sometimes I might not even go to emotions. We might just stay with the body and say: “OK, Let’s move that energy.” There are a variety of postures, breathing exercises, and movements that free that energy from the body.

Then I might ask my client, what are you noticing now in your body? And are there any emotions, images, memories? It might lead to a discussion of a family of origin situation. For instance, “Oh, this reminds me of my childhood when my dad required that I be this way.” Or “This reminds me of when I was with my grandmother, and I could tell that she didn’t want me in her house.” And then we follow that. And very often just bringing something to conscious awareness is also a part of moving the energy.

Remember, these are all previously in the subconscious and in the body. By moving the energy in the body and then talking about it brings it into conscious awareness, all of which is in the service of freedom. I may not be free to make certain choices if my choices are being governed by these hidden energies in my subconscious and in my body. But if I bring them to my conscious awareness and move the energy in my body so that it’s not stuck there, then I at least have the possibility of making some conscious choices about what I want to do next.