Body Politics: What McCain's Smirks, Tics And Jaw-Clenches Really Mean
Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks
Huffington Post
Understanding the language your body speaks can help you attain much deeper intimacy in relationships. One of the big complaints we hear from partners in relationship therapy is, "I can't figure out what he/she's really feeling." A related complaint is, "I don't know how to figure out what I'm feeling." Knowing what you're feeling and what your partner is feeling is essential to a healthy relationship. When people can't, won't or don't know how to speak about their feelings openly, their bodies are left to communicate about those feelings in the form of blinks, twitches, clenches and other bits of Body-Talk. Electing a president is like signing up for a four-year marriage, a marriage in which about half of us will end up being married to someone we wouldn't even want to share a cab with. In this political season, it behooves us all to get better at Body-Talk, so we can understand what those blinks, smirks and clenches are really trying to tell us.
Body-Smart Or Body-Dumb
The morning after the first debate we saw something odd. Several pundits made mention of the remarkable display of twitches, smirks and jaw-clenches that flickered across the face of John McCain throughout the debate. Others mentioned his lack of eye contact, particularly his unwillingness to look Obama in the eye. We were pleased that the commentators observed those things -- many people overlook these important but subtle communications, in the spirit of "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." But here's the odd part: some of the pundits seemed to be apologizing for having noticed McCain's pyrotechnic display of facial flare-ups.
On MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski apologized for possibly sounding "superficial," then went on to discuss McCain tics and smirks. Why did she and others feel like they had to apologize for noticing something that all of us should be paying a great deal of attention to? It's probably because we're taught, as part of our social training, to overlook the language of the body. We are trained to think of it as superficial or not to notice it at all. That training makes us body-dumb instead of body-smart, and it costs us mightily in terms of health and love. If we don't know how to listen to and understand our body's organic language, we can't articulate our feelings in relationships and we can't understand the emotional underpinnings of many diseases.
(Continued here.)
Huffington Post
Understanding the language your body speaks can help you attain much deeper intimacy in relationships. One of the big complaints we hear from partners in relationship therapy is, "I can't figure out what he/she's really feeling." A related complaint is, "I don't know how to figure out what I'm feeling." Knowing what you're feeling and what your partner is feeling is essential to a healthy relationship. When people can't, won't or don't know how to speak about their feelings openly, their bodies are left to communicate about those feelings in the form of blinks, twitches, clenches and other bits of Body-Talk. Electing a president is like signing up for a four-year marriage, a marriage in which about half of us will end up being married to someone we wouldn't even want to share a cab with. In this political season, it behooves us all to get better at Body-Talk, so we can understand what those blinks, smirks and clenches are really trying to tell us.
Body-Smart Or Body-Dumb
The morning after the first debate we saw something odd. Several pundits made mention of the remarkable display of twitches, smirks and jaw-clenches that flickered across the face of John McCain throughout the debate. Others mentioned his lack of eye contact, particularly his unwillingness to look Obama in the eye. We were pleased that the commentators observed those things -- many people overlook these important but subtle communications, in the spirit of "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." But here's the odd part: some of the pundits seemed to be apologizing for having noticed McCain's pyrotechnic display of facial flare-ups.
On MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski apologized for possibly sounding "superficial," then went on to discuss McCain tics and smirks. Why did she and others feel like they had to apologize for noticing something that all of us should be paying a great deal of attention to? It's probably because we're taught, as part of our social training, to overlook the language of the body. We are trained to think of it as superficial or not to notice it at all. That training makes us body-dumb instead of body-smart, and it costs us mightily in terms of health and love. If we don't know how to listen to and understand our body's organic language, we can't articulate our feelings in relationships and we can't understand the emotional underpinnings of many diseases.
(Continued here.)
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Happiness resides not in posessions and not in gold; the feeling of happiness dwells in the soul.
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