Abstract Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner, Monica Canducci, presents two case studies of women with body image issues. Canducci reports how she worked with language and imagery alongside her structural integration interventions to support these two clients to have integrated psychobiological embodiment.

Editor’s note: This author is specialized in verbal analysis within the Rolfing^® Structural Integration and Rolf Movement^® Integration paradigm, this article is about working with words as an access point to the client’s psychobiological embodiment. The suggestions in this article are not intended to replace medical or psychological treatment.
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The Body Stories of Two Clients

When Amanda (not her real name) entered my workroom for the first time, I was struck by her bearing and attitude. I saw a young woman in her early thirties, very slim and stylish – with an impeccable hairstyle, makeup, choice of colors for clothing, accessories, and nail polish. When she entered the room, she looked at me almost defiantly. Her back was very straight, her eyes blazed, and her chin jutted upwards. I’m not even five feet tall and she was at least three inches taller than me, so I was sure that it was not my size that was the trigger for that kind of defiant attitude.

I couldn’t help but notice the remarkable difference between her and another client I had seen for the first time just a few hours earlier, Ellie (also not her real name). She was another young woman on the beginning edge of her thirties. In contrast to Amanda, Ellie was a shapely, Junoesque woman a good ten inches taller than me. But her body looked deflated and collapsed like she was trying to shrink and hide from my sight as she entered my Rolfing studio.

Amanda’s and Ellie’s attitudes were so different, but in both cases, their posture, bearing, and attitude were just a cover-up for a common issue: both women hated their bodies. They didn’t recognize themselves when looking in the mirror. Both of them had tried everything, but apparently, nothing worked – self-help groups, group therapy, psychotherapy, nutritionists, and even hypnosis. Then Amanda read an article about structural integration and decided to give it a try. Ellie had a conversation with a client, who was also a client of mine, at her coffee shop. The client was enthusiastic about working with me, and Ellie wondered if I might help her.

Both Ellie and Amanda looked anxious about explaining themselves to me. And both of them told me that they took time before contacting me because they didn’t like to be touched, so they talked with me about if it even made sense to work with me. I agreed to listen to them and explained that there was no need to touch them in the first session if they didn’t feel comfortable proceeding in that direction. I told both of them that we could start with the touching power of language, letting them fill the space of their session with their words.

Amanda’s and Ellie’s attitudes were so different, but in both cases, their posture, bearing, and attitude were just a cover-up for a common issue: both women hated their bodies.

Move In Mind^™

I developed my way of working by integrating the embodiment of Rolfing^® Structural Integration with imagery exercises, a method I call – Move In Mind (Canducci 2015). I employ this with the manual work I do with my sessions. It’s based on the known impact of mental imagery on nervous system rewiring (Robertson 2000). Words play a huge role in the rewiring within the neural network, new synaptic connections form between neural cells when we think of new ideas. Words trigger mental images, and mental images can trigger changes in our physiology. Especially words related to actions and perceptions – even when used in a metaphorical or idiomatic sentence – can trigger our sensory-motor cortex (Canducci 2022, Canducci 2015).  

This wisdom has helped me personally. I have studied neuropsychology for my own healing journey, I learned to apply it, and now I teach this information. I became a Certified Rolfer in 2008, but I was an enthusiastic fan of structural integration since 1995 when I received my first ‘Ten Series’. At that time, I was living in Italy, and for many reasons, I waited to take the training until it was available in Italy. In the meantime, I explored, studied, and deepened my knowledge of craniosacral therapy, hypnosis, psychophysiology, sport psychology, relaxation, meditation, dance, theatre, mime, martial arts, as well as healing spiritual practices originating from traditional paths from around the world.

In 2009, I suffered a mild brain injury that gave me trouble in the form of neurological issues. I experienced mild epilepsy and it appeared as if I wasn’t capable of completely controlling my body and movement coordination. But I didn’t want to take medications. So, I decided to find a way to rewire my brain and repair the damage on my own. My knowledge of neuroplasticity and movement gave me hope, and I was able to recover fully by integrating the tools that I had in my background of studies. All of these disciplines, from miming to martial arts, have the common element of using mental images to create changes in one’s psychophysiological settings – emotions, posture, attitude, and quality of movement.

During my recovery process, I was able to support my brain’s healing by using specific mental images. These images, triggered by idiomatic and metaphorical sentences involving body parts, senses, and actions, could have an impact on our physiology. After my success with repairing my own neurological damage, I structured the work I had done in order to make it accessible to everybody.

During the early part of my career, the concept of embodied cognition was just beginning to rise in awareness. Our brain’s understanding of words and sentences can influence our movements and actions, as well as the opposite. Metaphors, idioms, and similes related to body parts and sensory-motor processes can be used to describe our sensations and the way we feel. Yet when the use of a certain expression becomes a habit, it can contribute to maintaining certain psychophysiological settings within our nervous system. As if they were a set of instructions, the repetition of these states and thoughts together consolidates, becoming persistent.

Mental images can be triggered by memories, sensations, and words. Whether we are listening to someone telling us a story, or we are reading that story, our imagination allows us to ‘see’ what we are hearing or reading. I experience reading a book as if I were watching a movie. Maybe this happens to you as well? Or maybe you prefer audiobooks?

My approach with both of them started with listening to the way they talked about themselves in order to detect the words that might have shaped their attitude, body, and life.

We are all different: some of us are not so visual, and in this case, certain words can evoke physical sensations, felt images instead of visual images. If I ask you to imagine a stream of clear running water, you might imagine it visually and ‘see’ it with the eyes of your mind. You might ‘hear’ the sound produced by it or ‘feel’ the touch of the running water on your skin. Maybe you experience a combination of all of them, and maybe just two of them.

During my recovery from the mild brain injury I suffered, I found out that the images of a gentle, calm stream of lukewarm water would give me rest. Sometimes I would also imagine a gentle breeze, and my experience was as if they were filling up my restless legs and arms – they seemed to have a life of their own at times. This enabled me to finally sleep instead of jumping everywhere.

My injury had led me to feel like my body was possessed by a frantic ghost. In fact, my symptoms were particularly annoying because they prevented me from having much-needed rest, sleep, and recovery. Every time I started to relax my body to rest and sleep, my limbs and sometimes my trunk would start to move convulsively and uncontrollably, as if during a mild attack of epilepsy. Or alternatively, I would begin to hear a swarm of bees buzzing just around my head.

While reflecting on these symptoms and searching for effective images to reduce them, I realized that sometimes people would describe me as “busy as a bee.” I was used to “taking matters into my own hands” and doing everything all by myself. But then my body literally started acting as if everything was “out of my hands.” It seemed like my idioms were playing out or enacted in real life, and it felt like they were mocking me. It was at that moment that I realized how our bodies, like in a theatre, could become the stage on which our feelings, emotions, sensations, and even thoughts and words can be played out. What if our perceptions of the world and ourselves, and the way we describe these perceptions even if it’s just internally, could get embedded into our flesh – or get clothed with them?

What if words can sculpt our brain? Can they become tangibly written in and through the body a part of our flesh?

My symptoms taught me directly about how the words I was accustomed to using and the words that I heard others use to describe my attitude had become like instructions and were perpetuating my symptoms and issues. This is why, after my complete recovery, I started paying much more attention to my client’s words. I started to extract cues about their situation and help them find more functional alternatives to their goals and needs.

Both Amanda and Ellie started perceiving themselves and their environment as pleasant in small yet tangible ways, each had a different path to this awareness, and I supported this awareness one step at a time.
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Words Wrapped Around Body Image

And this is why I was glad to listen to Amanda’s and Ellie’s stories, explaining to them how we can literally be touched by words. My approach with both of them started with listening to the way they talked about themselves in order to detect the words that might have shaped their attitude, body, and life. Then I began to find different words to help them change their perception of their body and their attitude toward it. It was a bit of a long shot, but we had to start somewhere, considering that they didn’t want to start with being touched by my hands.

Both women said they didn’t feel good in their skin and described themselves as feeling constantly out of place. While Amanda’s reaction to this feeling was an attitude of always being on guard and an almost aggressive and defiant attitude. Her thinking seemed to be based on ‘the best defense is a good offense’. Ellie had developed the opposite style, she had a shifty, elusive attitude, as if she felt ashamed or guilty about something or expected to be scolded. Neither of these two women seemed easy to work with, neither of them liked to be touched. Moreover, Ellie complained about feeling sore everywhere.

To me, it was clear that even though they treated their body very differently, both of them needed to make peace with their body and they had come to me to find a way to do it. Amanda was pushing herself beyond its limits, and Ellie was neglecting herself, hiding.
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All About Amanda

At the time, Amanda was working as a researcher in a lab, and she was aware of her intelligence and skills. It was clear that she knew how to enhance her physical appearance. But this didn’t prevent her from perceiving herself as ugly. She didn’t like her face, she found her head too big and her body too short. She was sure she was ugly and that “no one ever really liked her” – even though she was engaged to a man who was ready to marry her.

She said she hated her “all skin-and-bones body.” She knew she was too thin, but the idea of gaining weight would make her feel nauseated so that she couldn’t eat more. She would spend hours practicing classic, modern, and contemporary dance to keep herself in good shape, but she couldn’t stand her image in the mirror. She told me that these inner conflicts were “devouring” and “consuming” her. The choice of words seemed to be congruent with her attitude toward her body and consequent issues. She couldn’t bear to see body fat on herself and she knew that she was on the verge of being diagnosed as anorexic.

Having been through years of psychotherapy, she was aware that the ballet school and its high standard may have had an impact on the way she was seeing herself. She was also aware that dance, especially ballet, was her mother’s dream for her. Her mother would have loved to have seen Amanda dancing (note another “seeing”) and become a prima ballerina. But she hadn’t made it. From the beginning, she had always felt out of place. Even though she had tried with all her might because she thought it was the right way to win her mother’s love. She had “given her blood, sweat, and tears” to dance, to be loved by her mother. But she hadn’t succeeded.

She had never passed an audition because of stage fright. Every time she had to deal with an audition, a “knot in her stomach” made her feel so sick that her performances were always very poor. And because of this, she had started developing a “mind over matter” attitude, fighting against her body. Recently, she had started to feel as if she was on the edge of a breakdown. She also was in love with the man who proposed to her but was very afraid of having children. At the time of our work together, this was not an issue because her menstrual cycle had disappeared long ago. But she knew it was all connected – her disconnection from her body, fear of her femininity, detachment from her emotions, and also fear of pregnancy. She couldn’t imagine her body “disfigured” by pregnancy and motherhood, she was scared about touching a baby and hurting them. This last statement sounded to me like something to explore more deeply, so I asked about her memories of her childhood.

Amanda didn’t remember much, but she knew that her mother was an orphan who spent her early childhood growing up in an orphanage. She was adopted by a wealthy family and married a very wealthy man. Then her mother’s pregnancy was unexpected, and Amanda’s mother used to describe it as a “very awkward and challenging experience,” joking that in order to bottle-feed Amanda, she would lay her down on the table because she did not know how to hold her. Amanda’s father was almost always absent or very busy.

Amanda was aware that she never felt completely and unconditionally accepted and loved. Both her parents had very high standards, and Amanda never felt she lived up to her parent’s expectations. The thing that I found remarkable – even though it did not surprise me – Amanda knew everything about the possible effects of her life experience on her issues from a psychological point of view. Yet she also appeared totally emotionally disconnected from what she was telling me. It seemed that her parents were used to talking and reasoning in terms of accomplishments rather than feelings and emotions, and she had absorbed that attitude as well.
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Ellie’s Experience

Ellie’s story was totally different. She also was aware of the impact of early life experiences on her issues. After years of psychotherapy, in some ways, she was more connected to her emotions than Amanda was, but this hadn’t helped her so far to improve her feelings about herself and her body. Ellie was a cultured woman, she loved literature and the arts, working as a manager and waitress in a little cozy coffee shop in the city center. While she enjoyed her job, constantly interacting with the public made her feel even more shy and insecure. She couldn’t help but compare herself to the impeccable businesswomen who frequented her place. Instead of doing something to enhance her look and physical appearance, she felt driven to neglect herself, eschewing make-up and hiding under very baggy clothes that did not suit her.

Ellie was Junoesque, a tall and shapely woman with a harmonious face who couldn’t help but feel ugly, too tall, too heavy, too awkward, and too cumbersome to be liked or loved. She told me how much she hated her body because ever since childhood she had felt that it took up too much space. While recalling her childhood, she was visibly troubled by a variety of emotions, most of which were not so pleasant. She had been a lively child, always on the move, a lover of nature and wide-open spaces who loved climbing trees. But her physicality was not well received by the rest of the family, who judged and called her ‘a tomboy’. On top of that, she was very tall and sturdy for her age and was often scolded and criticized because when she moved she would sometimes break or knock over objects nearby.

At the birth of her baby sister, Ellie had been forced to “shrink” to make room for the newcomer. Her room, already too narrow to contain her explosive vitality, had been split and Ellie could still remember her sense of loss. The words she recalled most were “stay put, stop moving, behave, be still, be good.” Her little sister, growing up, quickly turned out to be the representation of the perfect, desirable daughter – pretty, thin, graceful, and even ethereal. She was “the beautiful, pretty one” while Ellie was “the cumbersome, awkward one.” Her family and the people around her “only had eyes for her sister” as the little sister matched the current beauty standards.

Always reproached for the quality of her physical presence, Ellie started to feel like an intruder, always “too much” and “in the way” of others, and began to withdraw into herself. When puberty came knocking at her door, Ellie couldn’t bear the sudden changes occurring to her. The wide hips, the prosperous breasts, and the statuesque physicality of her body caught her unprepared, as well as the unwanted attention of some of the males in her family and life. She started hiding, even more, turning into a shy and elusive woman, always trying to forget her body and the emotional pain associated with it.

Quickly, she started feeling lonely and empty, mildly depressed and hopeless, and she could hardly believe how the vitality of her childhood could have turned into this kind of muddy mood. Ellie had been diagnosed as a bulimic and stated that looking at her body repulsed and disgusted her. In the mirror, all she could see was a shapeless, gelatinous mass, and she felt “like jelly,” bounding everywhere but with “no spine” to do something about it and stop “eating crap.”

She was aware that “eating crap” would make her feel “like crap” but she couldn’t stop. She described her life as “empty” and herself as a “nobody.” She felt anonymous and couldn’t find a purpose in her life – but hated herself for what she had become. Eating, for Ellie, was not even pleasure but a conscious way to feel the emptiness and void perceived deeply inside, a void that she didn’t know how to fill differently.
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From Seeing to Feeling

While working with both women, what I found really remarkable was the reoccurrence of sight-related words, like “look,” “looking,” and “see,” or “being seen.” Ellie was focused also on “feeling,” but it seemed that her ability to feel was always associated with something unpleasant. For both of them, it was the appearance of their body, how it appeared to others, that was their self-identified cause of their inadequacy. This was leading to them both feeling of being rejected. Judgment, especially related to beauty standards, seems so connected to our sight.

It was like they were embodying a collection of associations, conditionings, and beliefs based on the perceived responses they had been receiving from the environment instead of expressing their true sense of self through their body. After making them aware of this sight supremacy through which their lives seemed to have been highly conditioned, I mentioned to both of them the possibility of working to build a new sense of self, a new way to perceive themselves through their body. My plan was to be nurturing their ability to perceive the world outside and within by exploring and nourishing all their senses. That would mean nurturing, improving, and increasing perception, proprioception, and interoception, instead of focusing on their appearance.

The journey was different for each of these women, there are clear differences in their stories and backgrounds, and both were successful in improving their quality of life. One of the most important things that helped both of them was learning self-massage. This practice is part of the Move In Mind method I mentioned earlier, and I have found it to be effective for all my clients with body image issues.

With both Amanda and Ellie, I invited each of them to feel their body through self-massage and breath work at first. Then, as soon as we started the Rolfing sessions, we included breathing and slow-motion movement explorations integrated with specific images. Besides the importance of the breath work, my focus was integrating mindful and slow-motion movement because of the impact it has on rewiring our motor patterns and the way we perceive our body in motion. In the beginning, their sessions were aimed at helping them create a three-dimensional map of their own bodies through their own hands, by recognizing the different body tissues. By leading contact with the bones to the skin, and talking at length about the most fascinating body tissue, our fascia. We started our work keeping our eyes closed, then opening them in order to integrate slowly, step by step. Their sight became new and paired with pleasant sensations coming from their body.

Both Amanda and Ellie started perceiving themselves and their environment as pleasant in small yet tangible ways, each had a different path to this awareness, and I supported this awareness one step at a time. It seemed to me that by working with their body mapping in their own hands, they began to sculpt their brain connections to include pleasant body memories, and hopefully they begin to replace the old unpleasant ones. Finally, both of them were ready to accept the ‘Ten Series’ and receive their sessions from me.
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Finishing Touches

Amanda found out that she could listen to her body through my touch. For her, the image of filling her body with her breath and using her breath to move around and even dance was the key to untying the knot in her stomach, and she started to slowly enjoy food again. She was able to enjoy dancing for how it made her feel light and graceful. After the Ten Series and some post-ten sessions, she was so in touch with her body that she got married and two years later had a baby girl. She told me that our work together enabled her to overcome her fear of touching a baby because she learned how to nurture and take care of herself, which made her feel confident in her abilities to nurture her little girl.  

For Ellie, the key was to discover and literally get in touch with her bones. The acknowledgment of her bones made her feel safer, stronger, and more defined. Another turning point for her was understanding how the body works to deal with gravity, and how mental images and emotions have an impact on this relationship with gravity. She started enjoying the space of her body and the pleasure of filling it with her breath instead of unneeded food. Her awareness moved her to fill the surrounding space with her presence.

The Ten Series was, for Ellie, a way to acknowledge and recognize her body through a tangible mirror provided by my hands. Finally, she was able to enjoy and take advantage of the feeling of being supported, held, and even defined by my touch, instead of feeling judged by the stares of others. And she started reconnecting with her vitality, finding a new purpose. A few years later, she became a wellness coach.

Both Ellie and Amanda were able to develop a new sense of self, based on their own perception, proprioception, and interoception instead of relying, consciously and unconsciously, on other people’s eyes, expectations, and judgment. Finally, both of them learned to look at themselves through their own eyes, integrating their vision into their perceptual system and ridding themselves of the lens of cultural expectations.

As structural integration practitioners, I believe that we can do quite a lot to educate our clients and help them develop a healthy and integrated body image. Neuroscience shows us how our sense of self is based on perception and interoception, feeling our environment and ourselves accurately. When we help our clients strengthen their ability to feel and perceive themselves by developing somatic awareness, their fixation on exterior appearance and comparison loses importance, making room for a healthier search for integration and well-being. What other people see becomes irrelevant.

What becomes important is that what they see in the mirror corresponds to what they feel about themselves, and this can be described in terms of presence, awareness, integration, harmony, and fulfillment. A practitioner’s ability to listen, see, feel, and choose words that support embodiment can facilitate this change, alongside deep empathy and compassion for their process. These are critical elements to understand when it comes to guiding our clients to find functional alternatives to the patterns of being and moving they have created to survive. In this process, there is no room for judgment, only acknowledgment and recognition, both of which are a prelude to transformation. Our words literally sculpt our brains and shape our bodies.

I very often feel that, as structural integration practitioners, we have the power in our hands and in our words to help our clients get rid of that which doesn’t belong to them.

Monica Canducci is a Certified Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner, a Certified HeartMath^® Practitioner, and Morales Method^® Certified Instructor. She moved from Italy to Canada in 2012. Since her childhood, she has been fascinated by connections. She has been committed to connecting the dots between all the aspects of life and of the human being. Canducci pays particular attention to the interconnections between body structure, thoughts, emotions, language, and the perceived environment, from both a scientific and spiritual perspective. Canducci has an artistic, scientific, and spiritual professional background. Beginning in the 1990s, she studied neuroscience, psychophysiology, hypnosis, psychology, yoga, meditation, martial arts, performing arts, and several healing practices from different parts of the world. She is also the author of several books about self-development and healing. To learn more about Move In Mind (2015) you can check out the website www.moveinmind.com.
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References

Canducci, Monica. 2014. Move in mind: Adapting Rolfing SI to the needs of neurologically impaired clients. Structural Integration 42(1): 29-33.

___. 2015. Move in mind: The power of mental imagery in nervous system rewiring. printed by author. Amazon.

___. 2022. The healing attitude: Find the meaning of your symptoms and embrace the healing process. printed by author. Amazon.

Robertson, Ian. 2000. Mind sculpture: Unlocking your brain’s untapped potential. New York: Bantam.
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Keywords

Move In Mind; body image; anorexia; bulimia; neuropsychology; psychobiology; case study. ■