Gents,
For me, the throat has always been a problematic area during the work. It traditionally took some time to clear and I had to revisit it often.
Little did I know that singers have been dealing with throat tension for aeons. Throat and tongue tension for specifically. An imbalance or recruitment of wrong parts is detrimental for singing. And by extension I presume, not conducive to optimal, clear speaking. So the interaction between the tongue and larynx is particularly crucial for singers in terms of clarity, and not straining the voice. Thus, vocalists have developed many great exercises to help with the proper use and coordination of neck and throat muscles, as well as the voice box and larynx. These exercises are widely useful however, not just for singers. It’s not obvious how these muscles should really co-ordinate with each other, to us as average Joes. We just kind of do it how we do it.
In a psycho-physiological sense, the throat is a crucial area in the process. It acts as a regulating intermediary between the body and the brain - given it’s placement this is not surprising. As individuals who have been taught to ignore or even to tacitly despise our bodies and impulses, we tend to carry high tension in the throat and neck.
Many people are surprised to learn when you work with them that there are aoparent hard connections between the muscles recruited for various physiological tasks, where no such physical or fascial relationship exists. Chest, shoulders, nasopharynx, tongue, larynx, general throat, operate in ways they shouldn’t in most people, clutched and squeezed together during a simple breath - as a common example. There’s no real reason this should occur. In the throat specifically, as a dynamic expressive unit, things get even more complicated.
I can hear you all thinking it already. Jordan B Peterson comes to our minds as a prime example of a tense throat. The neuromuscular tension in these areas is so severe in his case that, by some unfortunate twist of fate, he sounds like Kermit the Frog. Leading one of deep and disturbing insight into the human animals condition to perhaps seriously question the true nature of his childhood and the validity of his advice.
Now, it's possible he has always been extremely uptight simply by nature. Though in my experience one doesn't typically end up sounding like that unless they're “bracing for impact” (I use this somewhat metaphorically) fairly regularly. What is for sure os that much of his personality as it is comes across in media at least, is of little surprise to those who understand the body and its impact on psychological character.
According to Stephen Porges and his polyvagal theory, in humans, three neural circuitries form the foundation of the tone, or flavour of the of hominid scumbot nervous system, and our consequent expressions of affective arousal. What are commonly known as “behaviours”, “sensations” or muh “emotions n shyiet”.
I will only go into the third of these networks, which is most developed in primates and phylogenetically the most recent, emerging about 80 million years ago and existing only in mammals. I know some of you don't believe you're primates even though there’s overwhelming evidence for it…like your roly-poly jerk, knuckle-dragging dispositions…
In monkeys, whether hairless or not, this circuit governs more intricate social and attachment behaviors, such as signalling your intention to smash a prospective cavelady partner over the head with a Bommy Knocker or telling some kid why he should clean his room. It constitutes a branch of the parasympathetic nervous system that oversees the mammalian, or so-called "smart" vagus nerve. This nerve is anatomically connected to the cranial nerves (cranial nerve 0, anyone?) responsible for facial expressions and vocalisation. This recent system predominantly engages the involuntarily controlled muscles in not only the throat, but also the face, and heart and some other areas. Areas of the body that are involved in facilitating the collective expression of our emotions to both others and ourselves.
So what could severe throat and neck tension be telling us?
In my conception of this issue, the impact of taught throat muscles indicates something deep about a persons socialisation and consequent orientation to life. Wait did I just refer to depth? The great crime of saying there is in fact a kind of depth. I think it says to be that they're holding back chronically, and what they're holding back has to do with social behaviours and how they’ve been conditioned to react to them. They fear something. In my view, such a person, like Peterson, is strangling himself to hold back what wants to burst forth. They (and by they I mean me also) also have a tendency to be clinging to life, expressed as clinging to breath for example - which is one feature of tension clusters in this area).
Ethologists note many patterns to do with this circuit when observing animals and primates, especially during states of fear. Now, I can clearly discern these same behaviours in people. These bodily reactions aren't mere metaphors; they manifest as actual observable and common postures and tensions. Patterns that tend to shape emotional experiences in similar ways, often serving as protective mechanismsFor instance, tightness in the neck, shoulders, chest, and knots in the gut or throat are central to states of fear expressed via this network.
For many reasons I won’t go into here, humans have more trouble than animals managing strong arousal states like fear. Why so is complicated - I'll explore this topic further tomorrow, but it's vital to acknowledge that this state of fear can become entrenched in the sensory-motor centres of the brain and human neuromuscular system. In lower mammals, once expressed, the arousal state and it’s energy discharges and dissipates, setting itself back to a kind of homeostatic equiliberium. Us? Not so much. At least in modernity. Consequently, we often learn to navigate arousal always in sub-optimal and clearly ridiculous ways, and this is etched into our bodies. I heard someone say once that our bodies keep the score for the game of us dealing with life. This is a good way to view it. Unfortauntely, most people don’t see things this way, and instead we often like to build a hard film of behaviour, language and symbol-use cope around it. This is because almost all humans fundamentally don’t understand what they are.
All of this doesn't necessarily have to result from hardcore trauma as it’s often asserted. I believe all manner of silliness can stem from low-grade habitual posturing, unskillful parenting, and the random challenges of life, an inability to reason as chilluns, combined with the hardwired propensities of our own personalities.
While some may experience what I’m talking about here more intensely than others, nobody is immune, regardless of what they say. In my opinion, the wide spread nature of all this is largely due to the artificial, ridiculous, unthinking and superficial nature of the civilisation in which we're raised. We've drifted far from our organic selves, and the throat serves as a notable choke point in this regard, for the scientific and physiologic reasons outlined above.
So I would guess that Peterson, without seeing him with his shirt off fortunately, would almost certainly conform to my overall mental model of how a person like him would be holding himself - I’ve seen bad cases before. I would guess he has raised shoulders and sunken chest, more so than the general populace.
Occasionally it gets out and he bursts into tears in stage. His strong sense of anxiety, and his inability to discharge or resolve it all is evidenced by his almost life-ending use of benzodiazepines. He also reports digestive problems, like the famous and fondly (for me) remembered “apple cider of doom” fiasco. Often such things result from hyper-aroused vagal tone effecting enteric motility. Of course, in static machine and esoteric online health molecule-ville we all suggest dietary Peat Ray-type interventions for issue slike this - fine - but has anyone explained it all in the terms I write here, to our dear friend Kermit?
Needless to say, I’m not surprised that as a wordcel shrink that he wasn’t able to resolve his issues and tensions. That’s not surprising at all akshually given what we know now, right? Language centers are the heavily bespectacled poindexters of the brain, and the emotional centers will “get their ass” every single time, without fail.
All in all, poor old Kermit is a ball of tension and anxiety, and has an almighty frog in his throat. This is probably why he appeals to everyone who is also a ball of tension and anxiety.
His tact is also unsurprising to me. Fearful and anxious types often seek moral certainties and other silly fictions in a very shrill and intense fashion as an answer to strong, often uncomfortable biological arousal streamings. Deadening is always preferable given their inability to not only deal with them, but to even acknowledge their hecking existence.
So they grasp at all sorts of things, words, theories, models, vocabularies, books, paranoid delusions, dumb fights and distractions to try and get a handle on it all.
This is where the idea of free will completely breaks down by the way. People are obviously completely unable to self-define in any meaingful way, and for all the reasons I discuss above you can see why such notions are utterly absurd. As if we’re in some causality free bubble away from our bodies. Really retarded stuff that whole thing.