http://www.integrative-
Institute for Integrative Healthcare Studies
April 27, 2007
www.homestudycredits.com
Learn How to Unlock Tissue Memory
The unexpressed trauma of past experiences stored in the musculature and connective tissue of our bodies creates tension, blocks circulation and can ultimately lead to pain and disease. Learn what you can do as a massage therapist to unlock and free clients of these tissue memories.
by Nicole Cutler, L.Ac.
Many scholars believe that pain and trauma are incidents prevented from being completed. These can be single damaging events such as a car accident, continuous bombardments requiring emotional defenses, or over-training of isolated muscles that lock the body into a recognized pattern. Traumas can be considered anything that keep us locked in a physical, emotional, behavioral or mental habit. Recovery from trauma is the process of the body finding balance and freeing itself from constraints. All too often, the recovery process is halted, preventing the traumatic occurrence from completing.
There are many reasons traumatic incidents cannot be completed, creating stagnation and causing a cascade of physiological protective mechanisms to separate the trauma from affecting everyday functioning. Because our bodies and emotions can only safely handle a limited amount of stress, trauma results whenever an experience exceeds our abilities to handle and cope with its consequences. The energy of the trauma is stored in our bodies’ tissues (primarily muscles and fascia) until it can be released. This stored trauma typically leads to pain and progressively erodes a body’s health.
Feelings
Emotions are the vehicles the body relies on to find balance after a trauma. Feelings represent the accumulation of incomplete events and the body’s attempt to complete them. By strengthening our inner resources, we are capable of processing these feelings, releasing stored traumas, and increasing our ability to handle stress with greater ease.
Protection
When trauma occurs, our bodies activate a protective mechanism. A stressor that is too much for a person to handle overloads the nervous system, stopping the trauma from processing. This overload halts the body in its instinctive fight or flight response, causing the traumatic energy to be stored in the surrounding muscles, organs and connective tissue. Whenever we store trauma in our tissue, our brain disconnects from that part of the body to block the experience, preventing the recall of the traumatic memory. Any area of our body that our brain is disconnected from won’t be able stay healthy or heal itself. The predictable effect of stored trauma is degeneration and disease.
Memory Beyond the Brain
There is ample scientific evidence proving memory storage in locations other than the brain abound. Three examples of the body containing extraordinary memory capabilities are:
1. Immune system response is enhanced by memory T-cells maintaining information about previous attacks by specific foreign antigens.
2. Muscle memory improves the ability of top class sports people and musicians to perform optimally even under extreme pressure.
3. Genetic research has demonstrated that the matrix composing our body’s cells (DNA) possess a complex information storage system.
When considering the vastness of our body’s intelligence, it is no wonder that our muscles and fascia are capable of holding memories.
Unlocking Memories
Three things are necessary for the body to release stored trauma:
1. The inner resources to handle the experience that were not in place when the experience originally occurred.
2. Space for the traumatic energy to go when released. Being full of tension and stress does not allow space for the stored trauma to move into.
3. Reconnection of the brain with the area of the body where the trauma is stored.
Combining bodywork with verbal therapy can successfully bring a trauma to completion. Many types of verbal therapy are ideal for the development of a person’s inner resources for handling a traumatic experience. Certain bodywork styles effectively reduce stress and tension levels making room for release as well as function to reconnect the brain with the stored trauma.
Bodyworkers play a key role in bridging locked memories with the physical body. The techniques known as myofascial release or myofascial unwinding are hands-on methods for initiating traumatic memory release. Myofascial work locates and physically frees the restrictions in muscle and surrounding fascial tissue that house traumatic memories. As a skilled therapist holds and unwinds these tissue tensions, memories may surface and release, causing the body to spontaneously "replay" body movements associated with the memory of the trauma. This release initiates relaxation, unlocking the frozen components of the nervous system. Such a shift marks the reconnection of the brain with the tissue housing the trauma, allowing transformation and healing to ensue.
Seeking Support
Bodyworkers utilizing myofascial release techniques practice within the illuminating space between physical and emotional health. While developing the emotional resources to cope with a traumatic experience is best reserved for those specifically trained in verbal therapy, bodyworkers can effectively fill the gap of total health in traumatic recovery. As psychological counseling is beyond the scope of practice for most massage therapists, it is recommended to practice release techniques with a client who has sought, or is currently seeking support from a mental health professional. Meeting all three of the components necessary for unlocking and healing from stored trauma combines the work between client, mental health professional and bodyworker. With this holistic approach, traumatic events can go to completion, allowing the body to once again find balance.
Recommended Study:
Myofascial Release
Advanced Anatomy and Physiology
References:
Grant, Keith Eric, PhD, NCTMB, Mind and Body, Massage Today, July 2003.
www.alchemyinstitute.com, The Alchemy of Healing: An Exploration of the Meaning of Illness, David Quigley, the Alchemy Institute of Healing Arts, 2006.
www.anniebrook.com, The Physiology of Shock and Trauma, Annie Brook MA, LPC, Annie Brook, 2001.
www.cranialsacraltherapy.org.
www.fnd.org, Writings on the Great Unwinding, Marvin Solit, DO, The Foundation for New Directions, February 2005.
www.integrative-healthcare.org
www.positivehealth.com, Biodynamic Massage: A Truly Therapeutic Massage, Denise McCrohan, Positive Health Publications Ltd., 2002.
www.satyamag.com, Releasing Muscle-Bound Memories, David Drier, Stealth Technologies Inc., November 2001.
© Copyright 2007. Institute for Integrative Healthcare Studies. All rights reserved. 1-800-364-5722
==============================
2. http://saveyourself.ca/
The Body Remembers
How your body can store emotional experience in your tissues, and experience them again during massage therapy
by Paul Ingraham, Registered Massage Therapist (Vancouver)
This document expresses my opinion only, and does not replace medical advice. More …
Recently, a woman came to me with a question: “Why do I start crying when I go like this?” And she tipped her chin up into the air.
“Do you feel like crying right now?”
“Yes, but I can control it. If I stay here, though, it will get stronger until I have to cry.”
What on earth is going on here?
This is an unusually vivid and specific case of body memory or somatized emotion, a phenomenon well known to many massage therapists and mental health care professionals. Even more exotic examples come up occasionally, but the experience is stranger than the explanation.
Even after many years of scientific data (and new age propaganda), most people still tend to believe that thoughts and feelings are abstract and have little or nothing to do with the physical body. The only widely accepted example of emotions affect the body is that stress aggravates or even causes a variety of conditions, especially heart disease. But the mind-body connection it goes much deeper than that.
When you feel an emotion, you feel it all over: every cell in your body is involved
Emotions are a physical as well as a mental experience. An emotion is a set of physiological changes of all kinds, within a specific mental context. For instance, guilt is characterized by constriction of peripheral blood vessels and cooling, and increased blood pressure and muscle tone. A set of neurological and hormonal events also takes place, releasing a cocktail of molecules into the bloodstream that change the behaviour of every cell in your body. When you feel guilty, you feel guilty all over: your toe cells are affected just as much as your brain cells.
Muscle tissue in particular is involved in emotional experience. It constitutes a large and complex sensory organ (see The Sixth Sense), as well as an organ of action. A strong emotion can permanently alter the constitution of muscle tissue. Later on, stressing those tissues, or placing them in a position that physically recalls the circumstances of the original emotion, essentially recreates the sensation. In this way, emotions can become “carved in flesh,” a kind of memory — much the way a smell can evoke strong memories, a physical position can evoke them too, and strong emotions along with them.
You can think of body memory as “long term memory.” If you have a fierce, passing craving for a chocolate bar or a wave of sadness as you’re watching the news, it probably doesn’t get stored in your muscles. The stuff that gets stored tends to be either chronic or intense. In other words, the important stuff: major themes and the crises.
Emotion stored in muscles is ancient history
My client was demonstrating a very immediate recovery of emotional experience from her tissues. Whatever it was, it was ancient history. If the original emotion was felt during a crisis, she would have remembered it. The alternative is that it had to be accumulating for a long time.
We all have emotional experiences, usually sadness and anger, stored like memories in our tissues, and it is usually not so obvious. In fact, most people are not aware of it at all: it all just blends into aches and pains, and feels like weariness or anxiety.
Fortunately, it’s a fairly simple matter to create a safe opportunity to dissipate body memory, and getting rid of it can literally feel like a weight off your back. Just one more reason why people love massage therapy for reasons they can’t explain to their doctor.
__________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment