Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Trauma and Unlocking Tissue Memory

Last week, I mentioned the mind, body, spiritual and emotional connection and how trauma can be stored in the muscles and cells of a person's body. While I couldn't find the original article to reference in my post, I found this article which supports the belief memories of traumatic events can be stored in areas of the body other then the brain.

Learn How To Unlock Tissue Memory
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.”

2 comments:

  1. Great post and article! I agree. It really was amazing when I worked for a while with a body-centered therapist how moving my body in certain ways would bring up emotions I wasn't aware I was still feeling - sometimes from trauma decades earlier. Releasing these almost always brought me some level of symptom relief.

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  2. I have had Fibromyaglia or Fibrosis as I call it. It manifested after a bout with MRSA. There was wide spead pain, migrating or wandering pain and all the other associated PAIN. But as I look back on it the most significant thing is that the inital onset of my Fibrosis was exactly similar to the pain levels and pain location right after a serious motorcylce accident that occured 32 years before. Severe back pain, leg and arm pain disseminationg from my lower and upper back. Can pain be embeded in the brain as memory? A confusion thing happened when I was in the military. One night while I was ironing my uniforms my buddies came back from a night of liberty. They were a bit drunk and obnoxious so I decided to play a game on them. I traded the hot iron I was using for a new and very cold one I had sitting in my footlocker, When my friend came back in the room from his shower I pretended to be ironing. I feigned some aurguement and proceed to put the iron on him. He turned his back and I pushed the iron onto him and he screamed. I laughed because I knew what was going on. But when he continued to scream I noticed his back had a mark the trace of the iron. And it was blistering. A clinical definition of a burn; the rapid transfer of fluid from tissue. Yes he was burned with a cold iron yet the attending physician knew this as possible. Our brain is a complex computer.They say we have muscle memory, can this pain memory be a system of electrical traces in the brain. When the Fibro is acting it spews out impluses similar to previous pain activity that was stored. Possible of all things. Hence wandering pain in diffent quandrants. Also affecting hormone control and other CNS functions.

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