Welcome to MFR: A New Perspective on Healing. This podcast is all about physical and emotional healing with myofascial release.
My name is Liana, I’m an expert level MFR therapist. I specialize in pain relief and all things related to authentic healing of physical and emotional injuries and trauma. I help clients from all over the country and abroad via private Telehealth MFR treatments. You can find out more about working with me and healing with myofascial release at bodyfirstmfr.com.
Did you know that scar tissue can grow as long as you're alive. It has no ability to check itself and say, “oh, they're all healed up, my job is done”. So it can just keep on growing. Another fun, scar tissue, fact is what you see is just the tip of the iceberg. Meaning the majority of a scar is internal and therefore completely unseen.
And since we don't yet have the technology to image soft tissue, you can't just have an x-ray, MRI or cat scan to see all the scar tissue that's giving you trouble. Just like you can't see fascial restrictions in our current imaging. Which is why for help with scar tissue or fascial restrictions, you really need a soft tissue expert, like a myofascial release therapist.
Now you may have noticed on yourself or a loved one, or your clients, if you're an MFR therapist, that some scars heal up very nicely, they're small and they fade with time, which is certainly the ideal. But other scars grow and thicken and lock down the area with incredible force. Oftentimes this extra thickening happens when a surgery or injury is more invasive or near major organs, or when lots of internal scraping is done, like in the surgical removal of a cancerous growth.
These extremely thick and cementing scars can occur anywhere on the body. They're also very common on a site where multiple surgeries are performed on the same spot and the surgeon cuts the same site over and over. Those areas have a very high likelihood of overdeveloping scar tissue due to the increased trauma.
Certain areas of the body, like the chest for example, also seem to often grow a lot of scar tissue. I've seen this many times in my MFR practice and I believe it's because of the proximity to your heart and other major organs that the body really wants to lay down extra scar tissue here and make sure that any wounds are firmly closed. And while this is good for wound healing, it's not so good to have a large overgrowth of scar tissue near a major organ.
The internal effect of the overgrown scar tissue can cause trouble by stopping areas of your body from being able to move or function properly. Scar tissue can also lock down around nerves and cause nerve pain, numbness or tingling in areas of your body or make it difficult to use the muscles in those areas.
Scar tissue can pull your bones, joints and hips out of alignment and even impede organ function. Another issue that occurs due to scar tissue is that it can prevent the healthy, subtle movements of our organs that are necessary for their proper functioning, like the wave-like motions of peristalsis through the intestines or the subtle up and down movement of the heart as it rides along on the diaphragm and so on. These are completely necessary, healthy motions that can be blocked by fascial restrictions and scar tissue and can cause serious trouble.The point is scar tissue can be a real beast and can negatively affect the way the body functions, sometimes impeding function in areas with extremely detrimental side effects when it overgrows.
The tricky part is scar tissue doesn't just grow where you think it should or where you see it on the surface. It can grow in and around and all through us like an invasive vine. Now, just like anything else, it's all about balance - without any scar tissue, we'd be lost. We couldn't live without it because cuts would never heal, but too much of this good thing is no good either.
The body can’t have empty space inside it, if there is empty space the body fills it in. For example, if something is surgically removed from within us, the body can't have that empty space so it fills that space with scar tissue, which just by its nature is thicker and stronger than regular tissue because it's formed due to trauma. And the more trauma there is the more scar tissue the body will create.
I think sometimes it's hard to imagine what it's like inside the body. So here are a few visuals. First inside the body is sort of pressurized like the cabin of an airplane, which is part of why it can hurt so bad when we breach that pressurized system with an injury.
If a plane were at 40,000 feet and even a small hole or crack by the door opened, it would be bad. And you wouldn't just put a tiny piece of tape over it and hope for the best. That cabin has got to remain pressurized. So you'd hit it with everything you've got to plug that hole. That's what the body does with scar tissue, which is part of why we don't feel so great after a surgery or wound until the body catches up on the scar tissue.
Another visual is to think about how we said there's no empty spaces in the body. That means the room you're in right now assuming you're indoors. If that were a place inside your body, all of the empty space in that room, all of the air, would be fascia. And just as all the furniture and knick-knacks in that room are surrounded by air - inside the body everything is surrounded by fascia.
And if in your home, for example, you decided to move your bed. As soon as you moved it, air would fill in that empty space you just created. Inside the body as soon as you remove something, scar tissue begins to grow, to fill in that space. Now, if in our example, your bed was say, hard to move like if it was glued to the floor. And you had to be kind of rough with it and sort of scrape it off the floor that would create a lot more damage. And if that were done inside the body, that would create a lot more scar tissue. Which brings us to one of the more invasive forms of scar tissue called cording.
It often occurs after surgeries involving scraping out of cancer cells like mastectomies, but it can also form from other surgeries on the chest. The thick scar tissue vines, if you will, or cords can grow back to the shoulder blades and immobilize them or down the arms and make it difficult to use the muscles of the arm. It can grow up the neck, down the abdomen towards the waist and even towards the heart.
Which is why it's so imperative if you have scars to understand the role they play in your health or in your symptoms and learn to release these scars. And right there is finally the good news. You can learn to release your scars! Because they are thicker and stronger and kind of a different animal than fascial restrictions, the releasing methods are a bit different, but it can be done. And all of this goes for scars from burns and injuries as well, not just surgical scars.
When you use an MFR self therapy tool to release a fascial restriction or an MFR therapist releases fascia for you there's often a palpable softening where you can tell that you let go or something relaxed or opened in a good way, and you can feel the release happen.
That doesn't typically happen when you're trying to release scar tissue. It doesn't release with that same whoosh of relaxation feeling that a fascial release has. But if successfully released the scar itself will feel more pliable and the surrounding area will feel freer and more mobile when you get up and move around.
Because scars are so thick, they will certainly need repeated releasing and regular attention for a while to get the area to soften up and remain more mobile. Another piece of good news about scar releasing is you can do quite a bit of it yourself. You don't necessarily have to have a therapist's help for all of this scar releasing repetition.
Once you’ve learned the techniques you need to release your scars you can do the work yourself. Scar releasing is not really common knowledge amongst all therapists or myofascial release therapists. You’ll need to learn from a therapist like myself with intimate knowledge of working on scars and some real expertise in this area. This is certainly something I often teach clients via Online Telehealth treatment very successfully.
There's one more important piece to touch on here, which is in order to regain full usage of these scarred areas, first you’ll need to make some headway releasing them. Then you'll need to work on reconnecting to the area and actually rehabilitating it to make the fullest recovery possible. Release, Reconnect, Rehabilitate.So while releasing is a really important first step it’s just the beginning. Then we get to dive into learning to use that previously injured area properly again and that is when we get to make our way all the way back to healed.
To work with me on your healing visit me at bodyfirstmfr.com. Empower yourself with the skills to heal and care for your body right and free yourself from relying on anyone else to heal you.
Thank you for joining me today my friends and as always, happy healing!