Your Body Keeps The Score

Trauma must be released in the body. That's where it began. Your body holds the secret to free you from your depression, anxiety and past traumas. Since trauma begins in the body, it can only be released through the body. 

Transcript

The Body Keeps The Score
glenellynmfr.com

“And the day came when the cost it took to remain tight in a bud, became more painful the risk it took to blossom.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         - Anais Nin

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new episode of healing your own. Todays podcast is called:

Your Body Keeps The Score.  My name is Greg, I’m an expert level MFR therapist and owner of Glen Ellyn Myofascial Release, and in-person and on-line treatment center for pain relief, injury rehabilitation and physical and emotional healing.

Your body holds the secret to free you from your depression, anxiety and past traumas. Since trauma begins in the body, it can only be released through the body.

So, lets talk about current medical approach to treating trauma and depression. Currently 40% of all ptsd sufferers are being treated with drugs alone while the balance with some combination of drugs and trauma-based psychotherapy. Its well known that medication are not cures, nor are they intended to be, but simply help you cope with or manage your ongoing condition. I’ve heard many men complain of feeling flat-lined. The worst effects are of depression are gone but they feel numb, unable feel or express joy or pain. Many patients respond positively to good psychotherapy. And there are benefits and limitations with talk therapy. In relaying a trauma or old emotionally charged event to a good, trained listener can be the beginning of real healing. In fact, this is the foundation for most addiction recovery work. Telling your secret shame and having heard and accepted by someone who gets it, who has been where you are and come through it. Addictions often begin as a way, maybe the only way available at the time, as a temporary relief from the pain and terror of the traumatic experience or childhood. So, finally taking the risk to tell someone what happened to you, or what you did, begins to erode the power it has over you. This is why it’s said the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. We can’t do it alone. Talk therapy is a good foundational step in trauma healing but in most cases, it won’t heal the process.

While talking it through is important to bring awareness to a condition many don’t know they’ve been living with, it is often done from a completely dissociated, disconnected place. In over 20 years of doing emotional work, I’ve heard men tell the horrific stories of childhood abuse and neglect they suffered. Often the telling falls into two camps. In the first, the story is told as though reading a shopping list, with no emotional connection to the experience. In the 2nd, they can’t stop crying in the telling. What both ways say is they haven’t completed the body’s thwarted energy response at the time of the event. They’re still emotionally stuck. When the trauma begins, stress hormones release adrenaline and cortisone to tightened the muscles to fight or flee. But if you’re a child neither of those is really an option. You are living with your tormentor. So, the body gets locked in a freeze response. Numbing out is common in abused children. Its their only defense to survive. But that energy can get locked in the body for decades. Time alone can’t heal it. In fact, it makes it worse. IN that first way of telling, by locking it away in the body for good. The second way you remain unaware you are emotionally stuck at the age the event occurred.

So, about the body. Think of your mouth as a doorway to a long dark cave. Talking about the traumatic event is opening the door and that alone is a relief. But the dragon guarding your painful past is never at the door. He’s always at the end of the cave. That’s where the treasure is. You may not even be aware of him. But he’s the unknown source of the anxiety you can’t seem to shake. And the way to healing is past the entry door into dark cave of the body. The talking door can tell about the event but it didn’t experience it. That happened deep in the body’s cave. That’s where the wounds are.

So, how do we get there. Well, there are a number of ways and a variety of body-centered, somatic therapies and exercises available. There are two that I’ve used for years, sometimes to great effect. 

The first combines the story while connecting to a place in the body. Often called role-playing, in men’s work we call it “returning to the scene of the crime” (or the original wounding event). The purpose is re-create the scene so the man/woman can emotionally reconnect to the event where the pain began. That long-buried emotional wound that’s running/ruining their life. When they’ve finally fully connected to the body, felt and released whats been stuck by sobbing, raging, or shaking the fear, the energy loose, for the first time in many years they feel free.They get clear. See the lie that was the old story they told about themselves, or that their caretaker convinced them they were. With a newfound freedom they can choose a new, healthier path to living.

And as in all healing it’s not a one and done. It takes time and repetition to forge a new way of being. But the way forward can be a much happier one.

Another, more direct approach I use, when a client is ready, is on the MFR treatment table. By helping someone relax into their discomfort, and not just remove it immediately, but allow them to get to know it, to feel it, to listen to the pain’s message, because that’s all pain is, a messenger sent to tell you to pay attention right here. If I do all the work I cheat them out the discovery themselves. It creates a co-dependency where that haft to keep coming back. But if they connect – feel what they’ve avoided, long enough, something underneath comes up: a buried picture, incident, smell, memory. I encourage them to surrender to it completely. Then suddenly the fascia begins to unwind, an arm drops, the lock on the treasure chest springs open, and precious jewel of pain is set free.

It takes guts to feel what you’ve locked away and buried for years in the body’s vault. The cost of not doing so shows up years later as Chronic pain, auto-immune disease, addiction, cardio-vascular issues, even cancer.  The body breaking down from the rot inside. The standard medical approach even admits they don’t cure you, instead they talk about long-term treatment plans, teach how to live with your condition.

But in the end we are responsible for our own healing. There is no magic pill, person or surgery to heal us. Remember the Wizard didn’t have the answer for Dorothy. Instead, he challenged her to confront her own demon (in killing the witch). And in so doing, the courage it took gave her the power to free or heal herself.

There are trauma relief exercises, holotropic breath work. EMDR and other somatic therapies that can shake loose blocked energy. Some can be quite beneficial. Those that bring release and awareness are best – so you feel what has changed and can consciously choose a healthier life.

Like Dorothy, you have that power. The power to heal yourself. Are you ready?

If I can help you on that path, or you simply want to know more about how MFR can help you please contact me at my website, by email or phone. And as always my friends, I wish you well on your healing journey.