Twenty years of increasing pain with little to no relief—that’s what I found when I went home recently after a very long hiatus. Spina Bifida, Cauda Equina Syndrome, Tethered Cord Syndrome, Spinal Fusions and more.
I had called at Thanksgiving and heard her voice. She is 50. Slurring her words as if she’d had a stroke. But she hadn’t. She’s been on, and still is on, more medications than I could track without having a list to refer to. Circumstances led me to return 6 months later for this long overdue visit.
The last time I was there, that I can remember, was about 20 years ago, maybe 16. At the time she’d fallen off a motorcycle and required a fusion in her cervical spine at C-4/C-5. This was before I’d done the work and study I’ve done since. I remember being alarmed at the prospect. She was only 30 years old then.
I am now a Pilates Teacher trained in what was once referred to as post-rehab Pilates. Now it is called Contemporary Pilates. I have also studied our myofascial anatomy—a relatively new area of study in the last 20 years or so. This is what is commonly known as our connective tissue, or the white, sometimes filmy stuff we see when we cut up a chicken—an inner skin of sorts. Admittedly, I’ve been somewhat obsessed, highly focused on this part of our anatomy for over 17 years. I myself was in chronic pain for about 30 years. My issues and pathologies weren’t as severe as Dahlia’s are, but they persist—despite many attempts in different cities I lived—in to address the problems. My story is here: …………………….
Dahlia’s journey has been complicated by trauma, specifically childhood trauma. We have nearly all heard that ‘The Body Keeps the Score.’ ( a book currently very popular.). Many people who have endured childhood trauma do experience pain. This is also found in the literature.**.
My first 2 years in practice I noticed that most of my clients had also endured childhood trauma—often sexual abuse. Our bodies and our minds, our psyches, are not separate. Once I assisted a client to put her arms overhead for a particular exercise. It was a simple movement that I had done many times with others. She burst into tears. Turns out that is what ‘they’ did when they were raping her as a six year old. Oddly enough, years later I touched a woman during a workshop and then an image suddenly came to my mind—I saw her with her arms overhead. I had just revealed to the group that I was an empath. A woman there asked me what I saw with her. So I touched her arm. I saw her with her arms overhead, as if she were falling. She then told me that he’d once held hostage by someone that held her arms over her head, she was on an incline of a hill near a park.
So, there is a definite connection between our body and the brain-mapping that all of our brains do. It’s not magic. We are literally energetic beings. The energy that keeps our heart beating, the energy that keeps our brain operating, and the energy that moves our muscles creates memories within our bodies that ‘syncs’ with our brains. Just as a food can evoke the memory of an event, so too, our body’s movements can evoke memories. There is a storage or recording aspect in our bodies that is mapped in memory, in the literal collagen fiber of our tissue. À la recherche du temps perdu(...in search of lost time…), a phrase by Marcel Proust, is the most famous example. But we have all experienced them. There’s a flower that reminds you of a lakeside hike, the color of paint you remember from your first apartment. Father’s Old Spice after shave brings back the memory of him teaching me archery in the green, tree filled back yard of our New Jersey home.
So many things in this Modern Life can prevent us from taking care of ourselves, can prevent us from taking care of one another. Sometimes I refer to our country as ‘PTSD Nation.’ We live in distorted times.
As I settled into Dahlia’s house, a flood of information came my way, in the way families catch up. Events, children born, accidents, houses changed, incidents revealed. Unpack the bag, there was a car accident recently…. Find the bathroom… Dahlia had remembered her childhood trauma…. The grandchildren show up…. The husband cannot fathom his wife’s problems as they have exponentially increased over the years, his mind filled with providing for the family, building income to survive life’s tumults. Tears appear and are wiped away like the clearing of the table for dinner before it gets cold.
My inclination is always to touch, to place a hand, to calm the nervous system first. I laid Dahlia on my lap and began massaging her head, the muscles, the tight fascia of the neck that are pulling her jaw, creating the tension in the head, no doubt resisting the internal pressures she feels to scream her truth, expel the decades of pain she’s repressed. She wept silently the entire time. She mumbled the memories, the revelations, things I’d only heard fragments of over the years.
Trauma leaks out of us until the damn breaks and then, often, the narrative of blame and shame can overwhelm, saturate us with pain. The pain often takes up residence in the body in the form of tension. Dahlia’s pain was everywhere.
I’d already given her husband the list of basic tools that one can use to relieve much of the daily pain we can acquire in modern life: The Pure Wave Massager. My particular ‘Vibe’ massaging peanut roller. Durable, convenient, things to reduce the trigger that everyday tension can create for the trauma victim. I introduced them the the VirtualEMDR program that helped me so much in the beginning of the pandemic.
Now I used my hands to check the limbs, the hips, the shoulders. She is tight everywhere, so tight one can barely place any pressure on her skin. Every blood vessel, every nerve wrapped in the tension she cannot relieve as she attempts to perform the daily tasks in life. Every day, the tension is exhausting, like swimming against a tide. (Our fascia when fully functional makes movement efficient and effortless. When tight and dysfunctional, it makes life and movement much harder.) A sibling had witnessed the abuse. Blamed himself. Led a life filled with guilt and drowned in alcohol to relieve his pain, his guilt for not protecting her. This is irrational because he too was a child, but this is how trauma works too. Others knew and did nothing, denied, went about in their own trauma storm until everyone forgot particular incidents and their life became a woven fabric of pain they lived within.
I released her superficial tension as best I could. But honestly the tears she allowed herself to finally shed as her pain poured from her mouth released as much tension as I did with my hands. She needed to cry. She needed someone to bear witness to her story. We must all bear witness. Keeping the secret festers the wounds. We all know inherently that not to speak allows the disease of modern trauma to spread, yet the impetus to remain silent persists. The pressure is too much for us to carry, the proverbial weight on the shoulders weighs us down until even the body collapses.
After the hands-on work, after the listening, the silent witnessing of the pain, Dahlia stood up. Her speech was nearly normal, the neck and jaw tension were literally preventing her mouth from forming the words clearly. She was standing nearly erect. Much pain was gone as her body began to heal itself immediately. I sometimes refer to the body as an organic self-cleaning oven.
Like water, the body will return to the path of least resistance, it will follow the well worn path until a new path is forged. She will need many more treatments. She will need to create better daily habits that build on each day’s progress. The tools to do this are out there if we can find them, if we can manage to create new living habits.
There is a lot of self-care that is available, some of it is what I think of as ‘grandma’s medicine.’ Rest. Baths. Massage. Basic Movement. The elusive Low Stress of a fulfilled life. We are so barraged with information, medications, surgery, solutions outside ourselves that we have forgotten real self-care. Now we have the growing practice of myofascial self-release which is something like self-massage. Soften what’s tight, lengthen what’s short, move what you can, keep moving… moving through the fog until you reach a new clearing.