HOW I ASSIST YOU TRANSFORM YOURSELF

Emotion

Whenever you're not willing to feel an emotion, your choices and behaviours stem from your avoidance of that emotion. Your resistance then runs your life and is directly contrary to your overall best interest. People suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the brain becomes hypersensitive to fearful stimuli that vaguely represents the initial trauma. The antidote to emotional resistance is acceptance. This means learning to accept your emotions, in your body, as soon as they arise. This acceptance is not mental or theoretical, it's a practical skill.

Emotions are part of the experiential system, which are the core consciousness system of sensory perceptual experiences and drives. They are a central part of core consciousness. They provide information about one’s core goals and needs. There are two broad systems of emotions, negative and positive. Negative emotions signal threat to needs and goals and energize avoidance. Positive emotions signal opportunity to meet needs and goals and energize approach.

The brain can be trained to regulate negative emotions. Emotions are messages from the brain that are delivered in the body. To receive these messages, we need to feel where they arise. For someone who is lonely, the message might show up as a stab in the heart, or a tug in the stomach, or a welling behind the eyes. Counterintuitively as it may seem, to feel a painful emotion fully, at the site of delivery, is the best way to help it diminish. Not feeling the emotion, on the other hand, causes it to grow stronger, remain longer, and can create issues in our lives. I explain to you that it is necessary to revisit emotions which cause distress, so that when new information is presented to you, the same emotional response will be lesser each time that same emotion is revisited.

Trauma

Trauma are incidents prevented from being completed. 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. 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 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 until it can be released. This stored trauma leads to pain and progressively erodes our body’s health. 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.

Rewiring the brain (the juxtaposition experience)

Unlocking memories involves three things for the body to release stored trauma:

The inner resources to handle the experience that was not in place when the experience originally occurred.
Space for the traumatic energy to go when released.
Reconnection of the brain with the area of the body where the trauma is stored.

The brain requires unlocking by reactivating the emotional response to a trapped emotion, this then unlocks the synapses (the junction between two nerve cells where information passes) maintaining it and then by creating new learning that unlearns, rewrites and replaces the unlocked target learning. Emotional learning circuits unlock and become erasable only when a vivid new experience mismatches what a reactivated emotional learning leads a person to expect. However, once a neural circuit has been unlocked, if nothing is done to erase and overwrite it during the next few hours, the synapses automatically relock, or reconsolidate, and the circuit restabilises, preserving the original learning.

This process of unlearning is called the juxtaposition experience. It first, evokes into direct experience the emotional learnings underlying the client’s unwanted patterns and then finds a new vivid knowledge or experience that contradicts those learnings. Finally, these two different learnings (the old emotional response and the new knowledge) are combined into a juxtaposition experience and repeated several times. The aim is to reprogram the new thought process by showing the client the contradiction of the old emotional response.

As a result of the juxtaposition experience, the person’s energy field becomes less dense, and the neurons in the brain are no longer sending conflicting emotive messages. The neurons in the brain begin firing in a new positive fashion and a new sense of freedom in the brain now begins to take hold. The emotions previously experienced as emotional triggers no longer exist and a new way of thinking and processing information occurs.

Myofascial body work (my referral process)

Unlocking Memories involves three things for the body to release stored trauma: The inner resources to handle the experience that were not in place when the experience originally occurred, space for the traumatic energy to go when released, reconnection of the brain with the area of the body where the trauma is stored. Combining bodywork (I don’t do this bit) 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.

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 counselling 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.

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