No Harm, No Foul

This is from of a fb dialogue with Mark Lamm on the possible emotional storage/release mechanisms implicated in massage therapy practice, when folks remember past trauma in the massage studio.


"I agree, Mark, our views of how the body saves the stories/emotional content of our encounters with life's traumas and is stimulated to facilitate the remembering and reorganizing of them might be a bit different from each other. Reading the article I sent you, and others, like the one you sent me, is part of my effort to refine my view of the experiences I have with folks in the massage studio.

You said two things about your view of this process that interest me and seem to be different ways of looking at it.

"My understanding is that the brain receives a holographic imprint of a trauma event as can be evidenced by tomography or neuro-scanning. I believe that the recording of the event is stored in the body's tissue and when there is a stimulus that replicates any part of the original trauma event, the brain, functioning as a processor, activates the response mechanism."

There's alot there to chew on. Haven't read about any brain scientists talkin about the holographic imprint idea. If you're referring back to Dr. Hamer's ideas, those are pretty controversial, a bit iffy IMO, and generally the rings he's giving great importance to are viewed as artifacts on inferior quality MRI equipment and not of any real diagnostic significance. Perhaps there's other brain research you've found that I have not read about yet that supports your holographic view. Sounds like an interesting idea.

The second part of that paragraph coincides more with a view I'm currently embracing as well. I think the upwelling of a memory complex when we touch an injured or traumatically charged area is a form of PTSD, it is an associative phenom, but the actual memory and emotional charge are stored in the brain as processor, as you so aptly put it.

This is a quite different view than the idea of actual memory/emotion stored locally in the tissue, which you seemed to also espouse in the sentence:"it is not the animal's brain but the tissue memory". What's the memory mechanism in muscle or fascial cells capable of that kind of complexity, somewhere in the mitochondria? a change in the way the RNA duplicates, or pacinian corpuscles, meissner's corpuscles those adaptive receptors responsive to light touch, maybe the merkel cells, or somewhere more mysteriously diffused in the somatosensory system in the tissues rather than in the homunculus back in the ole brain processor, perhaps it's in controllers of protein translation or synaptic plasticity. Maybe those young scientists in the Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society will actually figure it out someday soon.

There are a number of working models of how this 'tissue memory' occurs taught by several schools of bodywork as though they are facts. That bothers me, since none of them has a scientifically sound explanation for what they're teaching and some of them just don't make good physiological sense and so fall into the category of pseudo-science. Especially problematic when they get mixed together with ideas like having a dialogue with or channeling the client's 'inner physician', or asking the dolphins to inform us where the problem is by going in the tank with them to do the work and watching were they touch their noses, gadzooks!. We hear about energy cysts, tissue memory, cellular memory, myofascial unwinding as an instrument of releasing a locally stored emotional pattern in the fascia.....with the assumption that a simple abreaction alone is enough to release and integrate the stored memories.

It's that assumption regarding these ideas that I fear is ripe with possibly harmful potential, not the rash spreading of simplistic assumptions as fact, per se.

Most massage therapists, including myself, who encounter these emotional releases in their clients have little or no actual academically sourced psychological training. Therein lies the bug. Abreaction alone is not enough to release and integrate the psycho-emotional complex that fixates around a childhood abuse for example, especially if it happened early. Yet massage therapists in droves are out there pulling on legs and thinking that the ideomotor response of spontaneous movements arising are actually healing the emotional/psychological traumas embedded with this event(s). Some of these methods might address the somatic kinks in the tissues better than others. Which ones? We have no answers because the studies have not been done yet comparing them for somatic effectiveness. Yet many folks are making big bucks teaching that their methods are intrinsically effective and complete healing paradigms.

IMO, teaching that that is the case is naive, shows an incomplete understanding of healing (and ideomotor responses) and can cause those therapists who believe they have the answer to how to effectively work with these conditions to be inadvertently potentially harmful to their clients.

Attempting to understand these phenoms intellectually to refine the view of what's going on is interesting valuable and important, IMO, but in the meantime, when doing the work, if I find someone flinches when I address the inner thigh, for example, I'm going to find out if they're in psychotherapy already or find a skillful way to suggest it before I go right to the possible negative sexual encounter that might be underlying that flinch.

If abuse occurs, especially early in a person's life, it takes a lot more than remembering it to help integrate that memory into the psyche without that person malingering in a state of traumatic victimhood. It can effect their current relationships with husbands, wives, parents, children. Not all psychologists are effective at helping someone balance that information and emotional upheaval either but at least they're trained to understand that integration of the trauma of an event is something that takes time and work and is not an automatic result of simply remembering it in an altered state in the presence of an empathic observor/facilitator. Many schools of massage assume and teach that abreaction fully releases the trauma from the tissues, therefore person, and that is enough for a complete healing to occur. That assumption is what I consider irresponsible and potentially harmful to the client.

It's my hope that if we're willing to examine our currently held beliefs about the work and dialogue intelligently about it, that we can help each other to refine the view and improve our abilities to be of benefit to the beings with whom we are privileged to interact.

I think ole Hippocrates got the oath right and that we, too, should attempt to do no harm, even though we do not practice medicine. 'Course his requirement that a new physician swear to the healing gods that he/she will uphold the ethical standards, might not appeal to the Christians in the crowd, but vowing to uphold the standards as a solemn oath knowing the importance of ethics when working with other beings is the part of that act we will do well to also espouse.

I do love all the funny and thoughtful quotes you regularly bring to us and your willingness to devote some of your time to engage in this dialogue. In that spirit I'll toss you this one that gets thrown around a bit, so you've probably read it more than once, but Yogi Berra had a funny way of saying the obvious that I personally love:

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice there is."

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