The Biochemistry of Rage

CW: sexual assault

When I was in my early twenties, a friend of mine started having neurological problems. Intermittent, acute idiopathic pain, fatigue, and intermittent paralysis. Doctors could not find a cause. Some accused them of making it up to get attention.

At the same time, this friend started having flashbacks. Memories, long buried, of repeated sexual abuse by a relative, at a very young age.

They spoke up about the abuse. After some battles, they were even believed. The abuser was prevented from abusing others.

Over time, the neurological problems got worse. Many diagnoses were proffered and rescinded. They spent more and more time in a wheelchair.

The experiences of this friend, and of many others, inspired me to study alternative healing, particularly the relief of chronic pain. Over the years I heard countless variations on this story. Childhood abuse, adult disease and disability.

So when, in 2012, the results of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study were made public, it validated a suspicion of mine. As the study indicated, childhood trauma can disrupt the structural development of the neural network, and the biochemistry of endocrine systems. This can have far-ranging health consequences in adulthood, correlating with everything from heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and emphysema, to behavioral and mental health issues like alcoholism and depression.

Trauma disrupts the nervous system. 

If you have been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you might have been able to avoid the avalanche of people telling their sexual assault stories, in the wake of allegations against Harvey Weinstein. After a few days of it, I got off social media.

Because the guys complaining about people expressing their feelings were a little much.

As if feelings aren’t reality.

Feelings, as I understand from decades of professional experience, are data. Feelings are biochemistry. Feelings are a language more truthful, rational and compelling than any amount of intellectual rationalization.

And when I hear the feelings of millions of traumatized people dismissed as so much whining, I get kind of enraged.

It’s that kind of language that keeps abusers comfortable. It’s that kind of talk which keeps victims quiet. And it’s an ontological lie, told in order to maintain a status quo which is monstrously destructive.

Because every human being will experience trauma. It’s built into the system. What causes unnecessary trauma is trying to ignore and suppress the body’s natural response to it. Emotions are tunnels, which we have to traverse in order to build resilience.

I spend my days coaxing people’s bodies to release unprocessed trauma.

And I don’t have much patience with those who try to shut them up.

 

 

 

On The Bleeding Edge of Science

 

Twenty years ago, a friend of mine stopped being able to walk.

It happened intermittently. She’d be fine for a few weeks or months, then collapse. She had intense pelvic pain that doctors couldn’t find a reason for. Some thought she was faking it and sent her to the psych ward, or gave her a catheter without anesthetic “to teach her a lesson.”

No doctor, as far as I know, asked her if she had a history of childhood abuse.

Then came the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experience study (ACE), a study of 17,000 adults which correlated long-term health outcomes with childhood trauma. It suggested that certain experiences are risk factors for leading causes of illness and death–as well as poor quality of life, including idiopathic pain. Chronic, high-intensity stress in childhood, it seems, can  re-engineer your nervous system, and not for the better.

In my bodywork practice, my biggest source of fascination and frustration is “mystery pain,” often accompanied by “mystery fatigue.” I can get a little obsessed. In trying to solve the problem of why a client is in pain, exhausted, dizzy, depressed, anxious, can’t walk properly, or gets “pins and needles” for no apparent reason, I’ve researched not only musculoskeletal problems, such as injuries, arthritis, disc disease, spinal stenosis and spondylitis, but also adrenal fatigue, chronic Lyme, and any nervous system illness we have a name for, including every type of sclerosis that they thought my friend had, and then ruled out.

And I keep going back to the ACE study. All the TED talks and spin-off studies and New Health Initiatives focus on prevention, which is splendid. But what about people whose nervous systems are already kerflucked? Is there any way to help them?

Answer: I don’t know.

We know the nervous system is plastic; it can be rewired, to a certain extent. We know that PTSD is treatable. Could we develop a protocol in cases of idiopathic pain and fatigue syndrome, otherwise known as Nobody Knows Why I’m Kerflucked?

Because the danger in addressing an undiagnosable problem in a holistic way, is that you may be attacking it at the wrong level. You can’t heal a broken leg by changing your mindset. Too many holistic practitioners make claims that aren’t backed up by research. As a colleague noted when she said, “I don’t know any other massage therapists quite like you.”

So I keep asking questions. I keep reading research. And I keep up my attempts to hack into your nervous system, and tell it there’s no cause for alarm.

The Problems That Can’t Be Solved

suntreewallMy brother-in-law, Leif Weaver, passed away on November 14, after an eighteen-month battle with aggressive mantle-cell lymphoma. I loved him a whole lot.

His memorial was filled with friends and family who were just as broken-hearted, many of whom had flown cross-country on a few hours’ notice to say goodbye. We spent the evening swapping hilarious Leif stories, hugging one another and openly weeping. Love was everywhere.

During the course of his illness, I and others close to him experienced a host of sympathetic, stress-induced symptoms. Back spasms, sciatic pain, the onset of MS. Medical treatment could only take us so far. The body and mind have their own methods and timeline for processing trauma, physical and emotional.

In my bodywork practice, I call myself a creative problem-solver. The truth is, a lot of problems can’t be solved. While going through Leif’s illness and passing, I’ve shared the pain of many of my clients who are dealing with similar situations. When someone you love is seriously ill, your mind has to do something with the inevitable feelings of fear and helplessness; often this manifests as intractable pain. As both patient and therapist, sometimes all I can do is acknowledge the pain, treat it with the skills at my disposal, and wait for it to pass.

It always does.

The Roots of Chronic Pain

New research shows direct hormonal links between childhood trauma and adulthood disease:

There are two pieces of information that really provide the bridge to understand the connection between emotional trauma and adult disease, and the HPA axis is one of those pieces. The other is epigenetics. It starts with the hypothalamus in the brain, so that when we perceive any kind of threat to ourselves through the senses, through eyes or ears or nose or touch or whatever, that message comes into the brain and hits the hypothalamus. Then hypothalamus sends the message to the pituitary gland, which sits just below it, which in turn sends the message to the adrenal glands, which sit on top of each of the kidneys. This generates the flow of adrenaline and cortisol in the body. Adrenaline and cortisol are the hormones of stress. So there’s a connection between the hypothalamus, the pituitary, which is part of the endocrine system, and the adrenal gland, which is part of the immune system. That means that what happens to us emotionally affects our immune and endocrine functions.

When that happens early in life and chronically, it disregulates that whole system. “Trauma” means that stress is occurring over and over again chronically, so the HPA gets revved up and stays in the red zone. It upsets literally all of our physiology, activating the genetic proclivity we might have for whatever disease, setting the stage for it in the beginning, and oftentimes those systems don’t appear later in our lives until after our reproductive years. There is often a total disconnect between those diseases and its root in early chronic emotional trauma.

This is something I’ve suspected for years. I’ve noticed a strong correlation between my clients with chronic pain conditions–fibromyalgia, migraines, PTSD, anxiety, and vague neurological disorders such as primary lateral sclerosis(PLS)–and explicit or implicit childhood trauma. Often these clients have been further abused at the hands of a Western medical system which dismisses their pain and disability as ‘psychosomatic’ because doctors cannot pinpoint a specific cause.

As the linked article goes on to discuss, it is much harder to reverse this process than to prevent it. But that doesn’t mean there’s no way of addressing it in adulthood. The nervous system is plastic; if it is possible to mess it up through repeated stress, it is also possible to re-wire it. Bodywork is an excellent place to start. Massage therapy, craniosacral therapy, andnetwork spinal analysis all work directly and gently upon the nervous system to stimulate release of trauma and deep relaxation.

This is not a rapid process. Generally speaking, the more deeply rooted the trauma, the longer it takes to unwind. Our ‘silver bullet’ medical system tends to want to treat everything with surgery or a pill; nobody likes to hear that chronic conditions are, well, chronic. On the other hand, spending an hour or four a month on a massage table is a lot more enjoyable than pills or surgery. Isn’t that a piece of good news?

The Perils of Positive Thinking

Now, I’m not going to name any names. Let’s just say that There are Those Out There who will tell you, with great fluidity and earnestness, that you are what you think. That “your attitude determines your altitude.” That changing your mind will change your life. They will tell you this in a spiritual context, in a relationship context, in a financial context, in a healing context.

And without naming names, or going into detail, I will allow that they are partly correct. The mind is an amazing thing. Recent research into the placebo effect indicates that the brain releases endorphins that alleviate pain even when youknow you’re taking a placebo. Your thoughts can actually program your body for health or destruction, as well as for many things in between.

However, many New Age healers take this paradigm a step too far. They will kindly, earnestly and abusively tell a sick person that they ‘created their illness,’ and, by implication, that they can cure themselves by will alone. This is the kind of thing that generates  much antipathy toward New Age healers in certain circles.

heart

“Heart,” oil on canvas, 36″x 48″, Stephanie Lee Jackson 2007.

Two things. First of all, the mind-body connection is not a one-way street. It is a feedback loop. As much as your state of mind can affect your body (psycho-somatic), the state of your body certainly affects your mind (somato-psychic). There are a few people with such naturally sunny dispositions that their minds carry their bodies on an effortless wave of health and prosperity, but those aren’t most of us. Most of us get crabby when we have a headache, let alone a major illness, and we’re not going to think our way out of it.

Second of all–and this is something I’ve only discovered after years of giving and receiving both thought-based therapy and bodywork–your body locks in thought patterns that can only be accessed somatically. The reason you can’t will your way out of an injury or illness (besides the obvious) is that most somatic memory lies beneath the level of conscious awareness. Trying to ‘change your thoughts to attract health and abundance’ when you have oodles of trauma locked in your tissues only creates guilt, frustration, rage and misery.

In my experience, undertaking a healing path is a continuous, spiraling journey. Entertaining a new way of thinking can help a lot. I have undergone surges of positive thinking which performed as advertised–they attract health, joy, abundance and fabulous new friends. However, I have just as often fought my own thoughts for decades, only to have an expert bodyworker fiddle with my arm, my solar plexus or my big toe and trigger an unforeseen breakthrough, both physically and psychologically.

The Body Remembers

I am so thankful for the treatment that I received!!! I walked in the office a horrific mess, and Stephanie showed her concern and learned what the issue was that I was having and in four short weeks, my body responded to the gentle, yet firm work that she was putting into it.  My recovery was felt within the first visit, and continuously improved with each visit.

—Camille A., on Yelp.com

thornsivy

More than a year ago, Camille was struck by a car while she was crossing the street on foot. Most of the impact was sustained by her left hip. She underwent a plethora of treatments at the time, and reduced her pain to almost nil. Then one afternoon she ‘turned her head the wrong way,’ and it all started up, worse than before.

When Camille first came to me, she was stooped at nearly a 60 degree angle. She couldn’t lie prone with her back straight; she couldn’t lie on her back at all. She was in continuous pain in all positions. and I was concerned that she had problems outside of the scope of my ability to treat.

But she’d been to chiropractors, MDs and physical therapists, and the most recent chiropractor recommended massage. So I worked on her in the most non-invasive manner possible, adjusting positions to compensate for her pain. The entire left side of her body was in an extreme state of spasm, particularly her left piriformis and adductor muscles.

After her first session with me, she felt some relief, and decided to book a Crisis Intervention package. I didn’t find evidence of active trauma, such as inflammation, a slipped disc or scar tissue, so I simply encouraged her spasming muscles to calm down.

And ultimately, this seemed to be all that was required. By the end of her treatment, she was moving normally, the spasming had ceased, and she was nearly pain-free.

As I told Camille (and as I wrote to her lawyer, at her request), my belief is that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress. Memory of trauma is actually stored in our cells until it can be safely released; sometimes the smallest twitch is all that is required to re-activate the signal.

What does this mean, for clients and for therapists? Well, the good news is that it’s not permanent. Over time, and with patient engagement, the tissues will literally ‘release’ both the memories and the pain.

But at the same time, it’s important to remember that not all pain can be resolved by actively ‘fixing’ a problem. Some treatments, such as drugs and surgery, can make it worse. All too often, people take a hammer to a problem that merely needs a bit of unwinding.