Does Fascia Hold Memories? Part 2

BY RUTH DUNCAN

In my previous article, ‘Does fascia hold memories?’ Part one, I discussed what is commonly thought of playing a role in an unwinding process as well as a brief history of the origins of unwinding and how it relates to trauma. In this edition, I will go a little more in depth with the role of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and its relationship with certain brain areas and look at how these may play a role in the unwinding process.

SNS activation creates a myriad of changes within the body in readiness to fight or flight. This includes, widening the eyes, increasing heart rate and respiration. This is a normal process and should be relatively short lived with a return to parasympathetic tone once the threat is over. However, prolonged stress and anxiety for any reason sensitises the SNS meaning that it produces the flight and flight response at a lowered threshold. This results in what is called Hebbian learning, a common neuroplastic process of nerves that wire together, fire together (Keysers and Gazzola 2014). Think of playing a chord involving several keys on a piano that all respond together. That one chord, or output, have multiple firing nerves to produce one sound. When played over and over again, the reptation creates learning and you can play that chord and entire piece of music without looking and even thinking. This is what it meant when nerves wire together, they fire together. It becomes unconscious and, as we don’t know we are doing it, we don’t know how to turn them off. This is especially true in chronic pain and a sensitised nervous system.

Due to this neuroplastic process, it takes far less stimulus to create activation of the SNS (Alshak and Das 2022). The SNS sensitivity increases the allostatic load which is the constant adaptation of the body systems in response to the cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events (Guidi 2020). SNS activation is controlled by some of the oldest, or reptilian, parts of the brain and are part of our survival mechanism. In the fight and flight response, information processing is restricted to these older brain areas. However the cortex, the newest and outermost part of the brain, goes into quiet mode. What’s also important is that the reptilian brain can’t tell time. That is a cortical process along with problem-solving, reasoning and consciousness amongst others (Jawabri and Sharma 2022) and (Raccah et al. 2021). This would seem to correlate with the feeling that people describe as ‘right back there’ when they experience SNS activation. Also, as the cortex is in sleep mode during heightened SNS activation, rational thoughts, processing and judgment of the current event are unavailable to consciousness. This is what’s commonly called dissociation and is a naturally occurring phenomenon as a protective mechanism. This mechanism allows us to fight or flight even when we may have been injured in order to escape as there is no time for logic and cognitive processing. This same process inhibits the pain response and is thought to be the reason why some people walk for miles to escape trauma and only when they reach safety do they realise they have a broken ankle. Here though, historical thinking is that the trauma memory is frozen in time in the fascia. Further popular thinking also correlates with Stephen Porges Polyvagal Theory with this person being stuck in dorsal vagal tone or what’s commonly known as the freeze response. Rather, a better description and one that avoids catastrophising and potential to reinforce trauma would be to describe the process of the neuroplasticity of the sensitised SNS as all it is trying to do it offer protection. I hope that it is becoming clearer that while the fascia responds to the fight and flight response, it is an unlikely candidate to be the originator of this response or a storage container for the replay of movie-like trauma events.

It is much more plausible, and realistic, to attribute responses and behaviours that become actions and reactions with the lowered threshold response of the SNS. Also, according to Trauma Neuroscientist Dr Bruce Perry, memories are recreated, they are not replayed. This falls in line with the neuroplastic model in that nerves that wire together, fire together. When events, context and meaning all come together in the right amount and order, the sensitised SNS springs into action and plays out a story in the body. Unfortunately, for some people this is a daily event perhaps from an abusive partner. For others its episodic such as a car backfiring sounding like gunshot to a veteran with PTSD. These reactions and actions are what are seen in an unwinding. The process of how MFR triggers the sensitised SNS is the next thing to consider. During treatment, the client is relaxed and calm. As the therapist engages the client into the therapeutic relationship through effective dialoguing, interoception or the sense of self is heightened. This is a quality of the nervous system where specialised nerves deliver this sense of your inner self to the limbic system in the brain where emotional regulation occurs. In relaxation mode, unconscious cortical control mechanisms, natural and learned inhibition and antagonistic processes usually employed to compensate for a sensitised SNS are reduced. This potentially means that of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement independently of volition.’ these gatekeepers are turned off allowing the sensitised SNS to spring into action from even the smallest sensory input. This is not a negative response as the client is well aware that they are in a therapeutic environment, but it can take a client by surprise as their normal hypervigilance keeps sensitised SNS reactions and actions under wraps. Here, the skill of the therapist is to support the client, reassure them and facilitate the process.

Minasny (2009) goes further with describing that specific elements of sensory input, or afferent signalling, along with context and the relaxation response being divided into certain brain regions. This correlates with current thinking on mechanosensation by Bialosky (2018) in that touch stimulates the cutaneous sensory endings sending message via the spinal cord to the brain that creates physiological body changes. Additionally, Brandi et al. (2023) also suggests that touch could stimulate the deeper fascial mechanoreceptors which also result in physiological and psychological changes.

The unwind, the physical movement, is thought to be what Carpenter (1852) describes as an ideomotor response. There is not enough evidence that supports the unwind solely being the domain of the fascial system. Instead, consider that all movement is the domain of the nervous system as motor output. Carpenter (1852) described ideomotor to be ‘influence

Once a threshold of sensory information is reached, the body begins to complete the normal and natural process of self-regulation. Self-regulation is conducted in many ways but the most well know are tears, rocking, shivering and even vocalising (Gračanin 2014). This is where the ideomotor movement, or unwinding, can also be considered as a form of self-regulation.

Ultimately, the self-regulatory process of unwinding is a valuable process as a response to affective contextual touch. It can also be considered as graded exposure delivering post-event wisdom and can play an important role in helping people reclaim their health and wellness.