Trauma Training Tip
We are closing out on Late Summer and will firmly enter Fall this month.
The Late Summer is characterized by heavy fruits on the vine; heavy, dense and damp air; loud insects; and the sweetness of the harvest. When the air turns clear and light, the harvest is essentially complete, and the cicadas quiet, we will have moved into Fall and the Metal season. The growing season is over, death as a necessary part of life moves into our experience of nature and life.
The Earth informs our sense of our embodiment. It has a special relationship with our muscles and our flesh. Its role to create qi is visible in the tone and capacity of our muscles.
Muscles communicate sensations arising from inside our body, while our skin communicates sensations that arise from outside our body. Thwarted mobilization responses, failures of self-protection, and untransformed traumatic experiences may be stored in the muscles. What we believe, and how we feel about these failures may also be found in our muscle memory – and may be reflected in our posture, as well as our stance toward life.
Muscles have a clear beginning and end and serve to connect one bone to another. They can be useful to work with around the dynamics and capacity for connection in our patients – connection with themselves and connection with others.
One muscle that is very special in this way is the psoas. It connects the inside to outside; from the 12th thoracic vertebrae to the inner aspect of our femur. Some physiologists have found psoas fibers all the way up the spine to the cervical vertebrae. It is responsible for every movement that emerges from our insides to our thigh and femur – every step, every kick, every jog or dance step. No wonder it carries so much information about our history of mobilization!
A few other curious and dynamic things about the psoas:
- It attaches to the spine at the level of the back Shu Point of the Spleen. This is a very important point for addressing our capacity for transforming food into blood and qi, and for distributing blood and qi to nourish the body.
- It attaches at the location where the respiratory diaphragm also attaches to the spine.
- It serves as both a moving muscle and a stabilizing muscle.
- It is our primary fight/flight muscle.
- Its attachment location at T12 is very dynamic. T12’s upper half is shaped like a thoracic vertebrae – allowing it to turn and orient for the flight response. Its lower half is shaped like a lumbar vertebrae – and supports holding our ground and the fight response. If we are ambivalent about whether to flee or fight – that ambivalence can get played out in T12. This ambivalence can manifest as back spasms in survivors. It is the most commonly broken bone in the spine.
You can see that placing our hand and our attention at the origin of the psoas has the potential to engage in so many aspects and avenues for where the brace or collapse resulting from a traumatic history may be stored. You will want to use this engagement when your patient has some capacity anchored in their tissues, when they are ready to go to the next level of their transformation to greater regulation and balance.
Placing your hand at T12, and supporting an exploration of brace or collapse, activation and deactivation in your patient’s body, mind, and spirit can be profoundly helpful.
Alaine’s Two Cents
Photo by Ryutaro Tsukata via Pexels
After five years on the job, Martha Rolls Collins, my registrar and lead Clinical Assistant for the California and On-Line cohorts is leaving Integrative Healing. Oh my goodness! Martha is a treasure. She created an internal organizational infrastructure for The Tao of Trauma, used her creativity, passion and compassion to establish the Tao of Trauma in California, and has been a stimulating presence in my personal and professional life. She will be returning to private practice and her own projects. You can contact her at moxarolls@mac.com.
I will always be grateful for her many gifts, and her many contributions to the Tao of Trauma community. All good wishes Martha!
Check This Out!
Crisis Stabilization and Safety: A Neurobiological Approach
Sponsored by Somatic Experiencing International
October 5-8, 2023
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Clinical Curiosity
Where is your clinical curiosity carrying you?
Send me a question or two and I will explore them with readers in this corner next month.
Q.
My patient is a woman in her mid-30’s. She has unremitting back pain. She was raped in her 20’s, and reports “freezing” during the assault. She says, “I haven’t been the same since.” The back pain started after the rape. She struggles with intimacy and reports low libido and high anxiety. I’d love to help her.
A.
So glad she has you!
I would recommend starting with her kidney/adrenal system. You will want to build capacity in her signaling threat function. Her kidney helped her in the assault by sending that freeze message to the heart – in order to dramatically slow it down to protect her from cardiac arrest. Now her kidney needs to find some comfort and ease, restore its warm blood flow and build its capacity to distinguish discomfort from fear. We don’t want her living in the fear that was such an important signal back then, but isn’t so useful or necessary now.
Once her general regulation has grown, I recommend you accessing her psoas muscle. With her permission, slide your hand under her back to her vertebral column, above her waist, at the level of the 12thrib. Help her find your hand, and notice whatever “wakes up” for her. Could be movement, stillness, emotion, meaning, sensation, or image. Help her “tick tock” – allowing an activation cycle to mount and then round the bend into de-activation. If she goes too high and is at risk for going over her capacity, you can slide your hand over to her kidney to help her settle.
This is such a dynamic location — the tissues that wake up could vary greatly. The tone in her diaphragm could speak, the connection of her psoas to her femur could speak. As the psoas travels through her pelvis, it influences the health of all the organs of her pelvis, and they may find their voice. She may find fear or terror, anger or rage, with your attention to her psoas.
Help her track her sensations, inviting her attention to her tissues. Her Qi will follow her attention. As her Qi returns to those tissues that “froze” so long ago, it will do all the things that Qi does – transform, transport, protect, warm, hold things up, etc. Her inner physician will take over and you can to watch it work!
Would love to hear how she does. All good wishes.