Trauma and the Unbound Body: The Healing Power of Fundamental Consciousness

by Judith Blackstone

Most of the binding in our body occurs in early childhood. But some patterns are formed later in childhood in response to peers and other adults that we encounter.

Many grade-school and adolescent boys, for example, organize their bodies to defend against the threat of ph...

Adolescents also pattern themselves in order to conform to the stereotypes of male and female sexual attractiveness.

In order for the patterns of constriction to become bound in our body, they usually need to be repeated many times over the course of our childhood or adolescence.

We can also form patterns of constriction as adults. In general, the patterns of constriction that we form as adults are in reaction to extreme trauma.

A woman came to work with me with a severe constriction in her abdomen. As she released it, the memories that surfaced for her were of an illness that had occurred about twenty years previously when she was a young woman.

Later in the book, I describe the Realization Process release technique, which makes use of this bound pathway, preserved within the tensions of our body.

Why We Constrict

Although we fragment and constrict ourselves unconsciously, without calculation, all of our constrict...

Most of our patterns of constriction are for protection or to help us maintain the love and approval of our caretakers, which we need in order to survive and flourish, by restraining thos...

In this way, we “fit in” with the other members of our family or with our friends, so we can most easily enjoy contact and communication with them.

We also constrict those parts of ourselves that do not receive the stimulation of contact from our caretakers.

We may organize ourselves to embody the way we are seen in our family or the role that we serve in the family dynamic, such as the “good for nothing” one, chronically deflated in a posture of failure, or the kind but comically stupid one, with a bound pattern of constriction in our intelligence.

Protection

The most common reason for constricting yourself is to lessen the impact of painful, confusing, or overwhelming stimulation.

As you begin to release these organizations in your body, you may discover that the areas in your body of bound fascia contain your child mind (your childhood mentality at the time of trauma), the memory of what happened to you, and the emotions you felt during the trauma.

Important.

My evidence for this is experiential. Over the past thirty-five years, I have observed thousands of people experience the emergence of memories, emotions, and childhood mentality as they release the constrictions in their body. I am not alone in this observation.

Body-workers, such as Structural Integration and craniosacral practitioners, as well as psychotherapists working in body-oriented modaliti...

When you begin to release this part of your body through therapeutic methods as an adult, you may uncover several different memories of being afraid at different times in your early life.

Protecting yourself from your environment involves not just keeping external stimuli out, but also holding in whatever might be hazardous to express.

For example, if crying when you are punished brings about an intensification of your parent’s anger, then you may learn to hold back your tears. You may also hold back te...

Mirroring

You also organize yourself in order to match your parents’ pattern of openness and defense.

If your parents live mostly in their heads (or foreheads), for example, but are more constricted emotionally, you may also inhabit your head, or forehead, ...

I have often seen a parent walking down the street with a young child by his or her side, who is exactly matching the rhythm and slight imbalance of the parent’s gait.

If your parent’s voice is constricted, you may match that constriction in your own throat as you learn to speak.

What we mirror is influenced by many factors, including the personality that we are born with, our particular gifts, and our specific relationship with each family member.

whatever the origins are, our pattern of openness and constriction in the fascia can be recognized, and the constrictions can be released.

Here is another illustration of mirroring one’s parents’ holding patterns. Leslie worried about money incessantly. Although he was now comfortably retired, with money in the bank and a beautiful home, he still found himself feeling afraid each time a new bill arrived or the house needed repairs.

He knew that he had been brought up in an atmosphere of fear about money and that his father also worried that he would ...

Leslie recognized that this family attitude was based on his father’s childhood, during the depression, when his father’s family were very poor.

Leslie had a chronically deflated chest. Over the course of our work together, we had found a few different causes for this pattern, and it had begun to release. As Leslie spoke about his money fears and his father’s money fears, this pattern once again became more pronounced.

Now, as Leslie spoke about his father’s fears, I could see his father’s constricted chest within Leslie’s chest. It had a slightly different feel, more deeply shamed, and somehow more naïve than the mentality of the patterns in Leslie’s body that related to his own childhood history.

I asked Leslie to picture his father in front of him. “Where does he hold his fears about money in his body?” I asked.

As Leslie imagined his father’s body, his hands came up to his upper chest. “Here,” he said. “And in his solar plexus.” As Leslie experienced his father’s money fears in his own body, he also became aware of a deep s...

But I’ve never known what I was so ashamed about. This is his shame...

This was a pattern that Leslie had mirrored unconsciously at a very young age, along with an inexplicable sense of humiliation and worry about survival. But knowing that this was his father’s shame and worry, ...

Nu...

You are likely to constrict those aspects of yourself that are not met and nurtured by parental contact.

Circumstances later in life, or therapeutic methods, can help open and mature these dormant parts of yourself.

Sometimes relationships, especially intimate relationships with people who are not constricted in the same ways that you are, can help nurture those capacities that ...

The stimulation of education and art may also contribute to deepening these neglected and cons...

If your childhood capacity for love was not met with the response of parental love, for example, you may need to do the same focused release work within the constrictions in your chest that we usually need to do with protective holding patterns.

Compliance

Children thrive on approval. They are keenly attuned to the shifting winds of approval and disapproval in their environment.

If their intelligence is praised, it will deepen and mature. If their affection is appreciated, that will continue to blossom.

But if they are told, “Don’t be so smart,” they may actually constrict the instrument of their intelligence and abandon, to some exte...

Children are also sometimes told that their view of reality is incorrect. Their parents may adamantly insist, for example, that they are not angry or drunk or unhappy as the child perceives them to be.

Children may be faced with a terrible choice: truth or love. They can limit their own senses and intelligence and be cozily embraced by the family.

Or they can stick to their view of reality, shutting down their heart instead of their wits and enduring the family rejection.