Does fascia hold memories?

Over 15 years ago I wrote an article called ‘If your tears could talk, what would they say?’ It was published in a national massage magazine at the time called Today’s Therapist.

This phrase is often said by my own myofascial training and is a phrase I have often used with clients. The suggestion is that tears may be associated with life issues or challenges. Creating a safe therapeutic environment and giving the client permission to express their tears can often be a cathartic and meaningful experience. While my MFR practice focuses on working with those experiencing chronic pain, often a story eventually unfolds of life-threatening injuries or surgery, rape, abuse, bullying and claims of torture.

One client described being abducted at age 3, beaten and left for dead. Another described being in prison in the middle east and tortured by electric shock. These clients don’t attend MFR treatment because of these issues but do begin to realise that they may play an important role in their pain experience.

Does fascia hold memories? This is also the title of a 2014 journal study by the Osteopath and Physical Therapist, Paolo Tozzi (Tozzi, 2014). Tozzi describes much of the misinterpretation of this idea and comments that unwinding, a spontaneous movement associated with fascia-related therapies such as MFR said to release trauma, is both controversial and phenomenological. The body is one single organism which constantly adapts to its internal and external environment to preserve life. Therefor blessing or blaming individual parts for an action or reaction suggests a myopic viewpoint. Such is the world of fascia.

My own MFR training in the USA was hugely experiential sometimes with up to 180 people attending who were a mix of Physical Therapists (Physiotherapists) and massage therapists. As I began my MFR journey, I was fascinated at the potential for the body to harbour memories said to be stuck in fascia. However, over my career having taught in a number of different countries, I have come to realise that expression of emotion and the openness of discussing trauma is influenced by culture, belief, attitude and resilience amongst others. It seems that emotion and trauma memories are very openly discussed in the USA, less in the UK and hardly ever in South Korea. Therefore, as I reflect on my writing some 15 years ago, what has changed? Unwinding is a very generic term which describes body movement as a response to fascia-oriented therapies such as MFR and Craniosacral Therapy. Through gentle and sustained MFR, the client’s body will begin to move into patterns that are meaningful to them. However, these movements are unconscious; the client thinks and feels that you are moving them. Often, the client also expresses emotion such as tears, laughter, anger or fear.

For the client, unwinding can feel very liberating where they have an opportunity to say and do something they haven’t been able to before. The suggestion is that the traumatic memory has caused a dissociation that has never fully resolved and as a result, the trauma is replaying in the client’s fascia causing dysfunction and pain maintaining the fight and flight response. It is also suggested that unwinding allows for a re-association of these memories and a resolution of the actions and reactions to historical life events identified. A little like putting the fractured jigsaw back together again.

I’d say at least 85% of my clients over the last 2 decades are those experiencing chronic pain. Working with people who have had long-term chronic pain is very different to working with those experiencing acute pain. The chronic pain client presents with a complex array of physical and emotional symptoms including the life events previously mentioned. Many of these clients claim to have been let down by traditional healthcare and instead have turned to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Additionally, it is not unusual for some of these clients to have beliefs regarding the origins of their pain including past life adversity, inheritance, a challenging birth experience and blocked energy. This means that you are constantly developing strategies to work with your clients that meet their needs without judgment.

You cannot make someone unwind. It is not a technique that is done to or on someone, but it is a spontaneous response to touch in the therapeutic environment thought to be part of the body’s self-regulating systems.

Usually, unwinding is synonymous with piezoelectricity which is described as a low load pressure from the therapist’s hands that creates a chemical and physical reaction in the tissues. It’s a bit like the therapist’s hands charge the tissues and the result is movement or a tissue release. Incoherent disordered body energy, electro-magnetic fields and morphic resonance as described by Tozzi (2014) are also thought to change as energy flows through the microtubules of the fascial matrix as information.

That information is suggested to be our consciousness. It is said that MFR releases the fascial restrictions allowing unconscious memories to bubble to the surface and tell their story as movement and emotion. Hence, why trauma, considered to be blocked energy, can be resolved with unwinding. As I step back and reflect, there is plausibility to these concepts. However, not knowing anywhere near enough about Quantum Physics I can’t critically evaluate them and as a result I prefer to take a sidestep and have a different viewpoint.

It is true however that this spontaneous movement happens, and I have seen many of clients and workshop students benefit from the experience. But it is not unique to fascia-oriented therapy. The same type of movement is seen in hypnosis and the evangelical church. Also, when openness to discussing trauma and emotion exist, it does seem to have a positive correlation with the unwinding process; more discussion of emotion seems to equal more unwinding. Does this suggest that fascia is different in different cultures and countries? I think no would be the answer to that question leading us in another direction.

So, what might be the origin of this unwinding movement, and can it help trauma?

It was Viola Frymann, a British doctor who later became an Osteopath after emigrating to the USA, who is attributed with first describing this movement that she called Fascial unwinding (FU) in her teachings of Osteopathy from the 1960’s. In ‘The Collective Papers of Viola Frymann: legacy of Osteopathy to children’, (1998) Frymann states about FU that ‘The principle of this profound technique is to place the patient in the position that they were in at the moment of injury, and permit fascia to go through whatever motions are necessary to eliminate all forces imposed by the impact’.

Additionally, Budiman Minasny (2009) also sates ‘...the dysfunctional tissues are guided along the path of least resistance until free movement is achieved.’

Barnes (2020) goes further to describe unwinding as, ‘The beauty and power of myofascial unwinding is that it finds positions of past traumas that are somehow embedded in the fascial system. When these positions are found, the subconscious holding patterns, start to release their iron grip on our clients, and the straitjacket of fascial restrictions begin to soften, melt, rehydrate and glide.’

All of these descriptions suggest that fascia is attributed with some form of dysregulation and with the unwinding process. Some research has suggested that fascia will thicken in response to stress as its main cell, the fibroblast, can adapt and change into the contractile myofibroblast cell and could be the origin for low back pain (Schleip et al. 2019). Additionally, chronic inflammation catalysts a series of changes that initiates an adaptation of the fascial system reducing tissue hydration and glide (Francá et al. 202), (Pavan et al. 2014) and (Zullo et al. 2017). Fascia contractility has also been studied in the formation and dysregulation of scar tissue (Darby at al. 2014) ands (Wipff and Hinz 2008). However, fascial adaptation takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight. An important note here is that chronic inflammation can play a role in fascial dysregulation and ultimately causes what the Steccos’ call fascial densification (Parvan et al. 2014). Inflammation can also be caused by a dysregulated SNS derived from very individualistic and unique reasons. Here is where the potential for trauma may fit but, this still does not allude to the storage and subsequent release of memories or emotion from the fascia or the process of unwinding. Looking at the concept that fascia holds memories on face value, all cells have memory.

This was a big factor during the pandemic that once you had the Covid-19 virus or the vaccine, your adaptive immune system remembered the virus and encoded its cells to respond accordingly. All cells can be programmed to adapt to their environment. Once a cell is programmed to perform a certain action, it can pass the memory of that action to daughter cells. This is no different with fascia. The fascial cells have the ability to memorise what they need to do to keep fascia healthy. When the cellular environment is compromised, cells can become dysregulated and memorise inappropriate programming that leads to further dysregulation. But this is not the same as fascia replaying a movie of a traumatic event. Gabor Maté in the movie ‘Wisdom of Trauma’ describes trauma as ‘not what happens to you. It is what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you.’ This is a better viewpoint to take when working with any client experiencing emotion during a treatment.

So far, we have discussed some potentials for cellular memory and trauma. In the next edition, we will go slightly further into the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, self-regulation and take a look at their relationship with unwinding and trauma.

Both parts one and two are below. Part two has all the references,.

Does fascia hold memories? part one

Does fascia hold memories? part two

If your tears could talk, what would they say?

The short podcast interview. This is an Aigen interview discussing these two articles.