Championing The Body
8 January 2022
We are taught to believe that within the human body, the brain is the master organ.
That cerebral pursuits outweigh physical pursuits (particularly when it comes to career choices), because being “brainy” equates to intelligence, and that stems from the revered mind.
But isn’t it time we gave the same reverence to the physical body?
We often ignore the messages from this brilliant, visceral being that we get to call “home”. Yet time and again, both in my own recovery and when working with clients, I get to witness the intelligence in the flesh that is the gateway to our life stories.
To who we are and what we have lived and witnessed. This is largely invisible to those looking at us from the outside.“Invisible illness” is at epidemic proportions and mainstream medicine still largely refutes the existence of so many of these syndromes when science has demonstrated otherwise.
The brain and memory can “forget” and disconnect in order to preserve us from horrific past events, but the lived experience remains.
Because the brain can’t access these events (implicit memory is another intelligent move our bodies make to preserve us), we are left instead with the physical experience of debilitating, confusing and frightening symptoms. Hypersensitivity has been tied to early trauma and sexual abuse. A 2019 study in the journal of Rheumatology showed that in a sample of 67,000 women, those with the highest incidence of childhood abuse, were at a three-fold greater risk of developing lupus than those who had not experienced abuse.
Survivors are also at an increased risk for developing serious autoimmune illness, chemical sensitivity, and allergy disorders. The correlations between early abuse and illness, disability, and neurodivergence are too many to list.
This is why craniosacral therapy is such a powerful modality and why I so passionately champion it. It allows us access to these unprocessed events without the need for retraumatisation. Even without the need to voice the back story. The body will tell it’s story when it senses there is a safe, relational space for it to start to let go of these undigested events.
How clever is that?
