Completing Your Recovery from an Injury
In your life, you may know individuals who have been injured who have never completely recovered from their injury. They still walk with a limp, or their posture is distorted, or they may still have pain or stiffness. If you see them in an athletic setting, you may notice that they may not move as well as before or that they may be prone to re-injury.
What does it mean? To answer that question, we should take a look at what happens in an injury situation. Whether the injury occurred in a sports situation, in a vehicle accident, or on the operating table, similar things happen. Number one is tissue damage. Bones get broken, ligaments get sprained, tendons get strained, muscles get torn, skin gets cut, etc. The usual stuff of injuries.
Tissue damage heals. So
why do the effects linger? Adhesions
and Trauma Reflex.
One commonly advanced explanation is “adhesions”. Adhesions are the body’s way of bandaging itself. Layers of connective tissue become “glued” to one another during the healing process, and that gluing restricts movement-especially desirable, during healing. Adhesions can easily be freed by massage, and those who have received physical therapy after an injury often receive massage, especially athletes. Why, then, do the effects of injury remain? Here is where the number two explanations come in, and it is at least as significant as the first: People cringe during and after injury and guard the injured part during healing. That action of cringing, known as “Trauma Reflex”, is a muscular act that often becomes a protective tension habit maintained as a learned response stored in the brain. Such a tension habit prevents a person from moving as freely after injury as before; more than that, it predisposes the tense muscles to contract first and to relax last in times of stress. It prevents full recovery from injury and may predispose a person to further soft-tissue injuries. More than that, the heightened tension in those muscles creates muscle fatigue and soreness—lingering pain.
Failure to release the cringing response predisposes one to further injury and creates the sensation of lingering injury.
Releasing the Cringing Response (Trauma Reflex) the cringing response cannot be released by tissue manipulation because it doesn’t originate in the tissue; it originates in the brain. The brain is largely an organ of learning or conditioning. Unlearning it can only end the cringing response. The idea of “unlearning” is an odd one. We are used to thinking of learning, of gaining new abilities. But consider this: every time you learn something, you unlearn something else; that is, you cease to do things the way you used to do them.
Since habitual cringing is a learned action, a learning-based approach is necessary for complete recovery from injury. The term for this type of bodily learning approach is “somatic education”. The word, “somatic” has to do with the experience of the body from within. That kind of experience is familiar to all of us-we have it when chewing, yawning, and in fact in any kind of action we control by feel. The word, “education” means “the development of greater competence or ability”. Somatic education increases ones control over ones own body. It is just that which is needed to release the cringing response.
For a more technical look at therapeutic methods of addressing the residual effects of injuries and a comparison to somatic education, read A Functional Look at Back Pain and Treatment Methods.