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Body Cells Carry Emotional Memory
Body Cells Carry Emotional Memory
By Boris Prilutsky
I found the theory that body cells carry emotional memories to be a true one. During my 38 years of clinical experience, numerous times I have witnessed the emotional reactions of my patients/clients to soft tissue mobilization. To more clearly explain this phenomenon, I would like to share one of my most interesting clinical experiences with you that support the theory of emotional memory being carried body cells.
Over 20 years ago, I treated one of the world-renowned boxers of the time from a shoulder injury. The right shoulder had a severe sprain/strain case with suspicion of possible rotator cuff tear. As with all such cases, after 24 hours of cold application procedures (cold application must be applied no more than 10-15 minutes and must be repeated every two hours) we started intensive massage therapy on the unaffected side in order to awake vasomotor reflex that will express by increasing blood supply to the injured extremities. I began to follow the treatment protocol for the above-mentioned purposes, starting to mobilize all groups of rotator cuff muscles layer by layer, as well as the anterior, posterior, and middle part of the deltoid muscles. As he was receiving the massage therapy, suddenly this big, tough, extremely strong man started crying, vocalizing sounds like that of a little boy. He was confused and expressed his embarrassment at breaking down in tears.
Being familiar with the theory that body cells carry emotional memory, I suggested to him to cry out whatever this emotional memory was. The sport clinical psychologist was informed of the incident. During his evaluation, this professional athlete, with the help of the psychologist, recovered a memory from his deep subconscious of an event that happened to him when he was eight years old.
Briefly, the story was that the boy's grandfather (his mother's father) once interrupted the constant fight between the boy's father and alcoholic mother; his grandfather attacked his father with a hammer. Afterward, the father was delivered in critical condition to the hospital and the grandfather was arrested. During this period of time, the little boy future boxing champion fell, off his bicycle and hurt his left shoulder. Crying, he came to his mom who was screaming into the phone, and asked her to comfort him because of the pain in his shoulder. His mother reacted in anger, and took his pleas as just whining for attention and she hit him with the phone a few times on this painful shoulder. All these years, on a subconscious level, this man carried difficult baggage of these memories of events related to losing the most important people in his life; his grandfather and father; and related to rejection by his mother. This kind of crying, emotional release tremendously helped this athlete to get rid of this subconscious trauma. This heavy emotional baggage was terribly disturbing and robbed him of a lot of happiness all these years, without him even knowing it existed. My experience has taught me that usually these emotional releases happen with people at the time when we perform massage (including deep tissue mobilization) in the inhibitory regime. Please be aware that emotional release may not be expressed by crying. Many clients may report to you that they have trouble sleeping and experience worry, or they may start shaking during the massage. Some of them will report unusual emotional sensitivity. Please explain to your clients that all above-mentioned reactions are very positive reactions and within the next few days of going through these reactions, they will feel a great deal better. Regarding the boxer whose case I presented to you, he later reported to me that he never thought that this subconscious baggage could destroy the quality and happiness of his life so much. He told me that thanks to this innocent massage therapy on the healthy shoulder, he was able to find peace within himself.
It's reasonable to assume that the memory of the emotional experience is stored somewhere in the brain - the system that is specialized in memory handling and remained inaccessible, as many other memories a human being experiencing during the life. But the shoulder cells hold the bookmark or a memory address of where the actual memories of the incident were stored in the brain. Thus by activating the shoulder cell you triggered the process of loading the content of that remote memory in the active memory, causing the aforementioned reaction.
As you can see from this episode, clinical psychology approach alone wouldn't be sufficient, because of the emotional memories carried by the cells of his body. Presently, I receive professional referrals from clinical psychologists.
Dear colleagues, I would like to encourage you to contact clinical psychologists in your neighborhoods and to offer them your services to incorporate massage therapy in their treatments. The Latin word "doctor" means educator. After being involved in many cases,at US it is clear to me that we should educate not only our clients about the power and importance of massage therapy, but also other health care practitioners.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Vlad on
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A meta-analysis is no good to us? You don't think that any clinician or or any "body" (meaning the likes of insurance companies, other healthcare bodies and other research bodies) might be interested in them?. They're useless, are they? And is that *all* he does, is it?
You haven't done your homework very well, have you?
You attack him and Raven and then come on here and brag about how much bloody experience you have and promote your classes like there's no tomorrow. And you don't apologize for trashing another persons work and you imply that any clinician would not take his work seriously?
You're a piece of work, Boris. You don't speak for this clinician - don't be so presumptuous in the future, please. You don't speak for all of us.
I'll be looking out for your class on Wolf Energy work when you advertise it on here.
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Permalink Reply by Gary W Addis, LMT on
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This is a silly argument. Both Christopher and Boris believe that massage can have a beneficial effect on the psychological/physiological health of the client. Phraseology is mere semantics--stupid, and creating hard feelings among people who believe that massage therapy should be the premier CAM practiced in America and the world.
Vlad said:
A meta-analysis is no good to us? You don't think that any clinician or or any "body" (meaning the likes of insurance companies, other healthcare bodies and other research bodies) might be interested in them?. They're useless, are they? And is that *all* he does, is it?
You haven't done your homework very well, have you?
You attack him and Raven and then come on here and brag about how much bloody experience you have and promote your classes like there's no tomorrow. And you don't apologize for trashing another persons work and you imply that any clinician would not take his work seriously?
You're a piece of work, Boris. You don't speak for this clinician - don't be so presumptuous in the future, please. You don't speak for all of us.
I'll be looking out for your class on Wolf Energy work when you advertise it on here.
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Permalink Reply by Boris Prilutsky on
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meta-analysis combines the results of several studies that address a set of related research hypotheses.usually one doing it when planning to write research protocol.otherwise for different "purposes" meta-analysis and all statistic that coming from it,having no value.you probably didn't born when I already participate in researches including being principal investigator.definitely I do not speak for you, but hoping that for many.you said:"I'll be looking out for your class on Wolf Energy work when you advertise it on here." it does means that you even didn't bother to find out that in my post I talked about youtube clip and not about classes.nothing wrong to talk about classes, this is what this site is for. To exchange ideas, experiences, knowledge as well to promote CEs and other professional events.you are very rude, and never again I would talk to you,
Vlad said:
A meta-analysis is no good to us? You don't think that any clinician or or any "body" (meaning the likes of insurance companies, other healthcare bodies and other research bodies) might be interested in them?. They're useless, are they? And is that *all* he does, is it?
You haven't done your homework very well, have you?
You attack him and Raven and then come on here and brag about how much bloody experience you have and promote your classes like there's no tomorrow. And you don't apologize for trashing another persons work and you imply that any clinician would not take his work seriously?
You're a piece of work, Boris. You don't speak for this clinician - don't be so presumptuous in the future, please. You don't speak for all of us.
I'll be looking out for your class on Wolf Energy work when you advertise it on here.
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Hi Gary.
I agree with you. It is silly , not professional, not productive as well as ugly. And only because :"prove me where this emotional memories stored?and no matter what you would answer, again prove me. How can I prove it to one who not spent day in treatment room but arrogantly distracting discussion. Even in disagreement have to be respect such as not to ignore any attempt to discuss particular issue.
Best wishes.Boris
Gary W Addis said:
This is a silly argument. Both Christopher and Boris believe that massage can have a beneficial effect on the psychological/physiological health of the client. Phraseology is mere semantics--stupid, and creating hard feelings among people who believe that massage therapy should be the premier CAM practiced in America and the world.
Vlad said:
A meta-analysis is no good to us? You don't think that any clinician or or any "body" (meaning the likes of insurance companies, other healthcare bodies and other research bodies) might be interested in them?. They're useless, are they? And is that *all* he does, is it?
You haven't done your homework very well, have you?
You attack him and Raven and then come on here and brag about how much bloody experience you have and promote your classes like there's no tomorrow. And you don't apologize for trashing another persons work and you imply that any clinician would not take his work seriously?
You're a piece of work, Boris. You don't speak for this clinician - don't be so presumptuous in the future, please. You don't speak for all of us.
I'll be looking out for your class on Wolf Energy work when you advertise it on here.
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Permalink Reply by Ravensara Travillian on
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Semantics is the study of meaning. We're arguing about the deep meaning of things; there's no "mere" about it.
If you don't think meaning matters, of course, then I can see why you would think there is no point to this.
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These guys just need podium and decided to choose my post/ discussions, to praise each other, and to promote classes.
Umm...*we're* promoting classes? And with that accusation, irony is well and truly dead.
Could you show us where either of us did so?
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Damn, Chris, you're good. If you're ever in the neighborhood, you have a standing invitation to guest-teach one of my neuro A&P classes.
Ravensara Travillian said:
These guys just need podium and decided to choose my post/ discussions, to praise each other, and to promote classes.
Umm...*we're* promoting classes? And with that accusation, irony is well and truly dead.
Could you show us where either of us did so?
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Thanks Raven. I hope we do get to teach something together someday. Perhaps we can look for opportunities to do so at future massage therapy conferences.
Ravensara Travillian said:
These guys just need podium and decided to choose my post/ discussions, to praise each other, and to promote classes.
Umm...*we're* promoting classes? And with that accusation, irony is well and truly dead.
Could you show us where either of us did so?
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Ravensara Travillian said:
Damn, Chris, you're good. If you're ever in the neighborhood, you have a standing invitation to guest-teach one of my neuro A&P classes.
Christopher A. Moyer said:
A visible scar stays in place, even though the tissue is replaced over and over again, so why not an invisible scar of trauma?
Hi Marion.
That's a good question. I'll leave it to Ravensara to answer it from a specific anatomical viewpoint, if necessary, but conceptually the answer to your question illustrates the point she and I were trying to make. Scars (actual physical ones) do indeed persist, even as the cells that make them up die off and are replaced. This illustrates that the scar is not 'in' the cells. Rather, the scar emerges when a collection of cells grow under certain conditions. Even though we speak of a scar as a thing, we might more accurately think of it as an event - it is a slowly changing phenomenon that has not physical 'thingness' by itself. If we could watch a scar with time lapse photography, we might be able to more easily see that it is like a wave on the ocean.
Similarly, and despite what other posters in this thread have argued, emotions and other mental events are not 'in' any specific cells. Like a physical scar, they are something that emerges from the coordinated activity of many neurons interacting with each other. Similar to the physical scar, an emotion has no 'thingness' but can more accurately be thought of as an event.
A traumatic memory and the associated emotions, then, is like other mental events including other forms of memory, emotions, cognition, and personality. Each of those has continuity within a person, even as the cells that make up the person's body can be changing. None of those things can be found in any cell, because they are properties that emerge from the coordinated activity of cells as they interact with environmental conditions.
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Christopher A. Moyer said:
Thanks Raven. I hope we do get to teach something together someday. Perhaps we can look for opportunities to do so at future massage therapy conferences.
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Boris, if we were promoting classes, the class would have to actually exist for us to promote.
Expressing the hope that we will have an opportunity to teach together someday is not promoting a specific class with details of when, where, and how much.
Boris Prilutsky said:
Christopher A. Moyer said:
Thanks Raven. I hope we do get to teach something together someday. Perhaps we can look for opportunities to do so at future massage therapy conferences.
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Ah, Raven. What you're arguing isn't any deeper than whose ego is larger. It's gotten to the point that you folks have begun to argue over who said rather than what said. Once again I remind that each of the combatants in this discussion is a skilled therapist interested in the care and feeding of MT clients. Umm, with the exception of Chris, a psychologist who apparently promotes the idea that therapeutic massage can help people to get in touch with their inner selves,in a psychological way. You ARE all saying essentially the same thing.
Semantics is the study of meaning. We're arguing about the deep meaning of things; there's no "mere" about it.
If you don't think meaning matters, of course, then I can see why you would think there is no point to this.
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