The power of touch is missed by too many. I picture a great number of people tensing to that very comment. As if proposing the felt sense as powerful in any other way than destructive is a joke. This image isn’t far from reach, it used to fill my head. Answer this, how many times have you pushed away your feelings? Ignored your needs, willed them gone and felt BETTER afterwards? Never. Your body and mind are far too brilliant. When needs go unmet, pain is the greatest motivator to pay attention. When the body becomes unbalanced rarely do we recognize the mental parallels. It is amazing how many physical disturbances follow psychological distress. If your sleep is off, if your bowels don’t work, you’ve lost your appetite, or if being touched makes you want to scream your entire being is thrown into disequilibrium. Years of ignored stress or a traumatic event can freeze our bodies in a state of fear and increased energy. Living in the present, both physically and mentally, is key to a fulfilled life- if you’re stuck in the past, you’re not healing in the present. Difficulty attending to bodily experiences is common among patients who have habits of disconnection from the body-due to chronic pain, trauma or other mental health challenges. You must know what is going on, inside of your body before you can appropriately gauge or react to you external environment.
You have to FEEL to HEAL. The leaders in the field of trauma treatment have recognized any effective treatment for trauma has to address these basic housekeeping functions of the body. Chiropractic is that missing piece. Chiropractic is the process of recognizing the body’s needs, so that you can finally meet and resolve them. Chiropractic is body based care serving to restore the maladaptive changes in body perception. The following principles are used as the building blocks contributing to trauma resolution 

Not just in the mind, but in the body. On a physiological level our bodies and mind work in tandem with one another. In a world where elevating our consciousness is more popular than ever we must honor the  medium of which our conscious interacts with this world. The vehicle through which we experience ourselves as human BEINGS is the felt sense. It is our sensations through which we gain knowledge of ourselves. A chiropractic adjustment  provides an opportunity, a real time experience in the present. It provides the body, and autonomic nervous system, an experience that deeply and viscerally contradicts the helplessness, trapped, collapse of trauma. The healing of trauma becomes a natural proses when an inner awareness of the body is accessed. Deep physiological resources are elicited through a chiropractic adjustment and specific exercise such as breathing, balancing, and awareness that remind the bod to be a participant in the healing process rather than a bystander hijacked by the process.

The answer to so many of our ailments lie around us. Moments before a lion catches up to a gazelle the gazelle collapses in defeat, immobilized. Fear takes control and the helpless animal is in a state of frozen protection. Microbes are found infecting the pools of stagnant water. Stagnation is illness in both mind and body. You must create movement for optimal health; movement in both the mind and energetic nervous system. There is no coincidence during a natural disaster, those that are mobile, those that are contributing to disaster relief are less traumatized than those immobilized by the experience. Life is no different than these simply metaphors. Movement is L I F E. The immobility response equates death. Traumatized people often have a deep distrust of their physiology. The arousal cycle becomes associated with the experience of being immobilized by fear. To overcome this, to resolve trauma, we must learn to move fluidly between instinct, emotion and thoughts. A chiropractic adjustment increases the ability to identify and contact bodily sensations, so we can identify our needs and begin to move towards meeting them.

We can be the architect of our own experiences. Pain and trauma are far too common to be completely avoided, but if we can learn to adapt to our environment they don’t have to be a life sentence. We combat stress by building resiliency. When we learn body awareness we are able to elicit deep physiological resources rather than being hijacked by them. We become the thermostats to our lives, not the thermometer.  In individuals with histories of chronic trauma the balance between fight and flight and rest and digest (called heart rate variability) and activation of particular areas of the brain show significant decreased in function, making it difficult to register internal states and assess incoming information.  Chronic stress shifts the bod into a state of increased fight or flight response. This state cannot be talked out of. It must be F E L T out of. Chiropractic adjustments can recalibrate the nervous system and increase HRV. Chiropractic increases resiliency to stressors. 

Chiropractic isn’t a substitute for current healing practices, it’s an adjunct to healthy trauma resolution. It is the body to the mind. Chiropractic incorporates more representation of the brain. More feeling. More healing. More YOU.

With love,
Brittnie