updated 10/29/05
The Body Remembers
How your body can “store” emotional experience in your tissues, and experience them again during massage therapy
by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MOREclose
Credentials and qualifications
I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.
For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.
Credentials and qualifications
I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.
For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.
Recently, a woman came to me with a question: “Why do I start crying when I go like this?” And she tipped her chin up into the air.
“Do you feel like crying right now?”
“Yes, but I can control it. If I stay here, though, it will get stronger until I have to cry.”
What on earth is going on here?
This is an unusually vivid and specific case of body memory or somatized emotion, a phenomenon well known to many massage therapists and mental health care professionals. More exotic examples come up occasionally, but the experience is stranger than the explanation.
Even after many years of scientific data (and New Age propaganda), most people still tend to believe that thoughts and feelings are abstract and have little or nothing to do with the physical body. The only widely accepted example of emotions affecting the body is the idea that stress aggravates or even causes a variety of conditions, especially heart disease. But the mind-body connection is more complex than that.
When you feel an emotion, you feel it all over: every cell in your body is involved
Emotions are a physical as well as a mental experience. An emotion is a set of physiological changes of all kinds, within a specific mental context. For instance, guilt is characterized by constriction of peripheral blood vessels and cooling, and increased blood pressure and muscle tone. A set of neurological and hormonal events also takes place, releasing a cocktail of molecules into the bloodstream that change the behaviour of every cell in your body. When you feel guilty, you feel guilty all over: your toe cells are affected along with your brain cells.
Muscle tissue in particular is involved in emotional experience. It constitutes a large and complex sensory organ (see The Sixth Sense), as well as an organ of action. A strong emotion can significantly alter the behaviour of muscle tissue, creating a strong, widespread, distinctive sensory experience. Even years later, stressing those tissues, or placing them in a position that physically recalls the circumstances of the original emotion, can recreate the sensory/emotional experience. In this way, emotions can become “carved in flesh,” a kind of memory — much the way a smell can evoke strong memories, a physical position or circumstance can evoke them too, and strong emotions along with them.
You can think of body memory as “long term memory.” If you have a fierce, passing craving for a chocolate bar or a wave of sadness as you’re watching the news, it probably doesn’t get stored in your muscles. The stuff that gets stored tends to be either chronic or intense. In other words, the important stuff: major themes and the crises.
Emotion stored in muscles is ancient history
My client was demonstrating a very immediate recovery of emotional experience from her tissues. Whatever it was, it was ancient history. If the original emotion was felt during a crisis, she would have remembered it. The alternative is that it had to be accumulating for a long time.
We all have emotional experiences, usually sadness and anger, stored like memories in our tissues, and it is usually not so obvious. In fact, most people are not aware of it at all: it all just blends into aches and pains, and feels like weariness or anxiety.
Fortunately, it’s a fairly simple matter to create a safe opportunity to dissipate and recontextualize body memory: another reason why people love massage therapy for reasons they can’t explain to their doctor.
