deep relaxation therapy
My deep relaxation treatment is designed to gently relax the hypervigilant and oversensitive mechanisms that produce pain. By finding the imbalances that overload them, the causes can be addressed. By finding the causes that overload the body and nervous system with chronic tension and helping these to heal through deep relaxation, stress and tension levels diminish allowing the body to heal and be more resilient.
Following are some of the causes:
Stress, Anxiety and Depression
Childhood Trauma
What makes deep relaxation’s approach to healing pain effective is that pain and emotions share the same neural pathways in the brain. Emotions not only modulate pain but have a direct impact on the experience of it, and its intensity. Many chronic pain patients have lower thresholds to experience negative emotions and mechanisms which help to reduce pain are compromised by prolonged stress and by anxiety and depression. Stress and anxiety, as well as unconscious conflicts, can eventually appear as physical symptoms in the body when emotional trauma (interpreted by the brain as danger) hasn’t been adequately processed by the mind. The initial task of the healer is to bring these protective mechanisms into awareness
We know so much more now about the neurobiological mechanisms of pain and how our emotions can engage them. Childhood traumas, for example neglect, abuse, abandonment fears, etc., can create danger/pain pathways in the brain as well as hypersensitivity that primes the neural networks involved in the nervous system’s response to potentially harmful stimuli in a way that can promote pain amplification in later life. Subsequent traumas over a person’s life reinforce the hypersensitivity, which can create an enduring cycle of pain, anxiety and, eventually, depression.
Emotions
Creation of Pain
The research of pioneering psychopharmacologist, Dr Candace Pert, has shown the impact of emotions on the body and the cells. What Pert and her team discovered is that in the neural pathways that transmit sensory data to and from our brain, trauma and stress are essentially information overload. Crucially, tension and stress, as well as emotional traumas that haven’t been healed, can create great disturbance in neural networks. Emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, joy, etc., have a biochemical response at the cellular level. The impact of stress and tension, as well as repressed emotional trauma, blocks the information molecules and disrupts cellular communication. When this disruption continues over an extended period the integrity of the cell is weakened.
The part of the brain responsible for storing emotional memories, the Amygdala, has a primary role in the transformation of stress and tension into physical pain. The Amygdala is intimately connected to the Autonomic Nervous System responsible for the fight/flight reaction in the presence of danger.
Symptoms arise when the brain creates pain to alert us to the presence of danger which can be damage to the body or simply a perceived threat which activates the danger signals. Fear, anxiety and anger, especially unconscious anger, activate the same signals, their pathways and the nerves that stimulate all the cells and fibres of the body. Not only does the perception of pain depend on how much danger your brain thinks you are in (and not on how much danger you actually are in), but emotional trauma also triggers the exact same danger/pain pathways that create pain from physical injury.
Research has found that the mechanisms which produce pain become more sensitive the longer the pain is present, so the brain requires less and less happening to create it. The longer we have pain, the better our warning systems become at producing it. Deep relaxation allows these mechanisms to let go and helps to break the chain of neural events which keep us in a state of chronic tension.