Welcome to Trauma & Back Pain Recovery!

Trauma is a physical experience, memories of which are held in the body and the non-verbal areas of the brain. It can feel like tension, stiffness, pain, fatigue, agitation, breathlessness, a racing heart, and movement trapped in the muscles: the legacies of the Fight Flight or Freeze mechanism (the body's way of responding to danger). The Amygdala, the survival brain, which holds the trauma, doesn’t understand time or place, so when it is reminded of the original incident, it thinks it’s happening again and sends out the same stress hormones and signals into the body, making you feel the stress and fear in your body again. No matter what you do, you keep feeling the same pain and fear, seeing the same images, feeling the same physical sensations as on the day it happened.

 

Resolving such trauma requires working at the level of the nervous system and the body, below language, to reach and release unprocessed sensations. This is why I offer EMDR and exercise to help people recover from trauma linked to sexual abuse, abusive relationships, assault rape, difficulties during pregnancy or giving birth and other forms of trauma.

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EMDR helps you process sensation and experience so it can be moved to the Hippocampus, the Library of the mind and remembered, but not relived. Exercise and movement help relieve the physical legacies of trauma - pain, tension, restlessness, agitation, and help you regulate or calm your nervous system and even process some of the traumatic experiences which are held in the body, through Pilates, Boxercise, running and weight lifting/resistance work.

 

Trauma & Chronic Lower Back Pain

 

Trauma can make chronic lower back pain worse and even create it where there is no physical reason for the pain: the brain decides whether to make the body feel pain, taking account of signals it receives from the body about damage or potential damage (such as a signal that there is a disc pressing on a nerve in the lumbar spine), but also information from the sensory system about your general situation, how stressed or relaxed you are: the more stress in your life, the more anxious or depressed you are, the more pain you might feel. (Anxiety, depression and trauma all lower the level of serotonin and endorphins – the body’s natural pain killers – making pain feel worse.) 

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When the Fight or Flight mechanism is triggered, the brain instructs to body to literally fight the danger or run away from it. Stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, are sent into the body to get it ready for action: the lungs breathe faster, to take in more oxygen; the heart beats faster to pump the oxygen around the body to the working muscles and these muscles (the muscles which will move the body into fighting or running), contract. One of these muscles is the Psoas, part of the Hip Flexor complex, which lifts the femur, or thigh bone when you walk or run. It’s connected at one end to the top of the femur and at the other to each of the five lumbar vertebrae. It’s also linked to the iliacus muscle, which runs from the top of the femur to the top of the hip bones and the sacrum (bottom of the spine). If these two muscles are tight, they pull the lumbar vertebrae down on top of each other, squeezing the discs, and putting pressure on spinal nerves. A tight iliacus can also pull the pelvis into an anterior (forward) tilt, exaggerating the lumbar curve. Both of these actions can be a cause of pain in the lumbar spine and hips.

 

If you’re living with trauma, being regularly triggered, your Psoas and Iliacus will be constantly tight or contracted, another way trauma can contribute to chronic lower back pain. Trauma can also be stored in the lumbar spine as chronic pain.

 

NICE, The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, recommends exercise plus psychotherapy as a treatment for “non-specific lower back pain” (back pain for which no clear physical cause can be found), which is why I offer Pilates and EMDR as a treatment.