Unlocking the soul: from hopelessness to healing

The secrets of the psoas muscle.

I started getting tummy aches and headaches in my childhood. By the time I was 23 my psoas muscle would pull my hip out of joint on a regular basis. The psoas muscle is in the lower lumbar region of the spine and extends through the femur to the pelvis. 

I remember being in a physiotherapist session and she had adjusted my hips back to where they were meant to be. Within the session they pulled out of line again. All because of what I was unconsciously bracing myself for. The pain became more and more debilitating and no amount of pilates, yoga or physio seemed to have a lasting effect. 

What did have a lasting effect was getting those frozen emotions out.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

There’s now a protocol called the Trauma Release Experience. This goes through a set of poses and positions in order to discharge any stored up emotion. However, as Irene Lyon (an expert on how past trauma affects the body) says, not all trauma can be released through shaking it off.

I got a tennis ball. The pain was deep in my right glute so I got the ball and sat on it. Then I let whatever emotions come out of me. An image of a black panther came to me and it felt like it roared out of my body. I roared and growled and sobbed my heart out.

The pain went away.

Photo by Magdalena Kula Manchee on Unsplash

Since then I’ve learnt more about the psoas muscle. It’s referred to as the ‘muscle of the soul’ and holds on to traumatic experiences on a cellular level. It is linked to our reptilian brain.

It’s where our survival instincts - our fight and flight responses - are embodied. During traumatic experiences our nervous system reacts to the threat and the psoas muscle responds by tightening and contracting as a means of defence and protection. 

When the psoas muscle is that activated, it’s terror that’s trapped inside.

Freeze!

Do not breathe 

Do not blink

Do not run

Do not think.

This terror shall soon subside.

Play dead!

Stay mute!

Go numb!

Take root!

This terror shall soon subside.

And the strain it slithers

And the sting it seeps

And the harm it hurts

And the pain it creeps

For it’s terror that’s trapped inside.

The freeze response is an involuntary physiological response that happens in the mind and body when a person feels threatened and there is not the opportunity for escape.

Why am I telling you all this? Well the feeling of the week this week is hopelessness (sorry folks) and I think that hopelessness is really embodied by our freeze response.

As Brené Brown states, 

Hopelessness comes out of negative life events and negative thought patterns with a perceived inability to change our circumstances. 

A freeze response is an instinctual and unconscious reflex which most living beings can go into, from insects to polar bears. You may have heard of that poor gazelle on the savannah who survived through feigning death (it’s just a scenario that gets repeated a lot when people talk about trauma), it’s predator fooled into thinking that its prey was dead and it could take indulge itself in a pre-dinner meander before tucking in. This was enough time for the gazelle to up and leave and live to tell the tale.

In other words, during an inescapable shock the freeze response, through feigning death, can be life saving.

However, when there have been various experiences of this inescapable shock, the freeze response can be triggered, even if there is the opportunity of escape. As my lovely little psoas muscle will attest.

The ability to problem solve, learn, the opportunity to fight or flee are all sacrificed for what is known as ‘learned helplessness’.

I can’t say I like that term very much, I mean, I understand what they mean by ‘learned’ from a behavioural psychology point of view, but for those who have found themselves in freeze response time and again due to circumstances out of their control, it has connotations of an active voluntary participation in some way.

Just me? What do you think, I’m I being too thinky about it?

The term you may be more familiar with is: trauma.

When we have a threatening experience that is or seems inescapable due to our weakness and vulnerability we experience trauma.

Trauma is often seen in two ways:  big T trauma, such as life threatening experiences, serious injury or sexual violence and small t trauma; events that are beyond our capacity to cope. Small t traumas can be cumulative so that, whilst one incident in and of itself may not seem ‘that bad’, the cumulative effect can be devastating. 

Personally, I'm not that fond of the label big T and small t and wonder whether 'acute' and 'chronic' may be a more suitable differentiation.

In order to process the freeze response it is apparent that we need to go through a ‘freeze discharge’.

This needs to be at a bodily (somatic) level as it is the nervous system which needs to come out of the freeze response, not a conscious process of us just needing to ‘reframe our story’ or ‘change our mindset’. When we are in this state our prefrontal cortex, which makes such things possible, has gone offline which means that what we are experiencing cannot be processed by our logic or cognition.

We have to work with the body.

The first thing to do is recognise that you have gone into a freeze response.

Physically you may feel:

• Cold/numb

• Stiff or heavy limbs, but with a sense of energy built up within

• Hyper alert to surroundings

• Shallow rapid breath

• Increased heart rate.

Then, finding some ways to connect in with yourself physically is important:

Wiggle your toes and fingers because having some movement is important to get you present and realise that you do have an opportunity to do something different. It may be helpful for this small movement to be imperceptible to others, for some this can increase a sense of safety which helps .

Focusing on regulating your breathe, focussing on a slow exhale breath which helps to activate the parasympathetic system.

We can slowly look around us and find three things that we like in our surroundings, noticing them in real detail - the colour, the texture, all help to connect to the present moment.

What is key is that we do things so that we can experience not only a sense of external safety, but also of internal safety - that we can notice somewhere in our body where we feel ‘ok’.

However, if you have an ongoing chronic freeze response it needs more intensive trauma therapy that works on a somatic level.

For me, somatic work has included psychodrama, EMDR, EFT, somatic experiencing, TRE trauma release, yoga, acupuncture and cranial sacral therapy.

Story telling helps the prefrontal cortex with reframing and making new meanings from what has been experienced, so that emotions can become regulated more easily. For me it has been through psycho-education (it can be about ‘receiving’ the story telling as well as ‘giving’ the story telling), talking therapy, no send letters, poetry, performing and 12 step work. 

I once heard someone say that hope is knowing where to go for help and, I guess, hopelessness is the opposite. I hope that, by sharing this, it helps you to have an idea of where to go to help if you need it.

I also want to offer up three podcasts of mine which talk about trauma healing. If you have a listen let me know what you think!

The first is with Lucinda Gordon Lennox, author of ‘Nobody is Broken.

Then there is Lou Lebentz, creator of The Voyage, a programme educing therapists and coaches about trauma.

And finally, Megan Febuary on writing to help you process trauma.

Nothing like starting the New Year on a light note, eh?!

Finally, did you catch that I am running a FREE writing workshop NEXT week on hope? Check out what I wrote about it before, or clickety click the old button to sign up here!

That’s it for now,

‘Til next time.

Jacky x