Self Harm Scars
Last week I worked on a young woman with long-standing restricted left wrist mobility, preventing her from excelling at calisthenics loaded through her upper body.
After taking an extensive history it came out that she went through a period during her childhood where she began cutting her left forearm in attempt to cope with emotional abuse.
Like so many cases, this wasn't a suicide attempt, but rather a cry for help, an expression of loss of control over her own life, a mere sign that she was in fact, alive.
The correction here was two fold.
Firstly, we cleared out local nocioception in the scars. Particularly present were neospinothalamic dysfunctions, unsurprising due to the nature of the implement by which the scars were inflicted.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly we had to address the limbic connections to this area. As primitive and complex emotions are processed through different pathways and centers in the brain, we had to address both of these in turn.
While primitive, almost caveman-like emotions such as fear, anger, and suffering are processed through the spinomesencephalic tract, more complex emotions such as love, mistrust, and abuse are processed through pathways that terminate in the pre-frontal cortex.
The combination of these pathways and their interplay with far reaching structures in the brain dictate our emotional experience of the people and things we interact with in the world around us.
Just as sensory receptors often become highly sensitized after a trauma, these limbic pathways may replay a particular piece of an emotional experience on a continuous loop, preventing us from fully integrating or processing past traumas. Corrections through P-DTR allow us to finally integrate this information into the whole.
After working through the local nocioception and intense emotional connection to this part of her body, we were able to restore full range of motion within the wrist.
If you've tried all manner of physical modalities to deal with pain or movement deficiencies, consider that it just might not be entirely physical in nature.
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