Healing from Emotional Abuse: The Memory is in the Muscle

The memory is in the muscle. We hear people vividly taste remnants of the feelings surrounding old trauma when faced with a trigger of the context in which that original trauma was experienced. It’s truly as though the memory is in the muscle.

We know this phenomenon to be characteristic of post-traumatic stress. What’s unclear for many is how the emotional memory remains dormant in the psyche and in the tissue over months, years and decades.

It is as though all of the sensory neurons of the traumatized memory remain in tack. And once re-tasted, they carry much of the cognitive components associated with that feeling state.

There are a number of therapies designed to disentangle the memory on the neuro-sensory level. One very practical and cost-effective way of accomplishing the diffusion of the affective/physical and cognitive flood of such trauma is to ground oneself at its initial onset and recast the experience to be commensurate with one’s current surround.

This is easier than it sounds. In the face of the flood, let your attention go inward to the place in the body where you normally feel things. Chances are the experiencing of this memory will be magnified here.

In relation to this bodily felt sense, you can engage an innocent inquiry that has the potential for the memory to let go of you, and thereby lose its hold on your experience in the moment.

For example, you may ask yourself 4 questions from the Work of Byron Katie:
1) Is it true? (Is my perception true?)
2) Can I really know it to be true?
3) How do I react when I embrace this thought?
4) How would I be without this thought?

Then turn this thought around.....

To enhance the success of the procedure, let your attention be filled with breath and stay with that until respiration relaxes the physiology and grounds your mental emotional state.

If you walk into past trauma that remains dormant in your muscular memory, this is something you can bring into check. And over time, you will be pleasantly surprised at your ability to regain your current balanced demeanor of internal harmony.