Understanding Tissue Memory & Emotional Release

By Margarita Camarena, CMT

What is an emotional release?
While getting a massage, you might experience an unexpected welling up of emotion. It may be a sense of sadness or happiness, or some other emotion. It might be like a flashback, tied to a memory, or just the feeling. It might be linked to a part of the body, but it might also be the result of a certain posture. It can occur as much from a gentle touch as because of intense work on a trigger point. An accumulated emotion resurfaces after being unconscious and stored in some part of the body. This is an emotional release. It comes up without prodding, and often leads to a change in the quality of the tissue that is deeper than what just the bodywork would have achieved. What was chronically tight, relaxes. In massage parlance, we say that a "repatterning" happening. You could also say that a de-patterning has happened.

It is a not uncommon phenomenon in bodywork. Common enough, in fact, that inevitably most bodyworkers learn some way of working with it. If you get massage regularly, it’s very possible that you have already experienced an emotional release. 

"An emotional release can lead to a reduction of chronic tension in the body" 

Tissue Memory
An emotional release occurs because an emotion was stored in the first place. Tissues have memory. In fact, our bodies are incredible recording devices. You often hear of “muscle memory” in relation to athletics and the movement arts. We are accustomed to the idea that the body remembers actions; we might be less familiar with the idea that it also remembers feelings. A held emotion can lead to a holding in the body. The opposite is true, too: a tension in the body can lead to holding onto an emotion. It follows from this that releasing tension in the body might release an emotion, and that this emotional release can lead to greater openness in the body—as well as preventing a return to a state of tension.

Emotional stress creates physical tension, and vise versa. Just recall the last time you were nervous about an upcoming event to see how emotions affect the body. To experience the converse—how physical tensions affects emotion—put a small rock in your shoe, walk around with it all day, and see how hard it becomes to stay good humored as you go about a busy day! Usually this cross-traffic between emotions and the body are transient. Below we look at more at those cases when they become lasting.

Fascia
The main mechanism of tissue memory seems to occur in fascia.

Like an interconnecting web, fascia is a continuous sheet that wraps around all the parts of our body — our muscles, bones, organs, nerves, arteries, spine... Fascia moves with the body, and indeed makes the symphony of all our movements possible. Consequently restriction introduced into fascia by trauma will lead to a decrease in function in the tissues. To learn more about fascia, you can read a nice summary by my teacher John Barnes here. 

As Barnes notes, our common concepts of the body and the way it handles emotions and memory are sorely out-dated. There is a gap between common expressions like “heartbreak” and “butterflies in the tummy” and the fact that there actually is an emotion happening “there." Not making that connection, we don't realize that it can become stuck and show up as chronic physical tension. That's why emotional releases so often seem to come out of the blue.

Normally our emotions and body are in an ongoing exchange. This is natural as long as it remains fluid. The problem starts when there is a sufficient shock to either our emotional experience or our bodies. At that point, that traumatic experience can become locked in our tissues. It becomes a kink, interrupting that natural back and forth communication.

Such trauma doesn't just come from blunt force to the body. It also happens when the body seizes up due to a strong emotional experience, and then never quite relaxes back down. Chronic postures can also create a tension in the fascia that becomes associated with a certain state of being. The classic example of this is the slouched posture of a depressed person. The posture itself exacerbates depression (for example by limiting a full breath) and can maintain that depressed state even when the person doesn't 'feel' depressed.

Fascia stores our experiences, our movement, and the interruption of our movement. I leave it to someone else to provide more details about how this happens. The truth is that we don't fully understand how that relationship between mind, body, and emotions works. But as I mentioned above, as a bodyworker, I witness it all the time and have learned how to work with it.

This is what I will get into next!

"An emotional release cannot be planned" 

Experiencing an emotional release
Nicole Cutler writes that “Bodyworkers can utilize massage therapy techniques to unlock and free trauma, but only if the body is prepared for its release." There are many massage modalities that can help release trauma. I have found myofascial release to be particularly effective.

It is important to emphasize that you can't force an emotional release. It can only happen of its own accord, when the body, mind and the heart are ready. If one does occur, it should not be stopped or discouraged. On the contrary, what an amazing healing opportunity, to be able to go that deep and find the root cause of a chronic issue and finally work THROUGH it, not around it, and release it once and for all. It can be a powerful experience, but I never see become one that a client can't manage.

So how might an emotional release show up?

Take someone who has been in a car accident. The sounds and the impact are very intense. The crash of metal, the disorientation, the fear... all that stimulation puts the person into a heightened state of arousal. The moment is recorded like a snapshot. It might be recorded in the posture this person was in during the accident. Or it might be in the right hip, say, which suffered injury. Forward to years later. This person is getting a massage and out of the blue she is recalling the scents, sounds, temperature, and tastes of that accident. She feels that intense confusion and fear from back then and asks herself “What just happened? I haven't felt any of that in years!" 

“You can think of body memory as ‘long term memory,’" writes Paul Ingraham. "If you have a fierce, passing craving for a chocolate bar or a wave of sadness as you’re watching the news, it probably doesn’t get stored in your muscles. The stuff that gets stored tends to be either chronic or intense.” 

Here are some possible reasons this client's body stored the experience of the car accident:

• the intensity of the accident overwhelmed her capacity to digest it at the time
• the physical trauma was never fully resolved
• she was unable to fully digest some aspect at the time — for example her sense of fear had to be pushed aside to deal with the insurance company logistics 
• the experience became associated with a body part

She probably didn't realize this had happened. However ever since there might have been some chronic tension that never seemed to go away, even with a great massage.  

I should be clear that it gets more nuanced than this. But those nuances would turn a simple post into a much longer paper! After working with a lot of people having emotional releases, I can say that these experiences are profound and healing. This is the main thing I would like to convey. Emotional releases happen, there's no need to fear them and, in fact, they should be welcomed. As a therapist I continue to develop the skill to guide people through the process as deeply as they are comfortable going. “At the subconscious level, Fred Krazeise explains, "this [pain and sensations] is what your body has been feeling all along. In order to fully heal, these sensations must be fully felt so that they can be released.” 

So what do you do if you unexpectedly find an emotion come up while receiving a massage?

Encourage your body to go through it, feeling the emotion and following it to the area of the body that it connects to. Communicate with your massage therapist so they can guide you accordingly. Do not try to overanalyze the emotion. As one of my teachers says, “Don’t beat the puppy, it will not learn to sit that way.” Don’t beat yourself up if you start crying, screaming, getting angry, or simply start laughing like crazy. That is a great sign that some good healing is about to happen. Be gentle, let it happen at its own pace. During and afterwards, do not try to make a story of it.

"Don't analyze, experience." 

Be with the sensations of the experience as much as you are comfortable doing.And don't worry: you are more in control of the release than you might think. If it gets overwhelming, a good deep breath or a shift in posture will be enough to come out of it. It's okay to ask the massage therapist to pause. I usually switch gears into a different type of massage; this quickly brings things under control if needed. I also like to integrate Reiki into the session to help the physical and the subtle body integrate the emotional release. 

Don’t get in the way of your own healing. Allow yourself to go “there.”
I will be walking next to you.

Margarita Camarena offers Swedish, Trigger Point Therapy, Deep Tissue, Craniosacral, Stretching, Mobilization Work and Reiki at Atelier Emmanuel. She uses multiple modalities to reach the goals desired by her clients.