What If Healing Is Really Rewriting the Brain?
Neuroplasticity, the Body, Memory, and Why Your Past Does Not Have to Become Your Future
For a long time, we were taught to
think of the brain as something relatively fixed.
You developed a personality.
You formed habits.
You experienced things that shaped
you.
And eventually, that was simply who
you were.
We now know that isn't entirely
true.
The brain changes throughout life.
Experience changes neural pathways. Repetition strengthens them. Attention,
emotion, behavior, relationships, movement and environment can all influence
the way neural networks organize and reorganize.
This ability is called neuroplasticity.
And I believe it gives us an
extraordinary way of understanding healing.
Because if experience can change the
brain in one direction...
experience can also help change it
in another.
But what if healing involves even
more than changing the brain?
What if the nervous system, body,
connective tissue and energetic field all participate in carrying the patterns
of our experiences?
And what if healing occurs when we
begin giving that entire system new information?
Trauma Is Not Only Something You Remember
When something overwhelming happens,
we tend to think the memory of the event is the trauma.
But trauma can become much more than
a story stored in the mind.
The brain learns.
The nervous system learns.
The body learns.
If you repeatedly experience danger,
rejection, abandonment, unpredictability, criticism, abuse or fear, your system
may begin anticipating those experiences before they happen.
The brain is extraordinarily good at
prediction.
If closeness once led to pain, your
body may become vigilant when someone gets close.
If expressing yourself brought
punishment or rejection, you may learn to silence yourself.
If your childhood environment was
unpredictable, calm may eventually feel unfamiliar while chaos strangely feels
normal.
These aren't necessarily conscious
decisions.
They are adaptations.
Chronic stress can produce plastic
changes in neural systems involved in emotion, learning and stress regulation.
In other words, neuroplasticity
isn't inherently positive.
The brain can become very good at
practicing survival.
Eventually, a survival response can
begin to feel like a personality.
I'm anxious.
I'm insecure.
I'm an overthinker.
I'm bad at relationships.
I don't trust anyone.
But perhaps the better question is:
Is this who I am—or is this
something my system learned?
Because learned patterns can change.
The Brain Creates Pathways Through Repetition
Imagine walking through tall grass.
The first time, there is no trail.
Walk the same route repeatedly and
eventually a pathway forms.
Our neural networks work somewhat
like that.
Thoughts we repeatedly think,
emotions we repeatedly experience and behaviors we repeatedly perform can
reinforce particular pathways.
Eventually the pathway becomes
familiar.
Automatic.
Efficient.
That's wonderful when you're
learning how to drive.
It's considerably less helpful when
the pathway becomes:
trigger → fear → thought →
physiological response → protective behavior.
This helps explain why
intellectually knowing something is over doesn't necessarily stop the body from
responding.
Your conscious mind can say:
I'm safe.
while another part of the system
responds:
Last time this happened, we weren't.
Healing requires more than arguing
with that part of ourselves.
We have to give it new
information.
Memory Is Not a Video Recording
We tend to imagine memory as a file stored
somewhere in the brain.
Open it.
Watch it.
Close it.
But memory is more dynamic than
that.
Under certain conditions, retrieving
a memory can make aspects of that memory temporarily susceptible to
modification before it is stored again—a process researchers call memory
reconsolidation.
That doesn't mean we can simply
erase traumatic memories.
But it raises an extraordinary
possibility.
An old emotional learning can be
activated...
and something different can happen.
Old expectation
↓
new experience
↓
new information
↓
updated response
The past doesn't change.
But the meaning, physiological
response and predictions attached to the past can.
The past cannot be changed.
But what the past continues to create inside us can change.
But What If Memory Isn't Only in the Brain?
This is where the conversation
becomes especially interesting to me.
For years, bodyworkers have observed
something difficult to dismiss simply because its complete mechanism isn't
understood.
Someone receives massage or
bodywork.
A chronically tight area begins to
release.
And suddenly...
emotion appears.
Sometimes tears.
Sometimes anger.
Sometimes an unexpected memory.
Sometimes simply a profound feeling
of letting go.
I've witnessed versions of this kind
of response through healing work, and it raises an important question:
What exactly is the body holding?
Fascia is nothing like the passive
“wrapping material” it was once commonly portrayed as.
Fascia is a continuous, richly
innervated connective-tissue network involved in movement, proprioception, pain
and sensory communication.
And one of its principal components—collagen—is
piezoelectric.
Mechanical pressure and deformation
can produce electrical effects within collagenous tissue.
That is real physiology.
So touch isn't merely touching
“meat.”
Pressure, stretch and movement
introduce mechanical and sensory information into an electrically active
biological system.
And this opens a fascinating
possibility.
Does Fascia Hold Memory?
There is an idea within somatic and
energetic healing that the body holds the history the mind has not
completely processed.
We know chronic stress can alter
muscle tension, breathing, posture, pain processing, autonomic regulation and
movement.
Maintain those protective patterns
long enough and the body can become physically organized around them.
So perhaps when we say:
“the body remembers,”
we may be describing several
overlapping phenomena.
Continue reading the full article here...https://mountainrosehealing.com/articles/f/what-if-healing-is-really-rewriting-the-brain
Written by Araura Rose
Spiritual Counselor & Integrative Healing Practitioner
Mountain Rose Healing
828-367-7577
Remember who you have
always been.
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