Do you sometimes seem stuck in vicious cycles of physical pain, trauma, anxiety or depression?  Have you ever wondered why your symptoms resist traditional treatment approaches?

Traumatic stress is the number one source of chronic pain, creating anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, musculoskeletal pain, and other illnesses. Understanding how it affects each and every one of us is the most important secret to healing.

According to studies in human physiology and biology, there seems to be a specific time or events that change human nature and human biology. There is a specific time when we begin to lose our health, happiness, and purpose in life.

Traumatic stressful events, like job dissatisfaction, painful childhood, mistreatment from others, physical and emotional abuse, medical mistreatment, stressful marriage, loss of a loved one, divorce, a car accident, accumulated stresses, etc., can exert positive or negative influences; however, this depends on how integrated and adaptive our nervous system is to the stress’s influence. What is so amazing is that almost all injury and illnesses are the direct result, or greatly affected by these unresolved stressful traumatic events. It appears that an individual’s biology gets attached to these events, and goes into survival mode or defensive postures, acting as if these hurtful traumatic events are still occurring. The attachment, both biologically and mentally, can keep an individual stuck and/or unable to move forward in life and become attached to the past.

When human beings are exposed to high-levels of dehumanizing stress, injury or painful experiences, like trauma, their brains disconnect from an inner feeling or felt sense of the body.  Their brains also disconnect from their bodies and emotions. This break in communication back and forth from brain to body can be caused by all kinds of life experiences. They often become numb to what is going on in the body and the precious ability to feel. We then lose our ability to focus and to communicate with the deepest most intimate part of ourselves.

Many people are not in touch with their feelings, wants, and desires. Often they are trained to ignore and set aside feelings, especially those weaker more tender feelings like fear and sadness.

This state of mind and the body is what we call “survival mode” because the brain and the body have purposely numbed out pain in order to go through life. However, as a result of this lost communication, physical and mental disease can creep up on them unexpectedly. In fact, living in survival mode, often in a post traumatic stressful existence, may be the only common link between most diseases!

So much of what keeps a person stuck and/or trapped is unconscious to them, that is, they are not aware of what is making them sick, anxious, or unhappy.

And even if they have some conscious awareness that their injury, sickness, or unhappiness preceded a particular event, they are powerless to do anything about it. It will result in a person doing harm to themselves in any number of ways ~ could be drugs, alcohol, workaholic, perfectionist, etc… the list goes on.

The good news is there has been a scientific breakthrough in the therapy field by Dr. Paul Canali who has founded Unified Therapy™, an interdisciplinary systemic treatment backed by recent discoveries in neuroscience, mindfulness-based psychotherapy, and somatic therapies. Unified Therapy™ unleashes the body’s natural ability to unlock chronic conditions, using a variety of techniques according to the demands of any given individual condition. By learning to re~establish broken connections between the brain and body, true innate healing will take place.

Unified Therapy™ activates the master healing system which combines the sympathetic mediating fight, flight or freeze and the body’s responses to stress and pain. The parasympathetic mediates repair and repose resting states, digestion and nutrient storage, and most importantly, the healing response. The most powerful biological automatic regulating system in the body controls, coordinates and reorganizes all the other systems in the body. This master system has the potential to release stress and trauma in such a way that it can turn previously painful experiences into life changing positive ones.

We can develop levels of skill that not only have the capacity to treat multiple conditions at once, but that can also prevent vulnerability to future recurrences. These abilities will normally remain underdeveloped and cannot be advanced on their own without the assistance of a trained therapist.

Integrative Bodywork seeks to express that Unified Therapy™ is not isolated to any particular individual application, method or modality – but to the overall understanding and principle of what happens to the nervous system, the brain, and our body’s biology under chronic repetitive stressors and trauma without release.

Such a discovery, as supported by larger research studies, will be known as a major breakthrough in the healing arts and sciences.

By Jim Fazio, LMT, CSI, UTP
Integrative Bodywork, Inc

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