Do you live with chronic pain, tension headaches, or constant aching in your body?
You are not alone. Fascia doesn’t just carry mechanical information, it carries emotional information too, which is why it matters so much for your mental health.
Your fascia stores your trauma and understanding it, can completely change the way you make sense of your body, your emotions and your pain.
It explains why your back pain isn’t just about posture, why your neck and shoulders ache when you’re stressed, and why healing from trauma requires more than just talking, stretching or strengthening.
How your body keeps the score
During overwhelming or traumatic experiences, your body instinctively goes into a fight, flight or freeze survival state. Muscles tighten, breathing changes, and your nervous system moves into survival mode.
But when your body can’t complete the actions it wants to take at the time, these survival responses can become stuck.
For example a fight or flight posture might show up as bracing through the chest, shoulders pulled up or the chin jutting out.
And a freeze posture often looks collapsed with slumped shoulders and a lowered chin.
All this unresolved stress influences your posture, the way you move, the way you breathe and your emotional patterns.
When these patterns become habitual, they can lead to long-term tension, nervous system dysregulation and chronic pain.
What is Fascia?
Imagine peeling an orange. There is the outer peel, and then underneath that there is the white pith and each little orange segment has its own membrane.
That’s what fascia does for your entire body. It’s a network of thin casing of continuous connective tissue, from the top of your head to the tips of your toes that wraps around every bone, muscle, organ, blood vessel, and nerve in your body. It links every cell in your body.
Fascia is incredibly sensitive – it responds to your emotions, beliefs, past experiences and stress levels. It keeps everything supported, connected and communicating. This is why the body truly keeps the score.
When you’ve spent years holding everything together, coping with trauma, staying strong, or stuck in survival mode, your fascia reorganises itself to protect you.
When you are hypervigilant, you can feel it in your body – your neck and shoulders tense up, your chest tightens, your belly contracts – and your fascia thickens and tightens and forms what feels like a fascial suit of armour.
Fascia, Chronic Pain and the Nervous System
Fascia is sensitive, responsive, perceptive and it is deeply connected to the autonomic nervous system, your enteric nervous system (gut) and your immune system.
It influences:
- pain perception
- emotional regulation
- breathing
- digestion
- your sense of safety
When your fascia becomes restricted, your nervous system becomes more reactive and this is why chronic pain is often a nervous system issue, not just a structural one.
The fascial network is now considered to be your largest sensory organ with more than 250 million nerve endings! That’s a lot of nerves in your fascia and this includes nerves for pain.
Fascia contains six to ten times more nerve endings than your muscles or your skin.
Sensory neurons send messages from the body UP to the brain via the fascia, to communicate about the body’s internal state (interoception) and position (proprioception).
This is why it’s so important to use a bottom up (body), rather than a top down (cognitive) approach when healing trauma.
Your pain isn’t “all in your head.”
It is also worth mentioning that pain is a protective signal, not always a sign of damage. Instead, pain is influenced by:
- biology (genetics, inflammation, injury, load, vagal tone, hormones)
- psychology (thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, past experiences, predictions)
- social factors (relationships, society, work, community, culture)
If you’ve suffered with chronic pain and been for various different bodywork treatments that temporarily ease the pain, but don’t seem to last, then you’ll know how frustrating it can be and how helpless you can feel.
This isn’t because you’re beyond help. It’s because fascia responds directly to your emotional state.
If you’re a woman living with trauma, chronic pain or long-term tension, your body may be holding patterns of survival that it never got the chance to complete.
These patterns can create physical pain, emotional overwhelm and ongoing nervous system dysregulation. Healing must therefore include all parts of you.
This is where Polyvagal, trauma sensitive sequencing psychotherapy creates long-term change. I specialise in recalibrating the nervous systems of traumatised women to help you to gently release survival patterns held in the fascia.
Working with the nervous system allows your body to:
- unwind bracing patterns
- release stored emotions
- improve vagal tone
- restore safety
- reduce chronic pain
- recalibrate the nervous system
If you’re ready to feel safe, at ease and more like yourself again, please contact me to arrange a call back: www.caroline-king.co.uk