SHEN works: Hands-on Help for Emotions, Pain and Trauma

Research has shown us that our bodies react to emotional pain the same way they do to physical pain–by contracting in an automatic reflex.  In other words, our bodies tense up in an involuntary grip when we experience emotional pain such as grief, fear, disapproval, shock, helplessness, revulsion, horror, belittling, shaming, demeaning, isolation or terror, the same reflex which happens if we are physically injured.

Our bodies react whether we are actually physically wounded, emotionally wounded or if there is impending, anticipated or imagined pain.  A heart clenching in grief, a sinking feeling in our gut, a jaw tightening enough to injure the TMJ or a stomach knotting in fear, are examples.

When you watch an infant, an animal or a young child, you can clearly see them contract physically when they are startled or scared. It is easiest to see the contraction in the young, but that reflex happens and is perceivable at every age and with every species, down to a one celled amoeba.

This automatic physical contraction is called ACPR (Auto-Contractile Pain Response), also known as the "splinting reflex" in humans.  It is an involuntary reaction that temporarily tightens or immobilizes an area in your body. This is inborn, it is your body's way of protecting itself and minimizing tissue damage, such as from a broken bone's sharp ends.

This gripping reflex is swift and sudden and usually releases as soon as the perceived threat passes. How fast one relaxes and how much one lets go depends on several variables, but if a painful experience is intense, shocking, or happens repeatedly, the physio-emotional grip releases more slowly, or not at all, and the tension is retained in our body.  Repeated experiences produce further contractive response, which then layers on top of the original unreleased tension, until one is living with layers of chronic tension, with deep tension carried within our bodies.

Our minds may or may not consciously remember the painful experiences in our past, but our bodies do.  Retained internal tensions constrict our organs and impede the circulation of our internal fluids, which inhibit the functioning of our muscles and our joints.

The consequences of deep bodily held contractions are far-reaching and show up over time. Tension, stress and impaired mobility can readily be seen in the distorted appearances of so many people, in misshapen postures, in inhibited or imbalanced movement.  All you need to do is look at many of our senior citizens to see the results of what retaining physio-emotional tension internally for decades does.

I believe that buried physio-emotional contraction is a major factor in deterioration as age advances, but deterioration is NOT inevitable, and in most cases it is not irreversible.  Many of the seniors I work with say that they feel (and they look) decades younger after a short series of SHEN therapy.  All of them have regained or increased mobility and flexibility in physical movement and/or thinking.

With SHEN, you see and feel an enormous difference when these contractions dissipate.  For example, an amazing transformation happens when contractions and tension in the facial muscles release: your natural, true expression emerges. Your appearance can change so dramatically that one client called SHEN her "holistic, organic Botox - except that my muscles can move!"

Emotions and Disease

Science has shown that emotional responses to physical experiences can lead to the onset of physical disorders, and that bodily held tension/contractions adversely affect the muscles, nerves, tissues, organs  and glands at the physical site where the emotional trauma was experienced. 

Until recently, how retained tension affected our health was not clear.  We now know that unreleased tension contracts the body and impedes normal blood flow.  Deep tension interferes with normal metabolic processes, preventing cells from fully receiving nutrients and fully releasing waste products, thus hampering cellular functioning and causing disease.

For example, long term fear or anger has been linked to stomach and digestive problems as well as insomnia and eating disorders. Feelings of shame and low-self worth have been frequently found to be a common component in prostate, feminine and menstrual difficulties as well as sexual dysfunction. Grief will constrict the area around the chest and is often a significant factor in respiratory conditions as well as in migraines and headaches (constriction at the vagus nerve and/or the baroreceptors interferes with blood flow return from the head). Retained grief is also a significant factor in numerous heart problems.

In fact, studies have shown that a high percentage of patients in cardiac units have suffered major grief six months to a year before having a heart attack.

The immune system is also affected by grief as contractions around the heart suppress the activity of the thymus gland, which activates the T-cells.

Very often, too, it is these internal contractions that are responsible for many conditions labeled neurotic or 'psychosomatic'-- conditions when medical examinations find "nothing physically wrong."  Internally held contractions trapped by ACPR and retained in our body affect not just our physical health and our appearance, but strongly influence or even dominate our emotional state:  how we feel and how we react to present time situations.

Most of us are still carrying internalized pain today from earlier experiences in our lives. We have had physical injuries such as accidents, trauma, or surgery, had traumatic births and/or childhoods, lost loved ones, suffered shame, isolation and belittling or have had abusive relationships.

A lot of us have worked hard to find and to understand the past events that shaped our current responses to life, only to discover that learning the origin of our feelings did not entirely free us, and we still find ourselves with old emotional reactions that keep surfacing (often inconveniently) in response to certain people or circumstances.

We all know people or are familiar with finding ourselves "shrinking in fear," "feeling our heart sink," "numbing out," "in the grip of terror," saying yes when we want to say no, "exploding in a fit of rage," "overwhelmed by grief" or "reacting just like my parent(s) did."

It is these buried, trapped emotions birthed in our past but held in our bodies which dominate us and drive us to think or say or do these things we wish we hadn't. Much of what appears to be dysfunctional behavior is actually our inner self exacerbating painful emotions in an attempt to throw off these intense internal contractions and heal.

Until they are dissolved, these feelings, thoughts and reactive patterns birthed in the past and retained in our bodies continue to influence how we relate, how we feel, and how we live our lives today.  These somatic (body) tensions hold the memories of past events, our beliefs and our reactions to those events. They can show us the decisions we made about ourselves and about life during those earlier experiences. They can be a key to discovering unconscious, habitual, restrictive or destructive ways of being and reacting to life's events, and the decisions our younger selves originated which still affect us today. 

SHEN Therapy offers an elegant solution to Fritz Perls' statement that emotions have a life cycle with a beginning and a natural ending which is often not completed and remains inside us until it is, affecting how we feel and everything we do.

The precise and powerful hands-on techniques of SHEN Therapy have been developed, refined and continually tested for nearly 30 years with clinical studies and in professional practice application to dissolve those internal contractions.

Healing the World one SHEN session at a time

Those who practice Vipassana and other forms of meditation, Jungian dreamwork, yoga, rebirthing, cognitive therapy, sensory awareness, subtle energy work, reiki, and Ekhart Tolle's "Power of Now," especially will appreciate the easy elegance and effectiveness of SHEN therapy.  

As focused chi in a SHEN session relaxes and dissolves buried internal tension, it loosens the grip of what Eckhart Tolle calls 'the pain body,'  freeing one from the effects of the past, and bringing insight and awareness. One by one, SHEN clients come to move, be and live in the now of present time.

Next: During A SHEN Session