Imagine you're a gazelle out on the plains, grazing along and all around having a pretty good gazelle day. Suddenly you get a sense that something is off, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you sniff the air and get a whiff of big cat on the breeze. Your body shifts into high alert, diverts all energy to your senses, elevates your adrenaline and prepares you to either fight or run to save your life. 

This natural process we call "fight or flight" has been going on for millions of years. In our gazelle experience, if the predator stalked away instead of in our direction or even if it came at us and we were able to run away; this high alert experience would be followed by a period of shaking where our gazelle bodies would physically dissipate the adrenaline and fear left over from our near death experience. After the shaking ends, we'd go back to a relaxed state of open focus, calm and grazing as if nothing happened because we naturally released the trauma.

Humans & Trauma

But, if you'd been a human instead of a gazelle and a lion had tried to eat you, you likely would not let yourself shake or cry and scream to release the adrenaline and fear, especially if there were other people around. Humans mistakenly see any lack of self-control as a weakness which seriously inhibits our body's natural ability to heal itself. You could instead, be traumatized the experience. Thinking about it constantly, feeling a victim even though you survived, maybe taking pain killers, anti-anxiety meds or using drugs and alcohol to deal with the constant fear that the big cat is around every corner.

Your Body Remembers

The truth is most of us are constantly going through some updated version of this. Stuck in a loop of fight, flight or freeze whether we realize it or not, spinning around and around our unfinished business from the past with our nervous system stuck in high gear. This is why during or after a good MFR treatment you may start to shake, or feel the need to punch or kick, you may feel freezing cold or burning hot or feel very emotional. As we release your fascia and let your body unwind it will go back to the physical processes that were occurring within you when you were originally injured or traumatized, even if the original trauma happened so long ago that you don't even consciously remember it. You're body remembers and you're instincts still want to help you heal, if you let them.