The Impact of Emotion on Muscles and Bones

Part 2 of 3

Kathy lived for her horses. At every opportunity, she would be out riding, hunting, or competing in equestrian contests. Her enthusiasm and enjoyment, however, had for years been impeded by constant pain in her lower back and across her shoulders. Sometimes, the discomfort was so intense that she supplemented her normal painkillers with morphine, all of which, I hasten to add, had been medically prescribed. Aside from the drugs, the only help her doctors could offer was to advise bed rest. When she came to see me, she was stiff and unable to bend. Her pain was acute.

I asked her to stand for the healing treatment; and soon, she was involuntarily falling backward. As this process began, she entered a state of extreme anxiety. Obviously, she harbored a subconscious fear, almost a terror, of anything that suggested even leaning backward.

While immersed in this panic, she began to recall an accident she’d had as a little girl. Suddenly the whole memory released itself; she had fallen backward down a full flight of stairs. As soon as she fully recalled the incident, thereby releasing the emotion of fear, she began to relax. By the end of the session, Kathy’s pain and stiffness had disappeared. A few days later, she telephoned to confirm the transformation and reported that she was free of the pain and stiffness that had plagued her for years.

Kathy’s subconscious had remembered every little detail of the childhood fall down the stairs. Any movement that caused her to lean backward in any way was countered by subconscious stiffening of shoulder and back muscles, holding her in a forward position. Horseback riding only worsened her condition because that pastime involves a lot of backward movements, every one of which was causing Kathy’s body to overreact with opposing muscle contractions.

Kathy was in a phobia and her body was actually working against her. But once her subconscious had gotten its message across to her logical awareness, she was able to release her childhood fear of falling backward. Her subconscious then discontinued its response to that fear.

The reaction of the subconscious to backward falls isn’t always to tighten muscles of the back, neck, and shoulders. The underworld of the mind often calls upon other parts of the anatomy and induces a myriad of disorders, as it pursues with fierce determination its mission of guarding the body’s survival.

At one of my regular workshops, a young woman asked if I could do anything for the pain in her right leg. She had broken her leg just below the knee while skiing some eight months earlier. Surgery to repair the break had been a complete success, and the physical therapy had achieved what it was expected to. Nevertheless, she was left with acute pain at the site of the injury whenever she tried to go up or down hills or stairs. Her therapists had no explanation for the continuing pain, and they had told her that they could do nothing more.

I asked her to come forward and stand in front of me with her eyes closed. As soon as I started healing, she fell backward into my arms. I returned her to an upright position whereupon she fell again and I raised her once more. After we’d repeated this entire performance five or six times and she had stopped falling, I asked her to open her eyes.

“Okay, you’re healed.” I said

A look of disbelief crossed her face. “How do I know?”

I pointed toward the stairs just outside the meeting room and told her to go walk up and down them for fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes later, a very excited woman returned.

“My pain, it’s gone! Malcolm, what did you do?”

“When you close your eyes, your subconscious takes over, especially when someone with strong healing power is near. When you closed your eyes the main concern of your subconscious was the pain in your leg and what caused it, so it repeated what happened at the accident. You fell backward when you broke your leg, right?”

She nodded.

“Your subconscious went back in time and repeated the action that caused the accident. The only difference now was that I was there to catch you. And each time you fell, I caught you and stood you up again. After going through several rounds of this, your subconscious realized that the danger has passed and that falling backward doesn’t hurt your leg any more. So it withdrew the warning message of pain it was sending whenever you went onto a hill or a staircase, both of which it was recognizing as a ski slope.”

She gave me a look of disbelief, as if to ask, “How could it be that simple?”

“It’s really just body language,” I assured her. “All it takes to work it out is some intuition and common sense.”

Without the healing to release the trauma, this young woman might have been forced to endure years of debilitating pain. I saw her a few weeks later and she was still without pain. She was enjoying her new lease on life. Sometimes a second or third session with the therapist is necessary to completely reverse the subconscious instructions.

How resourceful the subconscious is! Its amazing ingenuity as it strives to keep us safe can keep us healthy, or, as with Helen, impose on us a terrible burden.

Twelve years old, Helen came to me with severe scoliosis, a lateral curvature of the spine. Her condition had first been noticed three years earlier, and since then as she grew, it was getting progressively worse. Adding to the problem was her exceptional state of stress. Although able to relax during physical therapy, she always returned to her agitated condition afterward.

During my questioning, with which I begin every consultation, Helen’s father remembered that Helen had run into a rope stretched across the lawn. The rope had caught her across the eyes and thrown her backwards, badly injuring her eyes, neck, and the right side of her body. This happened twelve months before anyone noticed Helen’s symptoms.

I decided to treat her standing up; and after a few minutes, she collapsed backward and tilted to the right. I caught her and let her go gently to the floor, where she immediately began to relax. We repeated this totally subconscious and involuntary action several times until Helen was no longer falling and could maintain her relaxed state.

I had no doubt in my mind that Helen’s scoliosis was due entirely to the body language of the subconscious. Having gone through the trauma of running into the rope, and the intense pain and fear that followed, her subconscious set out to ensure that no such accident would occur again. And, therefore, it tried to keep her height below the level of the rope she had run into. The more Helen grew, the more difficult it became for the subconscious to put this scheme into effect: it therefore tried to pull her down by tightening the muscles in her back thus creating the scoliosis.

When Helen left the consulting room, not only was she totally relaxed, she was also taller. As Helen fell gently into my arms, her subconscious relived the accident and the fear without pain or stress. It could then conclude that the danger had passed. After four more visits, Helen was emotionally free and resumed normal growth. This is a typical phobia. A subconscious fear resulting from a past trauma causing subconsciously induced physical symptoms.

Malcolm S. Southwood