The Real Reason We Need Touch Therapy After Covid-19
Here’s the real reason we will need touch therapy after we emerge victorious from our social distancing: A spike in depersonalization and derealization.
Touch is a novel effector of afferent information — the nerve signals that inform our brain as to our embodied state. This make touch a vital tool in recovering from the potentially dissociative conditions of trauma. Improvement of these somatic reflex signals through bodywork ties us back into a calm and stable bodymind.
For some people with post-traumatic stress, symptoms go beyond the flashbacks, nightmares, sleeplessness, and tense feelings that trouble many. Up to 30 percent of people with PTSD also suffer from symptoms known as depersonalization and de-realization — that is, they experience “out-of-body” episodes or feelings that the world is not real. These disturbances to awareness and consciousness are known as dissociation.
Dissociation is a uniquely human trait. We are the only known bi-mundial species, living in the real world and also in the world of our imaginations. No other creatures can dissociate as we can. When the real world becomes too much to bear, we can imagine alternatives to reality.
PTSD with dissociation is recognized as a distinct subtype of the disorder. Without understatement it can range from mild, to absolutely terrifying.
The University of Western Ontario led a team of scientists in 2015 who used FMRI to compare activity in the brains of 49 people with PTSD, 13 of whom had been diagnosed with the dissociative subtype of the disorder. Their study also included 40 people without PTSD. The researchers focused their analysis on parts of the brain that connect to the amygdala, a small structure deep in the brain that is involved in emotion and fear processing. They examined connections to two parts of the amygdala: the basolateral amygdala, which evaluates sensory information and helps integrate emotions, and the centromedial amygdala, which helps execute fear responses.
They found that in the brains of patients with the dissociative subtype of PTSD, the amygdala was more strongly connected to brain regions involved in consciousness, awareness, emotional regulation, and proprioception (the sense of body position) than it was in PTSD patients without the dissociative subtype. The researchers say that patients' dissociative symptoms may be directly related to these alterations in the brain's functional circuitry, implying that the conditioning is somatic in many parameters.
If this topic resonates with you, you may as well want to read my Instagram posts where I share my perspective and learnings, along with evidence-based bottom-up healing strategies.
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