Memory Network
PART VI
Physical Memories
Physical memory is all about trauma. It is about biology-based, non-conscious action patterns that humans and animals execute when they are exposed to stress, threat, or injury. They dodge, fight, flee, freeze, submit, or surrender, etc.
The body draws from a library of possible motor responses supported by adjustments in the autonomic and somatic nervous systems. We see trauma if an event overwhelms the responses. The bodies of traumatized people portray ”snapshots” of their attempts to defend themselves.
Trauma is in essence a highly activated incomplete biological response to a threat, that is frozen in time. When our full neuro-muscular and metabolic machinery prepares us to fight or to flee, muscles throughout the entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness.
When we cannot discharge the huge energy generated by our survival preparations, that energy becomes fixated in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness.
Sensory feedback to the brainstem from incomplete neuro-muscular responses creates a state of acute & chronic arousal + dysfunction in the central nervous system.
