In my 22 years of touching more bodies than I can possibly count, one of the things I have loved most is working with the wild miracle of scar tissue.
Our physical bodies respond to a traumatic injury at a cellular level with what’s commonly called a “healing cascade” - inflammation at the site of the injury felt as swelling, flushing, bruising, other changes in texture & color, and the spectrum of don’t-touch/stop-moving sensations, all signaling an urgent movement in the tissues toward repair.
One significant element of that response is the fairly rapid formation of a beautiful, protective fibrous collagen network in the connective tissue, also called fascia, that holds the hurt place, giving it structure, knitting it together and limiting movement to allow that place to properly heal in its own sweet time. The body forms a quiet, still place, a sanctuary, to hold the necessary space for the repair to happen.
And that’s what we call a scar.
Scars are incredible: they are a signature worn on the body, visible or invisible, indicating where we have been through something profoundly transformative. A place where we have known violence, and also where we have known what it is to heal in the languid, unhurried field of body-time, where clocks and calendars shimmer and dissolve into the horizon like some Dali fantasy. Scars are places of deep body memory, a kind of instant-access, time-transcendent portal into both our mortality and everything in us that wants to jump up and live again after being marked by pain. And that desire to live shows us our own malleability in the most primal, direct way - not just what we think we want for and from our bodies, but what our bodies want for and from us. How free our asses actually can be, if we tend to our scars, integrate them, and allow them to reach their completion.
The formation of a scar is only the first part of its cycle. The sustained strength of its shape while all other tissues heal beneath and around is the second. And last is its resolution, the process of letting go of protective structures as they become unnecessary, and the melting of its fibers into the matrix of tissue and fluid that defines the body’s free, current, constantly evolving pattern of movement.
That cycle of scarring and resolving mirrors something our bodies do on another level in the moment of sustaining a trauma: one immediate, global nervous system response to an overwhelmingly painful experience is, among other things, to limit the depth of our breath, which in turn limits our sensation and mitigates the impact. We feel less when we breathe more shallowly, and that impulse to limit feeling is a deeply wise response that helps us to survive something that feels like it could kill us.
After that moment has passed and the threat is gone, it’s extremely common to have trouble moving past the experience - our nervous system response has changed (this, to me, is what defines trauma) and our bodies continue to reflect that change, holding the posture in which we are quite literally holding our breath. We can see for ourselves and recognize cognitively that the threat has passed, but it takes something different to convince the body, and without that, we can circle indefinitely, stuck in a protective loop formed in an amazing internal gesture of self-salvation that may or may not be relevant over time. We know those loops by the feelings of stuckness or “frozenness” as well as by the somatic symptoms that can arise, and by the repeat reactions and behaviors that we know aren’t an accurate response to the thing happening in front of us - the effects at all levels of having a part of us dis-integrated, splintered-off and lodged in time. If the experience affected us deeply enough, the whole world can seem to revolve around the axis of it. And this can continue until something persuasively demonstrates to the body, in its own language, that the coast is clear.
There are many different ways to communicate effectively in body-language in order to offer new possibilities and open the loop - this is the exact crossroads where those of us who practice somatics in all its myriad forms hang out. Suffice to say: completing these survival-level nervous system cycles require showing the body that unclenching and metabolizing whatever is bound up there isn’t going to destroy it. That blowing on the house isn’t going to knock it down. It takes a depth of listening and gentleness and firmness and stalwart optimism to make a new gesture and establish a new possibility of movement after a trauma. And it cannot be forced or rushed, but must be offered at the level of an invitation. Because the body is a wild animal, and therefore must be respected, and courted in its own time.
The way we approach physical scars is no different.
Most often, after the healing of a wound is complete and the incidence of injury is past, the scars remain, binding us in the posture we adopted to protect ourselves, which over time becomes something to work around, an unconscious avoidance. It has been very common in my experience to work with people who came in with injuries from decades past, still avoiding them, saying that they had never felt the same there and never expected to again. There are many people who are frankly terrified to touch their own scars and injured places, and for good reason: it can be scary as hell to feel ourselves and remember the feelings we have shut out, to challenge the place that was hurt for fear of being hurt again. It’s been my role to hold all of that with them, to explore sensation slowly with them, to witness the arc of memory that arises, and to be with them as they reestablish presence and possession of themselves in the place that was sundered and scarred. Slowly, gently, at the body’s own pace. The pace of trust.
The completion of a scar is the act of integrating the entire arc of the experience that created it, even experimentally. It’s the possibility that we can open up to something else as we test the healed place and discover for ourselves that the protective postures are no longer needed. It’s an unbinding that brings us into present time without agenda or expectation for what that will look like. And it takes the same spacious listening and patient invitation to accomplish at the cellular level as it does to dance with the entire dragon of the nervous system.
Tomorrow, 2/27, Mo Washburn and I will be teaching Antlers of the Heart, a workshop on breast and chest care as an act of radical self love. It’s a delectable layercake of an offering, and we’ll be talking about all sorts of things that are relevant to anybody alive in a body at this time. And, if you would benefit from an introduction, in community, to the beautiful work of unwinding and unbinding your scars, we will be focused on offering tools and practices specific to that.
It will be gentle, and we will do it together.
If you, beloved human reading these words, could use some loving touch, some sweet guidance, and feel ready to enter into a time of possibly unimaginable present-time freedom, please join us.
We would love to have you.