The Injury Loop

The Freeze Response

A few years back I encountered the following video on YouTube where a polar bear is being pursued by a team in a helicopter in order to tranquilize the bear and so be able to tag it.

The fascination of this video was the illustration of the discharge of the freeze response in the polar bear’s autonomic nervous system. Part of the video shows the “discharge” footage, and the rest is part of a presentation of Matrix Re-imprinting with EFT.

Let me say here that I am not a practitioner in EFT. However, it is clear from the comments by the presenter that the discharging of the freeze response, for us as humans, is hugely relevant. He talks about how we are “caged” animals, and how we react naturally after a car accident (say) until we are attended to in the sense of applying medication to “calm us down”.

The Injured Client

Recently I did some work with a client who is a netball player. About a month earlier she injured her knee during a match and had to be carried off the court. With no other players around she had jumped for a ball and landed awkwardly as her knee had failed to provide proper support. She had a clear recollection of the event.

Over the intervening four weeks she had a number of medical consultations including, the day before I saw her, an MRI scan. The pre-scan medical thinking was that she had an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injury, and the scan was to enable her consultant to ascertain the nature of surgery required.

One of the things happening for my client over those 4-5 weeks was body posture adjustment to compensate for her inability to straighten the knee joint. She had walked with crutches for some of the time, and then a stick. However, her description of how her knee felt – and how it appeared to the medicos – was as if nothing was progressing, and was as if the trauma damage in the knee joint was ‘frozen in time’.

When she described all this to me it brought to mind the polar bear, and the discharging of the freeze response. It appeared that for her, at an unconscious level, the traumatic event that lead to the injury was being played repeatedly on a continuous loop. It was very much as if the physical, bodily memory of the event was frozen in time and had not moved on.

I know, particularly from personal experience, that the mind has a powerful role to play in facilitating physical recovery from injury, and even replenishment from exercise. So if the mind is stuck in a trauma loop then the recovery process is not kick-started either. Likewise, even after surgery to repair the knee damage, if the event memory was still frozen then her post-op rehab would most likely be severely retarded as well.

For the best of recoveries in an ideal world, her operation needs to be a total success, AND her mind-body links needs to be in a place of wellbeing.

Our Work

As an accomplished athlete she has a good, objective mindset around the power of mind-body links, injuries and other sport-related processes. We had worked before on specific issues in her game which she had been able to change very quickly, so I knew there was already a good understanding between us as to what might, could and would work.

I explained to her about EMIplus, (Eye Movement Integration Plus) which is described as ‘a brief and content free process for resolving psychological traumas and negative emotions.’

I decided to use this as I have used eye movement processes for some time and have witnessed a number of amazing outcomes as a result – from the transformative to the distractive. I use eye movement processes as a ‘hypnotic gateway’ and they can be particularly effective when dealing with issues as far apart as insomnia and physical pain. The eyes hold many keys in terms of how we run things on the inside.

Without going into detail regarding EMIplus – especially as there are those elsewhere far more knowledgeable and capable than I – it involved my client following certain specific movements of my fingers whilst holding her head still. Essentially, therefore, only her eyes would be moving.

In the course of our running this process, in fact after about a minute to be fair, there was a sudden physical change for her which caused her to shake and made me pause whilst she regained her balance. I continued with the process until I was satisfied there were no more noticeable perturbations in her eye movements. We then did a de-brief on what had happened with the “tremor” – how it felt, what differences were now noticeable etc.

She reported a complete change of inner perspective in her knee. How the pain and discomfort now seemed to have a specific location which coincided with the medical opinions regarding the ACL damage. The actual tremor she described as being similar to having a sudden onset of cramp, and that it had been felt in the quads at the knee end of her thigh. She also now had a definite feeling within the knee joint whereas before there had only been an overall feeling of rigidity around the whole area.

Much had clearly gone on here for her in mind-body terms and I felt it was time for her to take this felt sense of change into a place of familiarity. In other words she needed time to become comfortable with what was now different.

By way of ‘homework’ I asked her to create two films – through visualisation – of the original event in the netball match. The first was to be associated as if seen through her own eyes, and the second was to be dissociated as if seen by her as an observer. The content of the film was to match her original memory of the run up to the event action, right up to the moment her foot landed after the jump to catch the ball. The content was then to become what would have happened if she had landed perfectly and continued her next piece of action in the game.

I saw her again a couple of days later and caught up on how she was getting on with the changes that had taken place. First we did a little more EMIplus work with the visualisations she’d created for her ‘homework’ and then I did a little piece of work using Clean Space.

My thinking behind using Clean Space was this – the visualisation ‘films’ she had created of the event involved two perspectives. The Observer perspective had a particular geographical location relative to the associated perspective and I wanted to investigate what unconsciously coded information lay behind that relativity, for her.

Interestingly this also involved walking her timeline of the trauma event, the NOW of some 4 weeks later, the operation, and the aftermath or post-op future pacing.

To some practitioners this may seem something of a kaleidoscope of techniques and processes – to which I would say that dealing with clients’ specific issues often involves the kaleidoscopic approach, the mix-and-match, because EVERY client is different.
And since every client is different, I tend to go with what I intuitively feel will work best for them. I will, most likely, never use this exact combination of mini-processes ever again – even with this client.

Conclusion

The next stage is to see how her operation goes and then to follow up – if necessary – with anything untoward in mind-body terms that may be happening for her in the aftermath and her rehabilitation.

I’m comfortable and confident that we unfroze her unconscious where the trauma was concerned, and the changes both she and I noticed bear witness to that.
Was it all freed up by using EMIplus? That’s for you to speculate!
I certainly have the memory of what I saw happen for her from a few feet away.
It was as if she'd arrived with her knee encased in a large block of ice, and I'd watched as that block of ice broke into pieces and her knee was able to move on the outside and inside much more freely.