“The body remembers what the mind forgets.”

There are multiple premises that underlie the practice and theory of Structural Integration; the most significant of them in my practice is the recognition that connective tissue is the primary structural material of the body. I think of fascia as the ‘material of memory’ in the sense that the history of significant events (written in scars) as well as the emotional habits and ingrained movement patterns that underlie our lived experience are given form and reified there. While the mind is constantly interacting with the many layers of the present (especially now, when our lives can be contained in a hand-held computer), the body is constantly emerging from the experiences and patterns learned in the past, regardless of how much that is a part of our immediate awareness. Most significantly, the mind tends to ‘forget’ that the very state and perspective from which it navigates the world is embodied and in this sense the body is continuously remembering the fundamental sense of self and state of being through which the creature constructs its world.

There are many studies linking emotional states and psychological resilience to postural habits, but there is as yet no agreed upon mechanism (for example). To me it is clear that no matter the neurological aspects of such a connection, that the facia will stiffen and thicken to support not only acute injuries and compensatory motion, but any position that does not align the bones to resist the force of gravity. Additionally, the loss of balanced movement associated with habitual patterns of ‘acture’ allows the fascia to bind together the sheets that would normally slide across each other if they were in the habit of moving. These multiple mechanisms together develop a structure of the body that remembers the experience of its life story, a history of emotional states and associated patterns of movement, and forms the substrate of our present moment regardless of the amount of awareness we have of it.

In the case of emotional trauma understanding the function of memory has additional difficulties. Much ink has been spilled on this topic, and I think it is important to acknowledge that how people experience trauma and memory can be fundamentally different and situationally dependent. Some traumas are experienced as foundational to a person’s identity and remain crystallized in the memory, while others can cause a kind of fragmentation that make the formation of semantic memories impossible. Of course, memory in the episodic sense is highly unreliable and prone to elaboration from the standpoint of the present. If we attribute the starting quote to Reich, it is highly likely he was referring, at least in part, to Freud’s function of repression which has largely been discredited. However, we as bodyworkers do not need to postulate anything other than a physical mechanism: the fascia will respond to habits of acture, thus habits stemming from a period or event will be enshrined in the fascial structure as a form of memory (perhaps not semantic or episodic), as a state of being involving emotion and sense of self. The body will in this sense 'remember', whether the mind forgets or not.