How "Predict & Protect" is stopping you from relaxing

Have you ever had a massage and been instructed to, “relax”? Can be frustrating and annoying, can’t it?! Especially when as far as you’re concerned, you ARE relaxed!

What is it the massage therapist is feeling then? Is it possible to relax more? What is preventing you relaxing fully?

Holding

During a treatment, I encourage all clients to be, “dead weight” as much as possible. As long as you feel comfortable (see my “2 steps to Wellness” blog), then submitting to the process of the treatment has real advantages to the outcome you can experience. But sometimes people do find it difficult to ‘submit’ because there is holding in their bodies which can be impossible to relax in the moment.

Trauma

I use this word in its fullest sense, so not necessarily meaning something BIG (although it can be), just something that causes an issue; something which was uncomfortable or painful in the moment, but that you may have hardly noticed, at times.

Here’s what I mean: A couple of years ago I reached up to get something from a kitchen cupboard when I got a pain in my shoulder. I noticed it, but because it wasn’t major I just got on with my day and didn’t think much about it. However, a short time later, I did the same movement to reach for something and felt the pain again. At this point, I realised something was going on here. I didn’t know what the problem was, but the pain was happening and I didn’t like it.

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Adjustment (Protection)

In the following days, as I would reach up to grab something I noticed that as I went to move normally, this movement triggered my memory of the pain in my shoulder and I started to modify the movement. I found that rather than reaching my arm up in a straight line, I could avoid the pain if I took my arm out to the side, then straightened it from there. So, for a while this was the process; start to move normally, remember that this movement caused pain (trauma), modify the movement, and complete the task.

The tissues around the area where the pain was coming from were now in, ‘protection mode’, tensing to create a buffer which prevented the pain from being triggered. No problem, right?

Prediction

Well, the story isn’t so simple! As my brain got more familiar with remembering the pain and ‘telling me’ to make the adjustment, I started to not need to remember (consciously) – I started taking my arm out to the side “naturally” because the process was becoming a subconscious one.

So, time passes and at some point the issue causing pain healed, so I should just start moving normally again, right?

No.

Because the prediction of the pain had become subconscious, the conscious connection to the problem was gone. I didn’t know when the healing had happened, because my conscious process became invested in totally ignoring the issue!

So, here’s where we come to the reason it can be difficult to ‘relax’…

Predict & Protect

Over our lives we experience all kinds of traumas and we adjust to them in the moment, making the best ‘creative adjustment’ we can, allowing us to move forward. However, when the trauma causes us to avoid or ignore a truth we don’t want to accept, we are being influenced by what I call “Predict & Protect”.

Because the prediction of the problem becomes subconscious, the prediction continues to be made (even after the issues has healed) and because our brain thinks the issue is still there, it continues to implement the protection against the problem.

So in my example, I may have continued to move my arm to the side before raising it for the rest of my life, had I not understood that I need to ‘release’ the protection once it’s not needed. Moving my arm in this modified way could have put additional strain somewhere else, which would build over time.

We can also see how ideas of certain movements being “natural” to us can be skewed by having experienced this process in the past and not remembering it’s origin. “I’ve always moved my arm like that…” could be something I said in 10 or 20 years had I not known to address the issue and continued to be influenced by the prediction and protection.

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Therapy

Physical therapy (such as Traditional Thai Massage) which uses touch in a therapeutic manner, can help our conscious mind connect with traumas we hold in our body. By stimulating us to feel what we are holding and make the connection to consciousness, we can release these held tensions. By doing s, we will be able to RELAX more: )