When speaking of trauma, Bessel van der Kolk wrote: It is one thing to process memories of trauma, but it is an entirely different matter to confront the inner void - the holes in the soul tat result from not having been wanted, not having been seen and not having been allowed to speak the truth. (van der Kolk 2014).
These ‘holes in the soul’ are ‘holes’ in the body too: interruptions in the coherent oneness of the individual.  For us as clinicians, we are not only concerned with these mechanisms theoretically; we have to concern ourselves with the palpable, manually accessible phenomena, the metaphorical ‘holes’ that are available to our hands in order to contextualise them holistically as part of a ‘total lesion’ with its altered features of mobility, motility, and relationship.
IN PRACTICEAs we develop our skills based on an understanding of mechanism, we move beyond the analysable visible characteristics of anatomy and its functional physiological representation in trauma and disease to incorporate subjective experience that is based on focused observation and palpation. And here, daily, osteopaths encounter tissue qualities that transcend pathology, abnormal motion characteristics, and dysfunctional relationships, to manifest something more: for example, a spectrum of emotional excess or depletion, from the emptiness of despair to the frenzy of terror; from the neurotic hyperactive state to the defeat and spent energy of the oppressed; from the explosions of suppressed emotion to the emotion that can barely be engaged or revisited, and several other often intangible expressions of human experience to which our senses, as practitioners, become tuned. (Naturally, we also encounter the physical and mechanical equivalents of these, often the results of tissue damage, pathology, or somatic dysfunction, but these are more ‘mainstream’ in osteopathic thinking.)

This is an excerpt from: 

Lever, R. (2020). Mind, Matter and Motion. London. Handspring.

• #Osteopathy
• #Osteopath
• #HealingHands
• #TraumaHealing
• #MindBodyConnection
• #SomaticHealing
• #EmotionalHealing
• #BodyAwareness
• #HolisticHealth
• #LymingtonOsteopath
• #ChronicPainRelief
• #OsteopathicMedicine
• #TissueHealing
• #TraumaInformedCare
• #PhysicalTherapy
• #HolisticApproach
• #SelfHealing
• #BodyMindSoul
• #BesselVanDerKolk
• #RobertLeverDO
• #TraumaRecovery
• #SomaticTherapy
• #EmotionalRelease
• #OsteopathicCare
• #MindfulHealing
• #MovementTherapy
• #OsteopathLymington
• #BodyHealing
• #OsteopathicWellness
• #TraumaInformedOsteopathy