Fascia, Core Self and the Patriarchy
We are examining fascia through the patriarchal lens.
The fascia has historically been considered unimportant and disposable. It was literally what would get scraped away so that we could see the “essential stuff,” like muscles and bones. It just so happens that the fascia is the richest sensory organ in the body. It is a vast network of connective tissue that holds our muscles and organs in place, yet, for centuries, its value has been dismissed, overlooked, and ignored, and is still a controversial subject amongst scientists.
In this essay, I will examine the phenomenon of overlooking the importance of the fascia due to patriarchal values.
Rather than valuing how we are all connected, it values competition. It believes that to make progress and be a leader, there must be muscular force and aggressive energy. It values top-down decision-making rather than information coming from the bottom up. It believes that bodies break and men are supposed to understand what’s broken, so they “fix” it rather than seeing healing as empowering individuals to reconnect with their healing life force potential. Patriarchal values believe we are most powerful when physically tense and contracted rather than soft and open.
It is the effector - the penetrator but never the recipient. Being receptive is seen as a weakness because receptivity is associated with being female. It values having the answers rather than having curiosity. Any person with a body can embody this patriarchal way of being because we’ve all been told this lie. The lie of - to achieve, we must emulate toxic masculinity.
Toxic masculinity disconnects us from our ability to experience our core being of aliveness and our sense of connectedness to others and nature.
To become more connected to our core self, we must begin by unlearning the impulse to contract inward onto a false sense of ourselves. The impulse to tense and contract comes from referencing ourselves through the binary of either pride or shame. Am I better or worse than others? Am I pleasing or displeasing to others? Instead, we must learn to open, nurture, and gather the pulsation of life force energy in, towards our center, and from that place, meet our true self. This self lives outside the binary and contains a self that can witness and reference the self. This self-witnessing allows us to experience a sense of worth and aliveness.
Expansion/Contraction
Our bodies operate by bringing energy in and moving energy out (expansion/contraction). That is what I mean by aliveness. This aliveness is our true self. Aliveness operates by allowing flow and reciprocal flow.
The patriarchy gathers “power” by amassing more influence and greater wealth rather than gathering energy that deepens one’s connection to the core self. This energetic contraction that is steadily gathered and maintained by the patriarchy eventually hits a threshold. When this energy feels threatened, it moves out, typically with aggression and a desire to destroy and conquer, not to create or heal. The act of destruction gives a false sense of pride-based and ephemeral expansion. A core connection to self does not guide it, which would inform individual desires, but rather a connection to a false sense of self that has been programmed with needs that are in perpetual lack and were informed by what the patriarchy needs to maintain power. This means that there is never a feeling of enough or true satisfaction.
Therefore, satisfaction cannot exist because we feed the hunger from a place of “never enough.” Also, when we are at the top, we always fear being knocked to the bottom. Therefore, we must remain vigilant and hoard wealth and power to compete with someone with more power and wealth. This model keeps everyone in a chronic disconnection from self and, therefore, from others. This disconnection leads to dysfunction and can manifest as depression, addiction, anxiety, etc.
Self as an energy:
We can only connect with others as a function of being connected to the self. For expansion and contraction to occur authentically and spontaneously, we must be connected to the pulsation of life force energy or aliveness in the body. This energy is creative, curious, and full of awe. To experience this, there must be a self that is open and receptive to experiencing the self. A self that is free of the conditioning of the fears that it has been told about “not-enoughness.” This self must dare to fall in love with and nurture the self to dispel the fear that, if we soften towards ourselves, we will be ashamed about what we find there.
This process requires fellow guides to help us feel safe enough to find our way home to love and “enoughness.” Fellow guides help us learn how to gather our energy through nurturing touch and offering a reflection of ourselves that mirrors unconditional love and positive regard. Self is a result of experiencing authentic connection. Without connection, we would never come to know ourselves. That is why loneliness is so damaging. This is also why being surrounded by people who lack a core self and are unavailable for genuine connection is so traumatic.
The experience of being seen gives us the energy to begin to build the charge of aliveness within ourselves and to harness that energy as our own. With time, we can start to generate this unconditional positive regard from a place of core self. Since most of us didn’t experience unconditional positive regard, we never got a chance to actualize our authentic selves fully. Who are we without the conditioning that we are “never enough,” that we are “too much,” or “this is who we have to be to be accepted.” What if we were conditioned to believe “all is welcome here” instead?
Experiencing moving inward (a coming in on oneself) from a place of gathering nurturing energy is how we begin to feel our true power because we can exist within a safe space. Without safety, we are only experiencing ourselves as survival energy driven by fear of being destroyed rather than the joy of being alive. What makes this state powerful is that we can move energy out into the world by yielding to our authentic core self, and this yielding naturally harnesses an outward movement once it has hit a threshold. It requires no effort. This outward movement is driven by inspiration and curiosity rather than building tension, leading to a destructive explosion of aggression or an implosion of shame. With this perspective, it is obvious which models will have the most sustainability and longevity.
We need to reject patriarchal models by refusing to internalize the tense energy of oppressive states of contraction. The contraction energy of these oppressive states explodes or implodes. Some people do one or the other exclusively, while others cycle through both. Exploding out looks like rage, bullying, intimidation, shame, criticizing, etc. Imploding uses the same tactics, but it turns the rage, bullying, intimidation, shame, criticizing, etc., in on oneself. The result of implosion is self-loathing and a feeling that you will never be good enough no matter how hard you try. This implosion creates an internal landscape of collapse and an avoidance of gathering energy. The idea is that if I stay small and hidden, no one can humiliate or judge me. If this is the case, any energy gathering can feel like a threat to survival. Specifically, it feels like putting a target on one’s back. People who explode put the target on someone else’s back to make sure they are never the ones who get targeted. Both are moving through life in a fearful survival mode.
What does any of this have to do with fascia?
You might have heard of “armoring” the body in response to trauma. The idea comes from Reich, who was a pioneer in somatic psychology. It’s the belief that we must address the muscular tension held in the body to release the armoring and heal. However, a muscle can’t remain contracted for 30 minutes, much less for a lifetime, so what keeps the tension in place? The connective tissue, which is the myofascial system, maintains the tension. When tension is released, this system reorganizes itself and returns to its pre-traumatized state.
Specifically, fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber, and muscle in place, and it contains nerve fibers that make it as sensitive as skin. Most of the information this system relays is afferent, meaning it goes to the brain. This tissue can harden, as well as liquefy, and can also expand and contract. When it is healthy, it is neither solid nor a liquid; it is gel-like in between. When it is in this gel-like state, it allows the skin to slide across muscles and organs to slide with each other, when you feel a knot in your muscles that is hardened fascia.
When it is in a liquified state, this seems to indicate a state of collapse, depression, or “giving up.” When it is in a hardened state, this seems to indicate a contraction towards fight or flight hypervigilance or freeze.
When the stress in the fascia is released, the connective tissue can reorganize itself and return to its prestressed gel-like state. Some ways of releasing this stress and returning the fascia to a state of plasticity can be used in body psychotherapy, including movements, exercises, stretches, touch, and breath. Body psychotherapy can also address the underlying beliefs, memories, and emotions that are being held in the connective tissue so that we can return to our core state of authentic self/aliveness.
Our fascia informs how we hold ourselves and move through the world. Our posture and movements communicate with the world our internal beliefs, memories, and emotions, whether or not we have conscious access to them. For instance, a puffed-out chest signifies dominance, whereas rolled-in shoulders signify defeat.
We also learn to mirror the posture and movements of those we grow up with, so, in this way, the fascia also keeps a record of intergenerational trauma. This means we might hold trauma that isn’t even ours. By working with the fascia, we are helping our bodies become more aware of who we are, what belongs to us, and what is happening now. The record that the fascia keeps score of keeps us stuck in the past, which can cause us to distort what is happening in the present moment.
For instance, we might perceive a person or situation that reminds us of something in the past as dangerous when the person or situation is safe. Supporting the fascia in completing patterns and letting go of tension can allow us to stop distorting the present moment and better distinguish when we are safe versus not safe. This helps us react in ways that support our feeling less fragmented and confused and more integrated and confident internally. This creates a feedback loop of self-love and greater empathy for ourselves and others.
What does this have to do with connection?
The way that we experience ourselves and “hold ourselves together” through our values, belief systems, and connective tissue is a result of our relational experiences during our lifetimes. Relational trauma happens as a result of being emotionally or physically neglected or abused by those expected to love and accept us unconditionally. It results from how safe we feel to express ourselves fully and how we can experience or know ourselves fully. This relational trauma impacts whether we grow up feeling a sense of worth and value or whether we grow up feeling shame and self-loathing.
The process of a mind-body approach to healing allows for our mind and body to come into alignment with one another, and, as a result, we come to know ourselves and feel good about who we are, even in the face of disapproval or judgment. This is the emergence of a self that can stay connected to one’s positive self-regard, needs, and desires while also being aware of the needs and desires of others. This dual state allows us to co-exist and be connected. This is the only state that allows for proper connection with others. Both need a core self available to experience taking the other person in, for the other person to experience a sense of having been felt, and, as a result, both feel more connected to themselves.
The disconnect created by patriarchal belief systems that are held in the body through tension hurts everyone. It requires the oppressor to stay contracted and unable to experience their authentic selves for fear of losing power, and it causes the oppressed to either collapse, be small and people-please, or hold onto tension to fight for the right to exist. Both are expressions that are a result of and result in relational trauma. Rather than being able to gather our energy towards ourselves in a curious and exploratory relational process of self-actualization, we are forced to reject ourselves and live in survival states of shut down and fight/flight, fawn, or freeze.
The process of healing cannot be done solely through a top-down approach but must also include information from the bottom up. Therapy that doesn’t include the body can only take a person so far without addressing the structure through which we experience and communicate with ourselves and the world. This essay aims to create a more comprehensive discussion around making peace within ourselves so that we can actualize an authentic core self and develop more satisfying relationships.
