Muscle armoring
I’ve had pain in my neck for a few years. It did not start immediately after my last accident, or maybe it did. I have a very high pain threshold, so it might have been there but overshadowed by other things going on in my life, of which there were many. Trauma is funny that way: it sits in your body in layers, like an onion, that can only be peeled back one at a time, little by little. Healing is surely not a one-and-done proposition.
Can we just stop and appreciate how sad it is that I speak in terms of “my last accident,” meaning, there have been many others? I am, indeed, an idiot magnet.
In the instant right before I was hit head-on, I turned my head hard to the right and squeezed my eyes shut. My brain was warning me about the possibility of broken glass, and isn’t it amazing the speed with which our brains alert us to all kinds of dangers? It’s wild to me that my brain thought of this and my body responded in a fraction of a second.
My head was turned and my entire body was tightened up, bracing for impact. When I was hit, my head snapped hard enough to fling my glasses off my face, but it was sort of sideways since I was looking over my right shoulder when it happened.
I don’t remember it hurting more than normal or being excessively painful in the following days. Just the normal “hey, you’ve just been hit head-on” soreness. But as time went on—and I’m talking about several years’ worth of time—I started having more and more trouble with my neck.
I didn’t necessarily attribute it to that accident. Why I didn’t is a mystery to me, except that there have been other accidents and maybe this is a cumulative result of a lifetime of neck abuse.
It started out just being tight muscles in the right side, then it progressed to tight muscles out toward my shoulder and down the center of my back, alongside my spine. I know there are names for all these muscles and I probably learned them in high school biology, but boy, that was a long time ago and they are nowhere to be found in the recesses of my battered brain. Sorry, Mr. Kelley.
Anyway, now that I am more than five years past the accident, I have chronic pain. That means it’s there all the time. I have a triangle of muscles that stay tight, big knots that you can feel under my skin, and I cannot get them to go away.
I’ve tried a lot of things to make this situation better: chiropractic, medical massage, deep-tissue massage, cupping, dry needling, accupuncture. Nothing has worked or given me even 24 hours of relief. My latest effort was craniosacral fascial therapy, that woo-woo thing I wrote about here. It may have other benefits, but it hasn’t helped my neck just yet.
Last January I decided I was sick of throwing money around and we needed to know exactly what is going on in there, so I requested a CT scan. We got results back that might as well have been written in Swahili. The report uses phrases like “severe right facet hypertrophy” and “left foraminal narrowing” and “disc osteophyte complex abuts the ventral aspect of the thecal sac.” Thank you for that very helpful explanation.
So we called my brother-in-law the chiropractor for interpretation. Basically there is a lot of inflammation in there. When there is inflammation, the body lays down extra bone to stabilize things and that narrows the space between vertebrae, which then squeezes the discs, which are at the same time getting less squishy because hello 62. I also took this report to my own chiropractor, who showed me this model:
When I was 16 my cervical spine looked like the one on the far left. Now it looks like phase 2, where his thumb is. So now I understand why I can look down, but when I try to pick my head back up, I have to move slowly and find the right groove. There are actual pieces of bone that collide and they only move past each other if everything is lined up just right. Isn’t this fun? Also, because every cake needs icing, there is a bone spur in there somewhere.
(Side note: This is why you should never settle a liability claim in the first two years; you have no idea what’s coming later, which was my argument against settling all along. But the law gives you two years to settle, basically saying, “It stinks to be you.”)
Anyway, this tells me what’s going on in my cervical spine, but there is more to my problem than this.
Remember the triangle of muscles that stay knotted up? I’ve learned this has a name: it’s called muscle armoring, and it is a trauma response. Of course it is.
When a trauma occurs, the brain and body work together to handle it. Your foot stomps on the brake without you thinking about it. Your head turns as an instinctive, protective reaction. Your muscles all tighten and brace for impact to keep you from flopping like a ragdoll. Your brain tells your body what to do without your conscious effort, and your body does what it’s told. You don’t actually think about it.
But, in a trauma, just like the brain gets stuck thinking the trauma is still happening right now, the body also gets stuck there. In my case, that triangle of muscles in my neck, shoulder, and upper back think they are still protecting me from danger, so they contract and won’t let go.
I had a similar experience with my right foot after that accident. Whenever I was feeling stressed, I noticed my right foot twitching. My body thought I was about to get hit again and it was trying to stomp on the brake. That is simultaneously annoying and fascinating.
I will not tell you I’ve figured all this out on my own. I do a lot of reading, and occasionally come across something that makes me go, “Hmm. That sounds like me,” so I read more. I also won’t tell you I know how to make my muscles stop armoring. My logical brain knows I don’t still need the armor, but my body isn’t listening. This is what “the body keeps the score” means. It does what it thinks will keep you safe, even when you rationally know it’s not necessary.
So if you’ve experienced a trauma and now your body does weird things, you know it’s not just you being freaky. It’s your body protecting you by turning your muscles into a suit of armor.