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Welcome back to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery.  Some things I love—fascia and bones with a detective mystery. I am practicing manual osteopath and structural integrator and love working with the connective tissue of the body and the holistic systems of the body. I am also a long-time educator in the field of bodywork and movement. My hope is to share some insights in the fields I practice.

This episode is the first for Season 2 of Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery. My hope is to do a deeper dive in the next few podcasts in how we may work with a Somatic Touch lens in working with clients as well as going down some rabbit holes in craniosacral therapy. In Episode 1 of Season 2, I am getting on my soapbox about how neurodivergent bodies experience trauma release work and why common methodologies do not work for them. We will explore neurogenic tremors a.k.a. shaking and trauma release and weaving back to embryology as a more appropriate model for understanding Somatic Touch and supporting healing.

 As a person who is gifted and definitively has overlaps with Asperger’s now considered autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I have learned through my own experience how different types of somatic release in the trauma field did not seem to be effective with how my sensory experience processes. It is well known that folks that are ASD do not have the same level of pruning neurons in growth—this means the individual is prone to hypersensitivity in processing. Giftedness is often paired with overexcitabilities (OE), which maybe expressed in a variety of ways as sensitivity and responses to internal and external stimuli in 5 domains both psychological and physiological. Another way of saying this is our bodies/brains are different and as such experiencing sensing the world differently.

I am heading to the Fascia Research Congress (FRC) in a week to present my research and learn from other researchers and clinicians. Stephen Porges, MD is a keynote speaker on his Polyvagal theory at the FRC.  He just did a podcast interview on the Thinking Practitioner (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-thinking-practitioner/id1492004207?i=1000718653827). I spent the time to listen to the podcast and one before it to see if they would address the embryological model as well as the neurobiology model I use in my work—they did not. What I continue to question is the use of the phylogenetic explanations by Dr. Porges as his why/how Polyvagal works. He states that the anatomical structures below the diaphragm have a different processing mechanism compared to structures above the diaphragm due to phylogenetics. Whereas phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships among organisms. My reasoning is due to embryological development of the nervous system with the precursor of the diaphragm—transversus septum as well as how the vagus nerve grows. The vagus nerve does not have a front, back, top nor bottom in embryological growth. I have been harping on this for several years in many different papers and writings. I was starting to think maybe I am missing something, why are folks not talking about this more? Thus, I went over to ChatGPT and asked what it thought about what I have been saying.