There is often a perception that a Craniosacral Therapy session should be silent! I suppose it comes from the need to move towards stillness. Dynamic stillness is profound and holds many of the answers that we seek. However, stillness is not the goal for everyone and every session.
People and their needs vary hugely, so there are no shoulds when it comes to noise. One session is often very different to the last and requirements can change within moments. Your experience of Craniosacral Therapy is likely to be very different therefore to your friend’s. That is, just because you spend most of your session time in stillness and silence, doesn’t mean that its right or best for your sister/dad/next-door neighbour.
Here are some examples of what I mean:
Sometimes, the system needs to settle into stillness
Of course, a silent environment is usually ideal here. However, is complete silence realistic or always best? I have worked in many clinics and there is always noise of some kind….. buses pulling away or sirens from outside when I worked in a London clinic, noises from the chiropractor clicking and crunching in the room next door or babies crying when I worked in a multi-disciplinary clinic. It goes with the territory.
I work from home and I live in a village, so generally speaking it is pretty quiet here (people often comment about this). However, although of course every effort is made to create a peaceful and calm environment and various measures are in place to help ensure, I cannot guarantee absolute silence ever. Sometimes the postman rings on the doorbell or there’s a noise from upstairs for example.
People who are really settled and resourced, will not notice or care about the odd noise. Others who are struggling to settle perhaps or whose nervous system is easily startled, may find them acutely annoying or that it takes them a while to really settle again afterwards.
The truth is, with life, there is noise and observing the way we respond (or not) to outside influences tells us a lot about what is going on inside us.
Interestingly, some guided meditation programs will progress from peace onto an environment with intentional ‘interruptions’ placed here and there. They do this to challenge your nervous system and see how it is for you to stay in the ‘rest and digest’ in spite of the noises. It helps train your nervous system out of fight, flight or freeze essentially, so helps that overall ability to be calm.
2. Is it good to sleep during my session then?
It might be just what your system needs. A lot of releasing can occur in sleep. However, it might also be a way of your system dissociating from what is going on. If this is the case, I will work with you feel safe enough to stay present (and awake!). Its all about getting the best from your session.
3. When new people come to see me, they often struggle to find safety (either inside or outside of their bodies)
Until safety is established, the nervous system cannot settle and healing cannot occur. I work with my clients in order for them to find safety wherever they can. Sometimes, taking the client’s attention away from their body feels better (safer) and creates an environment for more progress. In time, we work towards finding safety within their bodies. There are a lot of different techniques used in order to work towards safety. This can take time and will involve lots of verbal intervention. Finding safety in the body is always a big deal! And subsequent discussion about what the client can feel in their body can really help things progress. Stillness is further down the line.
4. I find the silence unsettling
I’m used to silence but it can feel weird or scary to some people, especially when they’re in a new environment. Sometimes safety comes in the form of reassurance and conversation. If you are happier talking, then lets do that and see how we go.I often mention things that I can feel happening in the client’s body if I think they will be interested or if I am helping them to engage more with what is going on inside them.
This can really help the process of connection, presence and embodiment. At times, the client having their attention directly on the process can assist any releasing.
5. Memories (traumatic or otherwise) are coming up for me and I want to tell you
If you want to share what is going on for you, please do. It can often help.
6. I’ve got a lot going on and I need to talk to you
You are very welcome to tell me about what is troubling you if you would like to. It can be helpful to your session. I will intervene if feel that it is detrimental to your session.
7. I know my sessions help my back/neck/shoulder/knee pain whether we stay quiet or not, and I quite like our chats!
The most important thing for me is that you get the most from your session. I have a fair few clients who chat for a lot of their session (often about random things) and their systems adjust and release all the while. That is all good!
8. What about kids?
They are not dissimilar to adults in that they vary a lot! Safety is key here too. Helping your child to feel at home is my main priority. Expecting toddlers to lay still on the treatment table for example is ridiculous, so we use a toy box, books, cuddles with a parent, even a screen can help the settling process.
Summary
Hopefully that gives you a little overview as to how people’s needs vary so much and hence why the approach can vary so much. What’s good for one client, could be unhelpful for another. Your needs may change from one moment to the next. Its not about judgement, my job is to assess your needs as an individual as best I can and guide you accordingly.
If you have questions about any of this, please do ask – Sarah 07956 390419.
This is a short CASE STUDY of a lady who came to see me suffering with M.E. and DEPRESSION (we’ll call her Karen).
Karen came to see me having been suffering with ME for about 12 years. During that time her symptoms had steadily got worse, despite trying lots of different ways to help herself. She had also during this time become very DEPRESSED. She was often bedbound with fatigue and would ‘crash’ frequently after relatively little activity – she described the fatigue as a 7 out of 10 (10 being the worst she could possibly imagine). She said the depression was a 10 out of 10 and she was experiencing back pain which felt like a ‘ripping’ and she scored that as a 6.5 out of 10. Her main goal was “to feel alive / happy / healthy again”, which she said hadn’t for at least 6 years.
Improvements came after just one session and after she’d had five, she said the depression was a 1/10 and the fatigue just 3/10. The pain was improving a lot also.
It was clear to both Karen and myself that further improvement was almost inevitable so she maintained her sessions with me, although they became more spread out. Karen found that having a CST session every 6 weeks needed to be part of her “care plan” and would “keep her on a level”, even to the point where she continues to see further improvements even now.
The last time I saw her, she got tearful telling me how CST had “changed her life” and how she had gone from “being largely bed-bound to LIVING A FULLER AND HAPPIER LIFE’.
We all know what pain is like. Acute pain is defined as short lived, the term chronic pain is used when pain has lasted for 3-6 months or more.
In a Lancet study carried out in 2014 (Michaleff et al), it was found that reading about how pain works for 30 months plus two telephone conversations, worked as well as twenty, yes TWENTY sessions of physiotherapy!!!
Therefore, understanding how pain works is key to recovering from it.
So here, and in my clinic, I teach people why they still have pain and help them out of it.
Its important to recognise that initial pain is often an indicator of danger. It tells us to react and can save us from further injury or death e.g. if your finger is burning on the oven for example, you will automatically withdraw your hand from the heat (without even thinking). When we have just injured our back, pain is helpful, because it warns us against further injury.
However (and this is the important bit) what we now know, is that after 3-6 months, pain is rarely in the tissues but in our nervous system. That is, pain has caused our nervous system to change. Our nervous system has become too sensitive!
“Sensitization means we turn the volume up on our alarm system, but are very poor at turning the volume down.”, Steve Haines, Pain Is Really Strange.
The medical profession used to believe that chronic pain was held in the tissues of the body, now we know that it rarely is. The answer to resolving the pain issue is to show the system how to down-regulate / desensitize / ‘turn the volume down’.
I should also say at this point that unresolved emotional trauma is held in the physiology and in the limbic system, not the cognitive (thinking part of the brain) as previously thought. It often shows itself as physical pain. So whilst we may be looking for the cause of our pain by having MRI scans for example, there may well not be a structural cause.
So…..hopefully all of this goes some way to explain why Craniosacral Therapy (in my experience) is so effective in terms of reducing or eliminating pain from the body.
I could go and on about this subject, but I am passionate about helping people with pain. The people I see in my clinic have often been in pain for decades. They may have limited mobility and their quality of life / ability to work may be seriously affected.
In a treatment, bringing the system into safety is key. Safety may be a completely new experience or one that has been forgotten. Once this has been established, I teach the system to notice sensations other than the pain. This is all HUGE in terms of down-regulating the nervous system (turning the volume down).
Gradually, trauma, whether that be physical or emotional will come to the surface and release and the pain gets less or goes. This is an amazing experience for someone when the pain has been there for a long time!
So, hopefully that gives you a brief summary of why I see so many people’s pain levels reduce or disappear. These steps seem counter-intuitive I know and how can something so simple be so effective?? If you would like to understand more or see if this therapy can help you, please do get in touch.
The subject of pain is a HUGE one and deserves much more time and space than I have here, but I will do my best to cover the key points.
.
We all know what pain is like, but to clarify…. acute pain is short lived, the term chronic pain is used when pain has lasted for 3-6 months or more.
In a Lancet study carried out in 2014 (Michaleff et al), it was found that reading about how pain works for 30 months plus two telephone conversations, worked as well as twenty, yes TWENTY sessions of physiotherapy!!! Therefore, understanding how pain works is key to recovering from it.
So here, and in my clinic, I teach people why they still have pain and help them out of it.
Its important to recognise that initial pain is often an indicator of danger. It tells us to react and can save us from further injury or death e.g. if your finger is burning on the oven for example, you will automatically withdraw your hand from the heat (without even thinking). When we have just injured our back, pain is helpful, because it warns us against further injury.
However (and this is the important bit) what we now know, is that after 3-6 months, pain is rarely in the tissues but in our nervous system. That is, pain has caused our nervous system to change. Our nervous system has become too sensitive!
“Sensitization means we turn the volume up on our alarm system, but are very poor at turning the volume down.’, Steve Haines, Pain Is Really Strange.
The medical profession used to believe that chronic pain was held in the tissues of the body, now we know that it rarely is. The answer to resolving the pain issue is to show the system how to down-regulate / desensitize / ‘turn the volume down’.
I should also say at this point that unresolved emotional trauma is held in the physiology and in the limbic system, not the cognitive (thinking part of the brain) as previously thought. It often shows itself as physical pain. So whilst we may be looking for the cause of our pain by having MRI scans for example, there may well not be a structural cause.
So…..hopefully all of this goes some way to explain why Craniosacral Therapy (in my experience) is so effective in terms of reducing or eliminating pain from the body.
I could go and on about this subject, but I am passionate about helping people with pain. The people I see in my clinic have often been in pain for decades. They may have limited mobility and their quality of life / ability to work may be seriously affected.
In a treatment, we find that the body has it’s own sense of priority. Number one is showing the system what safety is, this may be something which is a new experience, but is it key to everything else. We then teach the system to notice sensations other than the pain. This is all HUGE in terms of down-regulating the nervous system (turning the volume down).
Gradually, trauma, whether that be physical or emotional will come to the surface and release and the pain gets less or goes. This is an amazing experience for someone when the pain has been there for a long time!
So, hopefully that gives you a brief summary of why I see so many people’s pain levels reduce or disappear. These steps seem counter-intuitive I know and how can something so simple be so effective?? If you would like to understand more or see if this therapy can help you, please do get in touch.
...the pain in my neck is a lot better, I haven't had nearly as many waves of anxiety and I feel a lot happier!"
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...the pain in my neck is a lot better, I haven't had nearly as many waves of anxiety and I feel a lot happier!"