Trauma Held in the Lower Back

I suffered from chronic lower back pain for about a decade. I had always understood it as a purely mechanical “disc injury” based on what doctors had told me. Years of almost every treatment under the sun — chiropractic, physical therapy, strength training, manipulation from osteopaths, ultrasound, ayurvedic treatment, acupuncture, yoga, steroid injections, the Mckenzie method, and nothing worked. My pain continued to intensify.

Eventually I discovered in my work with a trauma-informed therapist that the piercing, knife-like back pain I experienced was not at all related to some physical injury in my past, but a direct expression of trauma that I was holding in the muscles of my lower back.

On many occasions throughout my life, people have commented on how shallow my breathing has been. Somehow I’ve lived the majority of my life without ever really breathing deeply. Whenever I’m in an environment with other people, my breathing becomes shallow and contained, as if there is a part of me that is trying to hide.

What I’ve learned is that every time I am seen by a person, my body registers the interaction as threatening. This shows up as a tensing of the lower back muscles and a shortening of the breath, and it happens on a subliminal level every single time I’m seen by someone, no matter who it is.

So I keep my breathing shallow and I tense my lower back, and that’s how I’ve always walked around in the world, constantly navigating a feeling of being unsafe in the eyes of other people by creating a kind of armor in my body through tense lower back muscles and contained breathing. It’s hard to exist in the world without being seen by people, so I’ve found ways to repress the fear — and the bitter anger & sadness that naturally results from the accumulated loss of connection — by manipulating my breathing, and by holding tension in my muscles.

This physical armor has been with me the majority of my life. Now it is unraveling. I’ve discovered that simply by allowing myself to breathe deeply, to relax every tension in my back with long, deep, slow breaths, the pain vanishes. I breathe deeply and I feel twitching and vibrating all through my back, legs and feet. The back pain transforms into this intense, pulsating energy that reverberates throughout my lower body.

When I allow myself to fully relax my lower back and breathe deeply in front of another person, a hurricane of fear, anger and sadness envelopes my entire body. It feels like a combination of a heart attack and an orgasm. It is terrifying and blissful at the same time. This is the old material I’ve kept repressed, deep in my muscle tissue, for decades. The back pain is not really back pain… it’s trapped emotion!

Now as I am letting these terrifying, confusing, overwhelming feelings come alive in my body, my back pain is gone. I feel much closer to the people in my life, much more alive, much more in awe of the mystery of being human. My core self has been hidden away from the world underneath the armor of chronic pain and repressed emotion, and now it is spilling out. I feel the freedom, the expansion, the passion, the love, and the body is the route to it.

Part of me is still shocked and in total disbelief in the face of this discovery. If I weren’t such a nerd who needs to know the how and the why of everything, I’d call it magic and leave it at that. It is safe to say through my own direct experience that the path to freedom is found in the flesh.