Transforming Traumas into Mimic and Vocal Pattern

Danko Lara Radi

We live in a modern, polite society, in which from early childhood many people are suppressed in expressing their natural emotions for the sake of peace & quiet. Many conflict situations in everyday life are not properly resolved as people dont react to traumas in a natural way anymore. How many times have you been very angry, but stayed silent? How many times you have been sad, but went along with friends for fun? Every time this happens, when an emotion is not immediately processed and expressed, that unprocessed experience is then stored somewhere within the body for future processing, usually in the form of an energy blockage. During Thai massage treatment, therapist is activating those stored experiences and the client faces them again as sensations of physical pain, anger, sadness, rage, happiness, tears, laughter, joy, etc. But still, driven by artificial codes of behavior, most of the people again try to stay quiet and endure the sensation and suppress the expression of emotion, not knowing that sensations should be expressed and in that way traumatic experiences can be finally transformed and easily released. This article will give you an insight into the way how to explain to your client what is happening, what he/she is experiencing throughout the treatment and how he/she can resolve the emotional traumas with your help.

TRAUMA
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event. A traumatic event involves a single experience, or an enduring or recurring event or events, that completely overwhelm the individuals ability to cope with or integrate the ideas and emotions involved with that experience. The sense of being overwhelmed can be delayed by weeks, years or even decades, as the person struggles to cope with the immediate circumstances. Psychological trauma can lead to serious long-term negative consequences. Traumas can be caused by a transgression of persons familiar ideas about the world and violation of his/her human rights, putting him/her in a state of extreme confusion and insecurity, subject to exploitation, sexual abuse, bullying, violence, indoctrination, natural disasters, war, falling victim of alcoholism, long-term exposure to situations such as extreme poverty, or milder forms of abuse, such as verbal abuse, including threats of any of these, or witnessing any of these, particularly in childhood . Traumas can range from a very light one to the fatal one. Triggers and cues act as reminders of the trauma, and can cause anxiety, rage, sadness and other associated emotions. Often a person can be completely unaware of what these triggers are. Consequently, intense feelings of anger may surface frequently, upsetting memories such as images, thoughts, or flashbacks, dissociation, loss of self-esteem, and frequently depression.

EMOTIONS
Emotions are intricate bio-behavioural energetic systems which have developed as a result of natural selection and provide an adaptive advantage. They are viewed as complex systems comprised of expressive, cognitive, physiological and experiential components. They are necessary to human functioning, assisting in the organization and direction of intrapersonal and interpersonal functions. Emotion functions not only on the individual experiencing the emotion, but also has impact on the behaviour of others in the environment. The ability to successfully produce, identify and interpret expressions of emotions is crucial for social functioning. Whenever a person has weak emotional intelligence, he/she risks to develop a psycho-emotional disorders or to be put in discrete isolation by the community, which in turn can damage his/her nature as a social being. In general, researchers tend to identify six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. However, there are numerous other emotions, which are a combination of these basic ones, more subtle and complex, which cannot be easily and clearly distinguished and identified (such as love, hatred, empathy, contempt, envy, pride, fascination, boredom, jealousy, enthusiasm, indifference, etc.).

WHERE ARE THE EMOTIONS STORED?

During the traumatic event, when the brain is overloaded with stress and trauma to the extent that it cannot immediately process it at the conscious level, in order to avoid the collapse, it stores the traumatic emotion in the unconscious body. Physical manifestations of the unconscious body are the muscle and fascia tissue and internal organs. The stuck and unprocessed memories create imbalance and blockage in the energy matrix throughout the energy body, which is reflected in acute stiffness, cramps, sluggishness or other symptoms at the level of the physical body. Longterm traumas usually create chronical structural deviations of body posture. At the physical level, neuropeptides are the biochemical basis of emotions. All emotions seem to have their own peptide, which generates multiple emotional & physical levels of responses. According to the old model, emotions reside in the limbic brain, but the new model suggests that only 2% are in the limbic brain, while 98% are located in the neuropeptides which flow throughout the body. Neuropeptides communicate among the nervous, immune, endocrine, muscle and skeletal systems via blood, interstitial fluids, and the central nervous system, which are all body fluids. Neuropeptides bind to cell receptors and they provide the key to how the emotions are stored in the body. Both emotions and memories are facilitated by neuropeptides binding to cells. A memory is not stored unless it has an emotional content. Pain is also transmitted via neuropeptides. Consciousness itself is not possible without emotions; meaning that the body is the unconscious mind. Memories, emotions and pain pathways are all facilitated using the same mechanism in the body.

HOW ARE THE EMOTIONS EXPRESSED?

Emotions are internal subjective energetic states characterized by specific bodily expressions, which manifest themselves in vascular reactions, changes in respiration and circulation, body movements and gestures, intonation of the voice and, perhaps most importantly, through facial expressions. People automatically and continuously mimic and synchronize their movements with facial expressions, voices, postures, movements and instrumental behaviours of others. One study indicated that up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues - that the impact of a performance was determined 7 percent by the words used, 38 percent by voice quality, and 55 percent by the nonverbal communication.

Changes in breathing pattern and vocal frequency

Many emotions are connected with increased muscle activity and increased voice. It explains the large role played by emotions in respiratory movements, performing, as you know, a dual function: 1) improving gas exchange and provision of the necessary functions for increased muscle oxygen 2) transmission of air through the glottis and achieving the desired vibration of the vocal cords. Respiration is changing when emotions change their velocity and amplitude during different emotional states. These changes are as follows: Pleasure fast and shallow breathing Displeasure rare and deep breathing Excitement fast and deep breathing Stress rare and shallow breathing

Mimic expression
There are three major roles of mimic expression: to display the emotion of the expresser, to infect the perceiver with the same emotion and to facilitate emotional contagion on interpersonal judgments. The perceiver automatically mimics the perceived emotion in order to reach mutual synchronization and to improve communication. Humans have complex facial muscles that mostly perform the function of facial movements in accordance with the nature of emotional states. Our emotions coordinate movements of the eyes, eyebrows, eyelids, lips, nose, zygomatics and chin.

HAPPINESS Expression of happiness is generally accepted as a signal inviting the perceiver to approach or affiliate with the expresser. Characteristic expressions of happiness consist of the following: raised inner eyebrows, tightened lowed eyelid, raised cheeks, upper lip raised and lip corners turned upward. SADNESS Characteristic expressions of sadness consist of furrowed eyebrows, opened mouth with raised upper lip, lip corners stretched and turned down and chin pulled up. These facial configurations are believed to elicit attentive, care-giving and non-aggressive behaviours. FEAR The experience of fear is though to facilitate the detection of impending danger in the environment. Characteristic fear expressions consist of raised eyebrows, wide eyes and stretched mouth. This expression is consistent with increased attention to the surroundings . The perception of fear in others has often been assumed to signify threat to the perceiver, although fear expression may in fact serve as an affiliating stimulus, encouraging approach rather than avoidance in the perceiver.

4 ANGER Anger is widely accepted as an approach-oriented emotion as the experience of anger motivates the individual to approach the emotion inducing stimulus. Characteristic anger expressions consist of the following: lowered eyebrows, wide open eyes with tightened lowed lid, stretched lip corners and lips exposing teeth. Perception of anger in others acts as a cue to potential danger. SURPRISE Surprise is a short term emotion, caused by sudden, unexpected stimuli, usually followed by other emotions, either positive or negative, depending on the qualities of the initial stimuli. Characteristic surprise expressions consist of raised eyebrows, wide eyes and opened mouth. DISGUST This is a very primordial emotion, developed primarily to save the human from digesting the insipid and rotten food. Later on, it has been spread onto other phenomena in the environment. In social contacts, it is a signal to the perceiver to get away from the expresser. Characteristic disgust expressions consist of lowered eyebrows, raised cheeks, tightened lower lid, raised upper lip and lowered jaw.

Vocal expression
Voice is created by the transmission of air through the glottis and vibration of the vocal cords. Voice is sound, pure energy, vibration at certain frequency. During the evolution, from the very basic instinct vocal expression, humans have developed speech and language as the most sophisticated communication tool. Primordial, prehistoric use of the voice was characterized by its strength and ability to create noise, for the purpose of scaring, alarming of a possible danger and communication on longer distance. Besides frequency, its main attribute was energy and power. We can rarely witness this power today in everyday city life, only occasionally, for instance in opera, on a concert, in a political speech or at a football stadium. The ultimate power of voice can be witnessed with some top Qi Gong martial artists who are able to use their voice so as to inflict damage on internal organs of their opponents from a 5m distance. Characteristic of the contemporary voice expression, that is, the speech, is a wide variety of different frequencies and subtle nuances of tones and tempos, reflecting the complex mind & emotional condition of the contemporary human. However, casualty of the new social environment in which more and more individuals are sharing small habitats, as in the cities, the ability of the voice to create noise, which is a powerful tool for emotional release, is socially suppressed. Substitute for the vocal power is found in the richness of the modern language. As the language becomes increasingly complex, more frequencies of the voice are developed and different subtle emotions can be expressed. Every word we use is coloured by an underlying emotional message. Everything you receive between the lines is emotion. Human language would be impossible unless permeated by emotions. The very same sentence can be understood in many different ways depending on the way it is pronounced. The best example is sarcasm. This is why it is very difficult for people to communicate via internet, because words on the monitor dont have the emotional attribute and that is why emoticons are so frequently used. In several studies in which voice mapping, measurements and analysis have been conducted, it was discovered that each trauma results in certain frequencies within the voice of the subject missing. The conclusion has been made that our entire mental and emotional condition is represented and constantly expressed through voice. Measurements have shown that positive emotional states like unconditional love, self validation, creative thinking, self acceptance and appropriate self expression, generate higher voice frequencies than negative ones.

Voice frequences Matt Kramer

Bodily expression
The body itself has numerous ways to express and release emotions and this happens both consciously and unconsciously. Different patterns of body movements can be activated, such as shivering, clenching, contracting, scratching, jerking, jumping and other. Especially during interaction with a partner, the body continuously communicates emotions through well known body language.

EMOTIONAL CONTAGION
People seem to be fully aware that conscious assessments can provide a great deal of information about others. It seems that they are less aware what information they can get by focusing on their own emotional reactions during social encounters. As people unconsciously and automatically mimic emotional expressions of others, they often come to feel pale reflexions of their partners feelings. By attending to this stream of tiny moment-tomoment reactions, people can and do feel themselves within emotional landscapes inhabited by their partners. Emotional contagion is of the outmost importance in personal relationships because it fosters behavioural interpersonal synchrony. People also mimic and synchronize vocal utterances. Different people prefer different interaction tempos. When partners interact, if things are to go well, their speech cycles must become mutually entrained. If the therapist is sensitive, and in meditative state, thanks to the natural mechanism of emotional contagion, he can synchronize his emotional field with his clients and create a unified field, through which he can perceive, experience and feel the emotions of the client.

HOW IS THE EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION SUPRESSED?

Expressive suppression involves deliberate efforts to control the outward expression of experienced emotion. It involves actively reducing or eliminating emotionally expressive behaviour. Individuals may engage in expressive suppression for a variety of reasons, in order to mask socially inappropriate affect, avoid unwanted attention, attempt to stifle emotional experience, etc. Furthermore, expressive suppression may be attempted in response to both positive (happy, but have to go to the funeral) and negative (sad, but have to go to the wedding) emotions. While some amount of expressive suppression is necessary for successful social interaction, excessive reliance on it as an emotional regulation strategy is related to a number of psychosomatic disorders. Repetitive suppression of the emotional expression can create serious blockages in the energy matrix and put it out of balance. Subconsciously, we create complex and sometimes mysterious mechanisms to protect us from early traumatic and stressful experiences. These mechanisms run silently below the surface of our conscious mind as coping skills that help us endure and survive difficult events and chronically painful conditions throughout our lives. However, their repetitive application often leads to thoughts, feelings and actions that create suffering and rob us of our fullest potential in later life.

Suppression of the mimic emotional expression

Suppression of emotional expressions also appears to decrease emotion sensitivity by interrupting facial feedback process. An individual who intensively engages in the suppression of the mimic expression is impaired in perceiving emotions of others, a critical ability in successful interpersonal functioning. Automatic facial mimicry in response to viewing facial expressions of emotions of others plays a catalytic role in emotion contagion. Mimicry is though to play a crucial role in interpersonal functioning. Successfully mimicking the expressive behaviour of interaction, partners facilitate affiliation and rapport, making the proper mimic expression the very basic foundation of a healthy emotional life.

7 The importance of a proper mimic emotional expression can be seen in the following study. A group of people has been divided into three groups. Each of them had a task to accurately identify the emotions of the randomly screened faces shown to them. The first group has been instructed to suppress their own facial expression during the task. The second group has been instructed to increase the magnitude of their own automatic facial expression. The third group was not instructed. The study showed that the first group experienced some impairment in emotional perception, together with a decrease of speed and accuracy. Both the second and the third group ended with successful results.

Suppression of the vocal emotional expression

The suppression of the vocal expression today starts at the very beginning of the childhood, with Stop, dont cry !. The peace & quiet & politeness politics is the ruler of todays social interactions. Even in the situations when quiet reaction is the opposite of ones aroused emotions and desired reaction, like when he/she is exposed to abuse, bullying, violence, humiliation or exploitation, either in business or domestic surroundings, there is a strong pressure and expectation by the society for the individual to overpower and swallow his/her emotions. If you would always react according to what you feel, it is highly expectable that you would suffer social repercussions. Today, a vast majority of population lives in crowded cities. In the cities artificial public codes are established, prohibiting you to react according to your present moods and emotions, for the sake of others. You can not scream in the city, if not on a concert, demonstration or a football match. You can scream only in your bathtub, with your head in the water. When did you scream last time? It is not very much socially acceptable any more to go out and sing loudly in the street, to cry, or to express any other strong emotion. You can not react naturally any more, only at places and on time predefined for that purpose. But how can you predefine your heart? The logical outcome of this situation is active and massive emotional suppression within population. People who live in the countryside, in the nature, can freely express their emotions through voice. When you sit down with country folk, you will notice that they all have strong healthy voices, speak clearly and loud, being all the time unlimited in their vocal expression. If you ever try to speak with your friend from one hill to another you will understand the power of the vocal emotional release.

HEALING PROCESS WITH THAI MASSAGE

HOW TO ACTIVATE, TRANSFORM AND RELEASE STORED MEMORIES AND EMOTIONS THROUGH MIMIC AND VOCAL PATTERN

Being one of the most profound and powerful healing modalities, Thai massage touches the very core of the human soul and emotional body, at its deepest level. In its approach, it encompasses the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level of the human being. It is a highly interactive discipline requesting full awareness both of the giver and the receiver. In this workshop we are stressing the role of the receiver and how he/she can contribute more effectively to the healing process. In the specific process of transforming and releasing stored memories and emotions, receivers acts, understanding and involvement are more important than those of the giver. It has been already explained that all suppressed and unprocessed emotions are stored in the unconscious body as memories. They are stored all over the energetic matrix, and we can feel them as energy blockages with the increased or decreased energy flow. In the physical body, they are stored in the muscle-fascia tissue and internal organs as the places where the tissue shows qualities different than the usual ones. As therapists, whenever we start to work on the energy blockage, we act as a trigger, both on energetic and physical level. As the blockage is the storage of unprocessed emotion in the unconscious, by acting on the stored emotion, we initiate and trigger its revival at the conscious level, so the receiver suddenly becomes aware of it. People will often experience different emotions, they can see pictures, hear sounds or have flashbacks. Usually they experience pain; but it can also be rage, anxiety, joy, sadness or other. This is the moment when the receiver needs a deeper understanding of the process and has to take active role in it. Emotion is pure energy, thus indestructible and hence it wont disappear. Once it has been revived at the conscious level, it can be either processed, transformed and released or put back into storage in the unconsciousness. This is the crucial fact that a receiver has to comprehend when faced with the revived emotion. The body itself very often naturally jerks in attempt to release emotion, but this mostly happens at the unconscious level. Although conscious contractions of the body can give an impression of the emotional release, actually they constitute the opposite, the resistance of the receiver against the processing of emotional sensation. At the conscious level, emotion can be expressed by breathing, mimics and voice. The emotion can be expressed randomly, by any means, or by the specific patterns such as sobbing, crying, laughter, screaming, sighing or grieving. The most effective way to transform the emotional energy the receiver is overwhelmed with is to transform it into sound energy vocal expression. The effective emotional release depends on the receivers level of consciousness and comprehension. When triggered, people who are familiar with these processes will instantly start to process the emotions through breathing, mimic or vocal patterns. In those cases, the therapist will have a good bio-feedback and can easily enter the field of the receivers emotional habitat and feel and identify the processed emotions. Experienced therapists will usually start to mimic and express the receivers emotion even before he/she starts to do it.

Yet, with vast number of people, the situation is completely different. People engaged in public positions, like business, especially those involved in management, like CEOs, who are trained and accustomed to strictly control their emotions in everyday life, commonly face great difficulties to spontaneously express their emotions. Accustomed to keep mental control in all aspects of life, they simply cannot let go, they would not even allow you to freely move their limb, without them assisting in the control of the movement. Other people have had a harsh growing up, often in abusive environment, which resulted in their introversion and timidity to express emotions in presence of others. Some people, especially males, have cultural prejudices against openly expressing their emotions, since to them it is a sign of weakness. They will always say I can endure. But the point is not to endure because then the trauma will return to unconscious level and stay stored and unresolved. For numerous causes, a lot of people face great difficulties with expressing their emotions, which in turn hinders the therapist from achieving the necessary emotional synchronization throughout the healing process. Usually, people who are not able to automatically and naturally process and express their emotions are also completely unaware of that. The simple fact of presenting them their condition of inability to express an emotion will make them surprised. The therapist should take time to patiently and carefully explain the complete subject to the recipient, making sure that the recipient rationally understood the entire phenomenon. Then he can ask the recipient to try to perform the expression, but even then most of the people would still be unable to perform it. This is because they have very strong unconscious suppression mechanisms which have taken years to develop. What you can do is to try with a simple exercise both for the recipient and you: 1) Act on the energetic blockage with the emotional storage 2) When the recipient becomes aware of the sensation at the conscious level, ask him/her to pronounce a long, steady aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa for a few minutes, while you continue to stimulate the energy blockage 3) Both of you focus on the changes in the frequency, tone and strength of the voice during the transformation of the emotion into it. This exercise will help the recipient become aware of the connection of the emotion with the voice and the immediate ease he/she will experience when transforming the energy of the emotion into the energy of sound. The therapist will experience instant active feedback to his action, which will help him to adjust and synchronize his and the recipients emotional fields. The triggering of the stored emotional memory is mostly done through pressure or stretching at the physical level and through emission of bio-energy at the energetic level. The strength of the physical pressure varies from a very light touch to very strong, deep pressure which depends on each particular situation. The physical pressure is always intertwined with its counterpart, the bio-energy intervention. When the process of emotional transformation is fully active and successful, the more complex emotions can come up to the surface of the conscious mind, initiating the more complex expressions. The emotions can come up in waves, with ups and downs. A sensation of pain can quickly switch to a sensation of joy, for example, and it wouldt be unusual for a person in the midst of grieving to burst into laughter. Likewise, anger can be easily replaced by sorrow and then back again to anger and so on...

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Molecules of Emotion Candace B. Pert, Ph.D. Emotional Contagion Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, Richard L. Rapson Voice Mapping Matt Kramer Expressive Control and Emotion Perception: The impact of expressive suppression and mimicry on sensitivity to facial expressions of emotion Kristin Grace Schneider Mimicry and the Judgment of the Emotional Facial Expression Sylvie Blairy, Pedro Herrera, Ursula Hess The Body Reveals - An Illustrated Guide to the Psychology of the Body Ron Kurtz and Hector Prestera Wikipedia