Fit in my 40s: can exercise really release trauma stored in your body?
Zoe Williams
If you want to understand bioenergetics, you first have to put aside your judgmental inner voice. It is the theory that trauma is stored in the body, that every repressed emotion from early childhood onwards alters your musculature and fascia (the fibrous tissue covering the body, like a spider-web); and that by exerting pressure on muscles with specific exercises, you can release the holding patterns and dead zones that they’ve sickened into.
My inner cynic raised the following objections: pah, trauma is for war zones, I’ve never been traumatised; the set text, Bioenergetics, by Devaraj Sandberg, feels very new agey and some of the responses Sandberg describes – uncontrollable shaking, after an exercise – sound very improbable.