Massage Therapy Journal Fall 2025

48 • Massage Therapy Journal

AMTA Continuing Education

“It has recently been discovered that early childhood trauma causes massive plastic change in the hippocampus, shrinking it so that new, long term explicit memories cannot form.” 115 When individuals experience repeated traumatic events, a conditioned response called kindling occurs independent of the actual trauma. 116,117 Kindling demonstrates how the brain changes itself in relation to trauma. Like lighting a match to dry wood, kindling encourages the physiological response to trauma. With the repetition of traumatic reactions, the physiological response to trauma eventually becomes the norm, regardless of whether any traumatic events occur. Kindling is more significant for right-brain people because they experience the world in a predominantly sensory way, combining images with meaning simultaneously, in contrast to the logical, sequential way associated with left-brain processing. 118 When right-brain individuals experience trauma, they receive an overall impression of what is occurring all at once, and these impressions flood the amygdala with sensation and override the hippocampus’s ability to explain what is happening. 119,120,121 Kindling is significant for massage therapists because the normal actions of massage may in fact kindle a deep-seated somatic cue from some unknown trauma. Massage therapists have historically described this experience as tissue memory. Involuntarily accessing the somatic or tissue memory and resurrecting the somatic experience of trauma represents a form of kindling. 122 Implicit Memory and Somatic Response The term tissue memory is commonly used in manual therapies to describe what happens when a client reacts to some form of touch. This term describes how an imprint of trauma appears to “live” in the client’s tissues. When certain parts of the body are touched or massaged, clients have described memories surfacing that are associated with the region touched.

In fact, storing and recalling information is an exceptionally complex and layered process that cannot be described in such a straightforward way, and suggesting that tissue memory is encoded in the tissues is too much of an oversimplification to be useful. 123 Rather, massage kindles a somatic response or implicit memory. Trauma is encoded in implicit, preverbal memory and emotional centers of the hypothalamus and amygdala because traumatic experiences are associated with fear and other strong emotions. 124,125 Somatization is the expression of psychological stress as a physical symptom. Implicit memory of trauma may also be called somatization. When a person with a history of trauma is massaged, the touch experience may trigger an implicit memory or a somatic response. 126,127 Over time, implicit memories or somatic responses kindle a reaction that eventually becomes independent from the awareness of the traumatic event. 128 Clients may not even consciously remember childhood secrets. Instead of recalling a specific painful event, they might experience a somatic Somatic responses seem alarming when they do not appear connected to conscious memory. Clients may become frightened, especially if they have not encountered the reaction before. On the other hand, some clients are quite familiar with the reaction but have no idea why it occurs. To illustrate, imagine that a client has consciously forgotten a series of beatings sustained as a child. When the massage therapist applies deep pressure on the part of the back that was beaten, the client may react by feeling acute pain or numbness, or by undergoing an inexplicable emotional reaction. The fact that implicit memory is encoded nonverbally and somatically may explain how massage therapy causes touch-triggered responses in vulnerable clients, as well as why some clients may be unable to ask a therapist to stop a session if they feel triggered. 129,130,131 When response that mystifies and puzzles both themselves and the massage therapist.

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