When I was working in John Barnes’ office in the 1980s, he asked me to write two chapters in his book. What struck me was his chapter titled “The Fascia Remembers.”
Like many concepts in the early days, I did not fully understand the scope of its meaning at the time. I was primarily seeing whiplash auto accident patients. When they cleared that remembered fascial strain and felt better, I was done with my therapy.
As I worked with more adults, it appeared that they had layers of trauma that the fascial web was remembering. I knew that I was getting back to their childhood issues because their pediatric conditions like asthma would return as a hidden layer(s) of their onion.
I was curious to discover if the fascial web also remembered any possible fetal soft tissue traumas. That answer presented in the Lancaster research of 500 to 600 newborns from 2006 to 2012.
Since the infants were not abused, any fascial strain had to have been caused by fetal, labor, and delivery traumas. I discovered that these infants were holding their own unique onion of strain since many visits were needed to work through their fussiness issues to become happy babies.
That changed my trajectory of patient care. When an adult now presented, I expected all of the adult trauma to the web, the childhood issues, and the underlying fetal onion.
The goal of the Gillespie Approach is to find the core or root of the problem. So my practice divided into two camps: patients who just wanted to feel better from their present symptoms and patients who wanted to go down the rabbit hole and revisit all of their traumas.
I believe that the work at birth is so critical because a newborn has an opportunity to start life with a clean slate to be the best she or he can be. Gillespie Approach Training for infants and newborns is a must for all neonatal providers.
“The Fascia Remembers” is a key element in the Gillespie Approach philosophy. Thank you, John, for being my teacher.
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