When my son was five in 1980, I told him all of the traumatic sports that he would never play. This is why I made that statement.
A forty-one-year-old man presented with pain all through his body. His mother and baby son had completed therapy, and he finally relented to treatment because the pain was so bad.
He had severe low back pain that recently flared up because of a yoga pose, a friendly basketball game, and touch football. He had a bulging disc at L4 and L5.
He mentioned that he had shoulder and right knee pain. If I had let him talk more, the list of problems would have grown longer.
He had ear tubes and a broken nose when he was younger. He played all sports in school but loved football.
His pain journey started during a high school play where he got slammed in his back. But he continued to play football over the years, even in a semipro league.
Now at 41, all of those cumulative traumas were starting to talk in his body. He presented with the expected zero-second brain cycle and strain everywhere.
I told him that his fascial web remembered all of his life’s traumas, and an unknown number of visits would be needed to try to clear them. He must release all of the football traumas, life’s other traumas, and his birth traumas for success—no small order for anyone.
I believed that a key in his therapy would be to revisit and clear that one play as the core football issue. I told him that I would listen to his body and let it heal the best that it could.
Traumatic sports can be fun and create an identity for a young person. But with the events long forgotten, it may not be worth the painful price encountered later in life.
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