The connection between scars and hydration is not immediately apparent. But scars form in connective tissue, and healthy connective tissue contains a lot of water. Another word for connective tissue is fascia, which wraps around every cell of every muscle, every bundle of muscles, and is present between your skin and muscle bundles all over your body.
“Aging” happens in fascia: fascial fibers get increasingly stiff and sticky when your body’s entire fascia network dehydrates with age and the heat of systemic inflammation. As fibrous bands of adhesive dried fascia become glued to each other, the ease of slide and glide between muscles and their neighbors, of connective tissue over bone, diminishes.
Joints lose their flexibility, and healthy muscles begin to atrophy due to thickening scar tissue cutting off their nerve supply. Lymphatic drainage is reduced, and your flesh becomes boggy and stagnant. Scars bind toxic chemistry to sensitive areas, causing pain or dissociation.
Scars interfere with a surprising number of physiologic functions. They interfere with blood delivery, lymphatic drainage, and nerve delivery. When areas go numb due to scar tissue, it creates dissociation from our mental body map.
Scars also cause pain by impinging nerves. Constant compression creates inflammatory responses in pain-sensitive tissues. The irony is that nerve compression causes inflammation, which then causes more scar tissue to proliferate. This downward spiral is at the heart of many pathologies in the body, including sexual pain.
I have worked intensively with women with sexual pain for the last two decades. Sexual pain after childbirth is common, and the role of scars in long-term sexual pain is examined in exhaustive detail in my doctoral dissertation. Sometimes, their birth happened twenty years or more in the past, but the pain remained. Once scar tissue is remediated, sexual pain initially resolves. To maintain the effects of pain resolution, clients must comply with ongoing self-help, like adequate hydration.
STREAM practitioners help people achieve scar remediation objectives by looking at all the complicating factors that have prevented scar tissue from resolving independently. Remediation is a good idea to break the cycle of inflammatory pain or loss of sensation from self-propagating scars. Remediation is the physical manipulation of scars and their surrounding tissue, which creates changes in scar texture and tension. Sometimes, you need help to reach tricky areas or get deep enough to address where the muscle meets the bone.
Physical manipulation has to go deep to fully remediate scar tissue and renew fluid flow so lymph can move, helping the body digest scar tissue. It’s like resolving a clogged sink – you must dissolve or unravel the hairball of tangled fascia to get nerve impulses and the life-giving fluids of blood and lymph to move again. Health follows fluid delivery naturally.
Scar tissue remediation dissolves and softens scars under the right conditions. There are many techniques to change their stiffness and density. Visit a STREAM practitioner and do some remediation on your own. Learn about the help that special oils, tools, and techniques can provide from your local STREAM provider.