The King’s Speech

A hearty welcome to the year 2011.  I spent most of the last week of 2010 processing and analyzing my current family and our relationships.  The last day of the year I spent largely absorbed watching other people’s lives on the big screen as I tried to take a break from my mind’s incessant ruminating.  I felt guilty at first for not being more productive, a typical problem of my Enneagram type One personality, but gave up these thought lines when I realized that I just really needed a break.

My husband and I compromised on our theater experience as we negotiated between seeing Black Swan, True Grit or The King’s Speech.  I used the critic’s grading system as my trump card and we went to see The King’s Speech.  We both enjoyed the story and the acting, and the audience even clapped at the end of the movie. It depicted the life of King George VI who was given the throne after his older brother abdicated the position in order to marry a divorcee, a very unprecedented and unexpected development at the time.

King George VI (Colin Firth) had a very pronounced stammer, which was one reason his wife agreed to marry him, as she knew that his speech problem would keep them out of public life, which was a fear of hers when contemplating a marriage to him.  Even so, she tirelessly tried to assist him and to locate specialists that could help him.  Why does all of this have a place on my Myofascial Release  (MFR) blog?  There is a particular scene where this newest specialist, Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush) and Bertie (George’s family given nickname) are working together and they are doing a self-treatment technique that we learn in MFR called Jiggling.  It was quite a shock to see it on the big screen but very affirming.

As the story unfolds we get to see how Bertie was raised to believe that his family is divinely picked to head the Church of England and how that separated him from others.  Also of interest is how two brothers raised by the same father react differently to his domineering and how negative childhood experiences manifest in Bertie’s adult life. 

When we really look deeply into the story we can consider how we are all products of our past and childhoods and how that wounding plays out in our adult lives.  “What wounding?” many high functioning adults may wonder.  Well unless you are among the relatively few with Autobiographical Memory and can remember every detail of every day of your life, there is much that is stored in your brain tissue that you are not cognizant of.  Those of us that have been involved with bodywork for years know from experience, even without empirical data, that other parts of our bodies store these long forgotten memories as well.  We are learning through MFR that myofascial restrictions are caused not only by physical trauma and inflammation but emotional trauma as well.

These myofascial restrictions, in whatever manner they are caused, then lead us to experience pain and/or dysfunction in our organ systems, manifesting in what the medical community calls disease, which we are finding is really just a combination of symptoms.  Unfortunately, traditional western medicine will treat our symptoms but rarely the underlying causes.  In John F. Barnes Myofascial Release (JFB-MFR) seminars we learn early on to “Look at the symptom (pain), but look elsewhere for the cause.”  For those of you that have tried everything, or those of you that aren’t willing to deal with the side effects of western medical practices, I urge you to locate a JFB-MFR therapist.  If you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, consider starting this new year by looking into treating the cause with JFB-MFR.