The Mandelbear's Reading

Earlier, I did a brain dump about unwinding pain, and how it can feel, and more. Now I’d like to go over my hypothesis in more compact, organized form

The fascia can create bindings that put one or more joints in your body out of proper, neutral, alignment. Some of these bindings are correlated bindings, and they need to be approached by realigning two parts of your body, releasing both (or possibly “all” if there are 3+) sides of the binding at once.

The fascia does this, so your body can still act as a bipedal human, when you’re injured, or, suffered a near dislocation. You’re more clumsy and less precise (after all, your body has restricted your range of motion!), but you’re able to act to preserve your life (for example), which means this is probably an evolutionary adaption. Later, when you heal up, the fascia remembers your normal bodily alignment, and “encourages” you to put yourself back to rights. How? By making you hurt of course! You feel uncomfortable, when your body isn’t properly aligned. If you’ve had a simple injury, you’ll probably heal back, and your fascia will cause you to undo any bindings it’s created, until all stiffness and limits on range of motion go away.

The thing is, the fascia can do this, even if you’re already injured, and already subluxated. And if your fascia gets tangled up with a second injury, while the first one is still healing, you might end up with tangles in your fascia you can’t undo on your own, because you no longer have range of motion to break the correlated bindings.

That’s what happened to me. My base subluxation was in my TMJ region. There are a lot of muscles and nerves in that region, and it is not a good place to have this kind of mal-alignment in your body. But worse, I had additional bindings, that kept my TMJ locked down. Until I started to mobilize both hips, and both shoulders, my TMJ wasn’t going to start mobilizing. The net effect of this was, I first broke bindings, and started living in hell, in 2010. Today, in 2026, sixteen long years later, I’m feeling well enough to write up what’s wrong with me, before I die. I’m not better – I just know that the words should be on the internet, before I die. I don’t know I’ll get better. I just know I need to post a warning to others.

I’m not joking about being in hell, either. The one reason I don’t like posting what I’m posting is, look, I’ll be honest: I think I’m one of the toughest people out there, the kinda guy who won’t bump himself off, no matter how bad things get, and I wouldn’t have bet twenty dollars on surviving sixteen long, horrible, years, where every single moment was filled with pain, and other issues.

Next: unbound, tangles in your fascia create a gentle path for muscle and bone to follow, to get back to normal (or closer to normal) alignment. If it’s a small amount of your body unwinding, you might barely notice a kind of twisty-twitching happening. However, as I approach a binding, the unwinding feels tighter, and eventually, I can sense sore spots, where I need to manipulate my body to apply pressure to those sore spots, and break the binding they represent.

Now: unwinding causes neurological pain, which I assume comes from the fascia, which is loaded with sensory nerves. This can overwhelm your brain, and cause some seizure like effects, as well as a host of other problems. I believe that these could mimic, or be the cause, of issues like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia. It could mimic chronic depression, or PTSD, and, ordinary measures to treat depression, or PTSD, wouldn’t help, because they wouldn’t address the real pain a person is feeling.

There’s one other oddity. Because my body is twisted up, weird things sometimes happen to my body. I can have projectile vomiting, or severe diarrhea, for example – projectile vomiting comes from the abdomen, did you know that? I got to learn…. But as important,I’m sure sometimes, muscle spasms close off my veins in the pelvic region. This would cause my heart to only partially fill, and cause me to get light-headed, and possibly faint – my heart would be pushing against blood that’s slightly bound in returning, so my blood pressure would be high, but there wouldn’t be enough fresh, oxygenated blood to keep me fully conscious. If my hips are in spasm, then I can have little flickers in and out of consciousness, which would look like a tonic clonic seizure to the naked eye. I don’t know if it would register as one on an EEG immediately, but, if your brain jumps between “barely conscious” to “mostly conscious” for long enough, I imagine it affects your brain’s functioning, and hence, the EEG. One of the biggest insights I had over the years was, neurology isn’t (necessarily) about what’s going on inside your head. It’s more of a question of whether your head can handle all your body’s signalling. That’s why you see patients seizing, or getting anti-seizure meds, in fictional emergency departments. A patient who was shot, or in a motor vehicle accident, might have such crazy signaling reaching their brain, that their brain can’t take it.

Just like happens to me, under much less injurious circumstances.

Now, I’ve spent 16 years learning how my body works, and spending significant amounts of time in strange mental states, and it took me twelve years to realize my problem was pain, and another four to figure out that it would look, in effect, like a seizure. This doesn’t mean seizure disorders are all caused by neuro pain, but, it strongly suggests that some people would do better if we fixed their neuro pain specifically, rather than trying to stop the seizure directly, and ignoring the pain component. Treat the cause, not the symptom, when possible. The better we get at understanding, and blocking, neurological pain, the better medications, with fewer side effects, we’ll be able to find (or so we hope).

Neuro pain can prevent sleep; that can cause a person to show all symptoms of bipolar disorder. Lack of sleep can cause mania; neuro pain can mimic depression. Bipolar meds might actually be blocking pain, on some level, or, for some people. It’s interesting that anti-seizure meds sometimes also work for bipolar disorder. Again, this suggests that better targeted pain reduction could eliminate the damaging sleep-deprivation-unto-mania cycle, and, that might be all some people need.

Finally, folks who are in neurological pain can mumble to themselves, because there are pain signals flooding their brain, and sometimes expresses as random vocalizations. They might look dangerous, especially if and when they are very low on resources. Some day, I hope people will ask folks like me, “I’m sorry, sir/ma’am, are you in pain? Do you need a quiet place to rest for a few minutes?” instead of threatening us because we fit a profile of a dangerous person. When I’m low on resources, everything hurts, and I can just barely stay focused to speak in complete sentences. Also, there’s a lot to being human that you do on automatic, and suddenly, for me, I can’t do them on automatic any longer. For these and other reasons, understanding is nice to receive, and quiet rest is doubly valuable, when we’re triggered, and using all of our resources to appear “normal,” and still can’t manage it.

The more I think about my own unusual case, the more sure I am that there’s a lot of people suffering, without understanding what’s going on in their bodies. I hope I can change that, and maybe help figure out how to treat cases like mine.