ABSTRACT
The location of impact, direction, degree of force, and duration of physical insult and response to it may all be discernible in the patient's tissues as what osteopathic practitioners term a tissue memory. In a patient with dissociative identity disorder, where that trauma occurred to a particular personality in childhood and is locked into some specific tissue reaction or a specific injury, then perhaps it will appear only when that personality is in current conscious focus. It is not straightforward to use tissue memory as evidence because it is too subtle to show up in an MRI scan or an x-ray. Acknowledging pain, as well as experiencing pain, may trigger body memories in the client that awaken associations of psychological trauma with physical trauma and may send the client into apparently unrelated or disproportionate levels of suffering and withdrawal.
