09/05/2026
When we talk about ‘unwinding’ in manual therapy, we nearly always start with the idea that there is something wrong or dysfunctional that needs to be released.
If you’ve worked as a fascia oriented therapist, you’ve probably seen unwinding. Someone is lying on the treatment table and, without deliberately deciding to move, their arm starts to rotate, their head turns, their body stretches or curls. Sometimes the response becomes much stronger and they shake, cry, vocalise or suddenly describe a memory from their past.
Traditionally, we have attached a problem to this. Fascia was restricted, an old movement pattern needed releasing or trauma was stuck in the body and the client had been encouraged to release it.
But what if much of what we are seeing is actually something a healthy human nervous system is perfectly capable of doing?
We don’t consciously plan every movement we make. The brain is continually predicting, preparing and adjusting movement in response to sensory information. Our ‘sense of agency’ is the feeling that ‘I decided to do that’, but our own motor system can generate movement without us having a strong conscious sense of initiating it. This may help explain why someone can genuinely feel that their body ‘just wants to move’.
The treatment table also provides an interesting environment. Someone is relatively still, there are fewer distractions and a therapist is providing sustained, predictable touch. Attention may naturally shift towards breathing, pressure, position and other bodily sensations.
Once movement begins, it creates new sensory information, which influences the next movement and creates more information again. Rather than something physically ‘unwinding’, this could potentially be a form of sensorimotor exploration, with movement and sensation continually influencing each other as the brain updates its predictions about the body.
Emotion can be part of this same process. Emotion involves changes in breathing, autonomic activity, muscle activity, facial expression, vocalisation and readiness to move, so crying, shaking, sighing or making a sound can all be perfectly normal parts of a strong emotional response.
Memory can also appear without us deliberately searching for it. Involuntary autobiographical memories happen in healthy people all the time, when a smell, sound, sensation, place or even body position unexpectedly reminds us of something. A movement might therefore change sensation, that sensation might cue a memory or association, and the memory may influence emotion and further movement.
This could also help explain why someone occasionally moves in a way that reminds them of something from their past. It doesn't necessarily mean the body was storing that movement waiting to complete it.
The movement may have helped cue the memory, the memory may have influenced the movement, or both may have interacted.
We regulate ourselves through movement and emotion every day. We stretch, fidget, sigh, walk, laugh and cry without considering these behaviours unusual. During treatment, however, someone may feel safe and supported enough to pay much more attention to what they are experiencing and allow movement or emotion to emerge without consciously directing it.
Similar spontaneous movements and emotional responses occur during meditation, hypnosis and religious practices. One context may describe them as spiritual, another as energy moving, while manual therapy may call them fascial unwinding or trauma release.
Perhaps the context and explanation change more than the underlying human processes do.
So rather than seeing ‘unwinding’ as evidence that someone arrived with fascial dysfunction, negative energy or trauma that needed releasing, perhaps we should consider another possibility.
Maybe ‘unwinding’ isn't really about unwinding anything at all. It may be a normal interaction between sensation, movement, prediction, memory and emotion that becomes particularly noticeable in the context of therapeutic touch.
