It sounds weird but it does seem to be a thing, e.g. people may find memories spontaneously coming up in massages.
One model is that emotions are linked to patterns of muscle tension—most obvious examples are feeling angry and clenching your fists, or really relaxed in both mind and body—and that emotions bring up memories associated with those feelings and vice versa. Then if one is habitually trying to avoid a particular feeling or a memory or both—say some particularly shameful experience that you’d rather not think about—you may subconsciously learn to tense a muscle in a way that creates an opposite pattern of muscle tension and blocks both the feeling and also the memory.
It sounds weird but it does seem to be a thing, e.g. people may find memories spontaneously coming up in massages.
One model is that emotions are linked to patterns of muscle tension—most obvious examples are feeling angry and clenching your fists, or really relaxed in both mind and body—and that emotions bring up memories associated with those feelings and vice versa. Then if one is habitually trying to avoid a particular feeling or a memory or both—say some particularly shameful experience that you’d rather not think about—you may subconsciously learn to tense a muscle in a way that creates an opposite pattern of muscle tension and blocks both the feeling and also the memory.