01/24/2026
💚🍵🙌🏽
I recently watched Carla Stecco’s webinar on ‘The role of Fasciae in Body Perception’ from the Fascia Research Society.
I considered her presentation from two perspectives, the curious clinician who wants better explanations for what we feel under our hands, and the educator who knows how quickly a few loose phrases can turn into a whole mythology online.
First, the good stuff. The reminder that fascia is not inert packaging is useful. Whatever technique camp you sit in, it is hard to argue against the idea that connective tissue is richly innervated, mechanically diverse, and closely linked to how we experience movement and load. If you are trying to teach therapists that ‘tissue sensation’ is really ‘nervous system interpretation of input’, this kind of material can support that, if we are careful with our language.
Where I think the webinar needs more precision is in the way it talks about how the brain represents the body. The slide uses ‘body image’ in a context that sounds much more like body schema. In plain terms, body schema is the mostly nonconscious, always updating map that helps you organise posture, coordinate movement, and know where you are in space. Body image is more the conscious, emotional, and cognitive experience of your body, how you think and feel about it, how it seems to you. These ideas overlap, but they are not interchangeable. If we want therapists to stop making big claims, we must model accuracy in small words.
The bigger issue, and the one I know many of you, if you watched the webinar, will have noticed, is the ‘fascia holds the memory of stress’ storyline. I do not think Carla is trying to say ‘trauma is stored in fascia’ in the popular social media and historical claims sense. But the wording, especially when paired with ‘subconsciously’, lands that way for a lot of people.
If we are being responsible, we need to separate three different things that often get blended into one dramatic sentence.
🔹 Stress changes physiology. Autonomic state shifts vascular tone, breathing, muscle tone, and attention.
🔹 Tissue can adapt over time. If loading patterns change, if activity drops, if inflammation or metabolic conditions persist, connective tissue can remodel. That is biology, not magic.
🔹 Memory and meaning are nervous system functions.
Trauma memories, emotional learning, prediction, and threat appraisal are not stored in collagen like files in a cabinet. The brain recreates and updates models in synapses, forming the perception of the world and the body, using inputs from everywhere, including skin, muscle, fascia, and viscera, to keep those models running.
So a fair, evidence minded version of the idea is this. Stress can change autonomic output and behaviour, that can influence how we load tissues and how we perceive sensation, and over time tissue state can change. Those tissue state changes may then contribute to ongoing sensory input that the brain interprets through the lens of context, expectation, and past learning. That is not ‘stress memory in fascia’. It is a whole system story, with the nervous system doing what nervous systems do, predicting and protecting.
Why does this matter clinically? Because therapists copy the words we use. If we say ‘the fascia remembers’, clients will hear ‘my trauma is stuck in my tissues’ and therapists will want to ‘release’ history with their hands. That is not only scientifically shaky, it is a safeguarding and scope problem.
I enjoyed Carla’s webinar, she is an excellent presenter. As a therapist, my takeaway is, take the useful anatomy and neurophysiology, and tighten the interpretation. Keep the humility. What was presented is the raw data from fascia through the nervous system to the brain. The brain scrutinises and samples afferent information and creates a story or interpretation leading to perception. Perceptions don't only use this input, they are also based on previous experiences, belief, culture, the current state of the organism and context, amongst others.
⭐⭐Fascia can be part of the input, but it is not the home of the story. ⭐⭐
The story lives in a person, doing its best to predict, protect, and cope. If we can teach that with better language, we move the profession forward without feeding the myths that keep it stuck.
