Ever fallen on your tailbone? It can cause pain down the road.

To every person that I pose this question to, there is often a reply of a memorable incident around sledding, slipping on black ice, falling down stairs or some kind of sports related event. In some cases the resultant fall onto the tailbone caused significant pain for up to a week or longer with difficulty sitting for perhaps weeks. Certain activities can almost guarantee some amount of trauma to the tailbone, like gymnastics, horseback riding (the quick eject), ice skating, and snowboarding on hard packed snow. Regardless of the mechanism, we recover, the pain resolves (hopefully) and we move on, end of story, right? Perhaps.

Here the plot can thicken. It depends on many variables, but it is possible a tailbone injury may not fully resolve following a fall. Part of the ‘impact force’, if not fully dissipated at the time, can be held in the tissue indefinitely. The body has a remarkable ability to ‘absorb’ excess energy from a host of different situations, from falls, overuse, surgeries, verbal and emotional abuse to dental surgery, even birth trauma. This excess energy or ‘trauma’ draws upon our bodies’ resources to contain it. Life goes on as usual until such a time as our resources grow limited. Like when we are dealing with an extra number of external stresses, for example, like a new job or work assignment or managing a financial challenge or going to ‘the Prom’. We may wake up one morning with a pain somewhere in our body. Even though our initial trauma might have been the tailbone, this may not be where we the pain show up. It may be our low back or tailbone, or symptoms might show up elsewhere like in the hip or through headaches or knee pain or our shoulders. This pain or ache can escalate with time until this traumatic energy is identified and released.

Why might you get headaches from a fall on the tailbone? It has partly to do with energy transfer and energy following the path of least resistance. A fall on the tailbone can transmit energy directly up the tailbone to the neck, head and brain. You can imagine how the neck and head muscles might respond to such an incident. Such an impact can lock up the muscles holding your head on your upper spine, or result in tension through the fascia and structures of the head and brain. Such response may happen relatively quickly like that day in a form of a concussion or in the following days or weeks with headaches, or the presentation may be more subtle, taking years to actually manifest as discomfort and pain. Variables of force vectors, angles of impact, health of tissue, emotional state all enter into the equation.

Fortunately, there are ways of identifying such trauma and releasing it. Peter Levine has written extensively about this subject. Other books related to trauma have been written by Dr. Michael Kern, DO., Dr. John Upledger, DO., Dr. Robert Scaer and Babette Rothschild, to name a few. An advanced craniosacral therapist can identify and release such trauma in the body. Both Seattle and Issaquah, Washington have very good practitioners to help facilitate such release both on adults and children and babies.

How do you know if you are carrying some kind of trauma? Everyone is managing trauma to different degrees. It is part of the human condition and experience. One potential sign is if you have been managing a chronic condition somewhere in your body or a tight muscle like the piriformis, for example, that, despite all your efforts of stretching, using a foam roll, attending physical therapy, massage, and a good diet, will not let go and give up the ghost, then a reasonable next step is to see if there is an underlying trauma somewhere in the body. It may be that the tight muscle needs to stay tight to help ‘contain’ that ‘trauma energy.’

A fall on a tailbone may just be a simple, albeit painful incident. Or it can lead to pain down the road. There is always an answer and wisdom for everything we experience. The challenge is in identifying and understanding it.