Wise Anderson Protocol - Understanding CPPS with Fight or Flight Concept

If you suffer from muscle related pelvic pain, you know that conventional medicine, whose remedies are primarily limited to drugs, procedures, and surgery, have offered little to help those who deal with muscle related pelvic pain.

In this video I want to discuss an insight that I believe makes pelvic pain syndromes understandable to the late person. I think it explains why drugs, surgery, and procedures have not been effective and it help clarify, in simple terms, the rational and the success of the treatment we developed at Stanford. Our treatment was originally called the Wise Anderson Protocol, but was popularly called the Stanford Protocol for many years.

We have all seen a dog pull his tail between his legs when he is fearful. Sometimes people attribute this “tail pulled between the legs” behavior to shame, submission, dread, defeat or shyness. However, I believe the common denominator running through the various emotions associated with an animal pulling its tail between its legs is fear. Sometimes fear is called stress, anxiety, worry, emotional upset, nervousness, but for the sake of our discussion I’m going to call it fear.
To my knowledge, in the scientific discussion of pelvic pain there has been no discussion of what we believe to be the intimate relationship between the “tail pulled between the legs” behavior, anxiety, and pelvic pain. I’m proposing that a preponderance of muscle related pelvic pain comes from an instinctive, protective, biological reaction to pull in the tail in states of fear or stress, resulting in pelvic pain when this pulling in goes on too long. I’ll explain further.

Walter Cannon, who was a great physiologist at Harvard at the beginning of the 20th century, introduced the famous phrase “fight, flight, freeze” to describe the variety of survival behavior in humans among other mammals. He noticed that when a person feels threatened the instinctive reaction is either to fight, to run away (which is fleeing or flight), or freeze and wait for the danger to go away. “Fight, flight, freeze”.
When a cat or dog pulls its tail between its legs, in terms of fight flight freeze, the animal is more on the freeze mode. It’s neither running away, nor fighting. This freeze behavior expresses the animals attempt to self-protectively withdraw/ hold fast while waiting for the danger to pass. In contrast most animal owners know their animal is feeling excited or aggressive when its tail is waving. Most cat or dog owners usually reed their animals emotional states by paying close attention to what the tail is doing. The interesting phrase “the tail between the legs” is common in many languages to describe behaviors of fear, shame, submission, cowardice, or defeat.
In humans, the tail bone is commonly understood to be what remains of the tail that has ben enharated from our humanoid ancestors. This tail bone or “the coccyx”, sometimes called the vestigial tail.

To reiterate, pulling the tail between the legs requires muscle contraction in the pelvis. If you tighten your pelvic muscles while holding your finger on your tailbone you will notice that your tailbone pulls in. In terms of evolution the act of pulling the tail in is an active behavior associated with fear. The aim of pulling the tail between the legs is probably to protect the anal rectal area and genitals as well as a way to signal to a predator or a competitor that it is no longer a threat or competitor.

From the beginning of our research we have known that somehow pelvic pain was related to chronic self-protective muscle tension that formed a self-feeding cycle of tension, anxiety, pain, and protective guarding. In the original publication of our book “A Headache in the Pelvis” in 2003, we summarized our understanding as follows… “We have identified a group of chronic pelvic pain syndromes that we believe are caused by the overuse of the human instinct to protect the genitals, rectum, and contents of the pelvis from injury or pain by contracting the pelvic muscles. This tendency becomes exaggerated in predisposed individuals and over time it results in chronic pelvic pain and dysfunction. The state of chronic constriction creates pain referring trigger points, reduced blood flow, and an inhospitable environment for the nerves/ blood vessels/ structures throughout the pelvic basin. This results in a cycle of tension, anxiety, and pain which has previously been unrecognized and untreated. Understanding this cycle has allowed us to create an effective treatment. Our program breaks the cycle by rehabilitating the shortened pelvic muscles and connective tissue supporting the pelvic organs, while simultaneously using a specific methodology to modify the tendency to tighten the muscles of the pelvic floor under stress…


The following article contains general symptoms of CPPS: http://pelvicpainhelp.com/blog/slides...