Your Body Keeps the Score — And So Does Your Pelvic Floor

There's a phrase that gets used a lot in therapy circles: the body keeps the score. It means that stress, trauma, grief, anxiety — all of it — doesn't just live in your head. It settles into the body. Into your jaw, your shoulders, your gut. And yes, into your pelvic floor.

We talk about this a lot at ISW, because it's one of the most important things to understand about why people get stuck. You can do all the right things emotionally — build insight, process your experiences, learn new patterns — and still have a body that's holding on. Sometimes the work needs to happen in both places at once.

Which is why we're genuinely excited to share that Marnie Tocheniuk, physiotherapist and pelvic floor specialist, is now seeing clients out of our space here in Squamish.

What Even Is a Pelvic Floor?

If you've never thought about your pelvic floor before, you're not alone. It's one of those parts of the body that quietly does a lot — supporting your organs, managing bladder and bowel control, contributing to core stability, playing a role in sexual health — and most of us don't notice it until something's off.

Pelvic floor physiotherapy is a specialised branch of physio that works with this muscle group directly. It's used to treat a surprisingly wide range of things: incontinence, pelvic pain, postpartum recovery, pain during sex, low back pain, and more. Marnie has been practicing physiotherapy since 1995 and has spent years developing her expertise in this area — alongside her background in manual therapy, visceral manipulation, acupuncture, and IMS.

Why It Overlaps More Than You'd Think

Here's the thing: pelvic floor dysfunction and mental health aren't separate lanes. They run alongside each other, and sometimes right into each other.

Chronic stress keeps the pelvic floor muscles in a near-constant state of tension — the same way it clenches your jaw or locks up your shoulders. Anxiety can make that worse. Trauma, particularly anything that's happened in or around the body, can show up as pelvic floor tightness, pain, or dysfunction. And on the flip side, living with pelvic symptoms — leaking when you laugh, pain during intimacy, a persistent heaviness you can't explain — takes a quiet, grinding toll on your mental health.

This isn't abstract. It comes up in counselling sessions regularly. Someone working through anxiety who can't figure out why their body stays braced. A new parent who's physically not recovering the way they expected and who's quietly falling apart because of it. Someone processing old trauma who notices their body holding in ways they can't consciously release.

Sometimes the emotional work and the physical work need to happen in parallel. Not because one causes the other, but because they're part of the same system.

A Bit About Marnie

Marnie graduated from UBC in 1995 and has spent her career building a genuinely broad skill set — manual therapy, acupuncture, IMS, visceral manipulation, and a deep specialisation in pelvic floor physiotherapy for both men and women. She's the kind of practitioner who keeps learning, and who treats each client as the specific, individual person they are rather than fitting them into a standard protocol.

She's also a rad Squamish person through and through — a cyclist, hiker, climber, and former varsity soccer player who genuinely understands what it means to want your body to keep up with your life here.

You can find out more about her work and book directly through her website: marnietocheniuk.com.

Two Practices, One Space

ISW has always operated from the understanding that people are whole — that what happens in the body and what happens in the mind aren't separate problems requiring separate solutions filed under separate tabs. Welcoming Marnie into this space is a natural extension of that.

If you're working with one of us and wondering whether the other might be useful to add in — ask. We're happy to talk through whether that kind of parallel support makes sense for where you're at.

And if you're new here entirely: ISW offers individual counselling, trauma therapy, anxiety counselling, and more. You can book a free intro call at innerspherewellness.janeapp.com — no commitment, just a conversation.