What massage taught me about suppressed emotion

I went to massage school to learn about muscles.

I didn’t realize how much I was going to learn about people.

After what, 11 years of working with bodies, I’ve watched people come onto my table carrying headaches, clenched jaws, rigid shoulders, poor breathing patterns, chronic tension, exhaustion, and pain they’ve been trying to push through for weeks, months, or years.

And every once in a while, somewhere between “Where are you feeling tension?” and finally having permission to stop doing it all, someone starts crying.

Sometimes it’s prettyyyy obvious as to why, and other times they laugh after and tell me they had no idea where it came from.

The ones that apologize for crying though. . . Those are the ones that have taught me the most, I think.

Most of us, I would argue, are incredibly great at holding it all together.

Most of us have been taught, in one way or another, to keep going, keep pushing, show up to work when sick, to not show weakness, to not burden others, yada yada yada—

to simply handle it and move on.

We learn to override hunger because we’re busy, fight exhaustion because we still have more to do (why is there always so much to do, honestly?), and a lot of built up emotion around all of this because we never get to address how fucking tired we actually are.

And eventually, overriding ourselves becomes so normal that we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Thennnnn someone lies down on my table.

I got the lights low with minimal noise, no one is demanding anything from them, there’s no phones, texts or emails for the next hour, and the only person that is being taken care of in that moment is them.

Guess what happens. :)

The body finally receives that permission to drop into a restful state and suddenly the emotions come barreling through.

It’s not always because I poked a magic spot and released a 10-year stored emotion.

Sometimes it’s because they just got permission to set the burdens down for a minute.

Your body doesn’t care whether your feelings are convenient for me at that moment.

Which is the huge lesson here:

We can intellectualize the hell out of our lives. We can tell ourselves it’s not that big of a deal, that we shouldn’t still be upset about something, that other people have been through worse, the whole,

“I’m fine.”

bullshit we tell ourselves over and over.

And yet the body will still communicate again and again,

“NO, I’m fucking not. I need real support. I’m tired. I’m drained. I need something seriously different.”

So, as the practitioner, I’ve learned to get curious very quickly.

People tell massage therapists things. :) We’re like mini-therapists at times. I think hairdressers and estheticians feel the same way.

And my guess is because we’re already holding the space of permission for you to show up imperfect and tell us about it.

But whatever the reason, I’ve been trusted with pieces of people’s lives for more than a decade.

So I’ve heard about the grief, seen clients through divorces and breakups galore, watched bodies shift and change and age, watched the way your jobs have been weighing down on you more and more after the years go by, seen you express shame and excitement, loneliness and love . . .

And the theme I see within all of this is how much the judgmental parts come up because it’s a pressure someone else put on them first.

We pick up it, make it our own, and push onward.

So the more I hear, and the more I see, I understand that any of us rarely know the full story about each other. Because underneath all of that is some kid who was told they had to be something they weren’t meant to.

Something that looks like laziness from the outside might be exhaustion from an abusive relationship.

Something that looks like overreacting might make perfect sense once you understand the years of buildup before it.

Something that looks like someone “letting themselves go” might be a person who has spent the last year simply trying to survive hit after hit.

The kid who grew up carrying it all is, well, still carrying it all.

And the more people have trusted me with their stories, the harder it has become to make snap judgments about anyone.

There is almost always more underneath.

So lemme say:

suppression isn’t the same thing as regulation.

I will say that again.

SUPPRESSION ISN’T THE SAME THING AS REGULATION.

This distinction mattersssss.

Regulation isn’t never getting angry, never getting triggered, and just always being calm.

And it certainly isn’t becoming so “healed” that nothing bothers you anymore. I really, really hate this narrative the healing community has put out there. That somehow you evolve into a completely unbothered human. That’s not how the brain operates, first off.

And secondly, what looks like calm is often actually suppression.

Sometimes what looks like being easygoing is someone who learned that having needs caused problems.

Sometimes “I’m fine” means “I don’t feel like I’m allowed to talk about this.”

Sometimes being the strong one means nobody ever asked whether you wanted to be.

Real regulation gives us more capacity to experience what is happening without immediately needing to run from it, explode from it, fix it, or pretend it isn’t there.

That includes the uncomfortable stuff, my love.

Now on the flip-side, this work has also taught me not to turn every sensation into something that needs to be over-analyzed.

If you know me, you know I speak a lot about balance and harmony.

Not every tight muscle contains a traumatic memory, guys. Sometimes the weak hips need some strength training and not a scream session.

Sometimes your neck genuinely hurts because you’ve been staring at your laptop for six hours.

Sure, we can ask why you didn’t get you ass up and move around on the hour every hour (super important btw), but I have found that sometimes making everything about some deeper emotional capacity quite literally drains people’s capacity for life.

Bottom line:

Humans are complicated. :)

Our physical health, emotional lives, relationships, environments, stress, sleep, movement, nourishment, beliefs, and experiences constantly interact with one another. Just like the connective tissue in our body.

I don’t think healing comes from obsessively decoding every signal your body sends.

I think the baseline of all of this is:

are you listening to your needs, allowing that they’re there, and then meeting them?

Whatever they are. Emotional, physical, what have you.

And if not, what’s blocking you from that?

Because, crazy idea I know—maybe the goal isn’t to stop having needs.

Maybe it’s to stop abandoning ourselves when we do.

To notice the headache and start looking at posture and correcting it. Whether that’s from a lack of confidence or a desk job (or both).

To recognize when we’re exhausted and start looking at our routines and calendars, and literally schedule in a day or times throughout the week where you get the restoration your body seriously needs.

To admit when something hurt our feelings and speak up about it, holding space for each other in our relationships when big emotions happen.

To let ourselves cry without immediately apologizing because what would life be without feeling it?

To acknowledge when someone pissed us off before it becomes resentment and burns the relationship to the ground.

To recognize a boundary before we’re fucking ten miles past it.

To rest before our bodies force us to with the worst head cold of the century.

Our bodies are constantly participating in our lives. Without them, we couldn’t.

So why are we treating them like the afterthought?

Our bodies aren’t inconvenient containers carrying our brains around, just as our souls aren’t something mystical to pray over and never integrate.

At some point, it needs to stop becoming intellectualizing and it needs to become the action.

Go to therapy.

Get the massage on your schedule.

Have that hard conversation.

Get your ass to the gym and lift something heavy.

When the tears come up, let them.

Understand the pain point then take the action to support it.

And sometimes that action is simply a good cry on the massage table.

If this is you, book here. (I’m literally trained to support people in big emotions so you’ll be okay, here.)

Did this touch something deeper in you? Book a connection call today and let’s see what other services (whether online or in person) would support you best.

Whatever you need to do, take that action.

And I’ll see you on the other side. :)