Stone Shoulders, Stuck Jaw: Where Does Tension Hide in the Body?

Can tension get stored in the body?

The Routine

You know I started doing facial massage a while back, right? I found a great routine that’s mainly meant to tackle turkey neck, jowls, and downturned mouth corners. According to Immi, who made the tutorial, the problem lies in fascia that has gotten stuck. At least, that’s how it’s often explained. Fascia is a thin, supple connective tissue that runs like a fine web throughout your whole body, including your face. It surrounds your muscles, nerves, and blood vessels and keeps everything in place while still letting it move freely. Healthy fascia is smooth and elastic, so the layers underneath can glide easily over one another. Tension, stress, too little movement, poor posture, or making the same facial expressions over and over (like frowning or clenching your jaw) can make fascia stiffer. The tissue gets stiffer, so to speak, the fibers become less mobile, and the layers don’t glide as smoothly. That can feel like a tight, tense face.

A Stone in the Neck

In this video, Immi also shows viewers how to massage the sternocleidomastoid, the big neck muscle that runs from behind your ear down to your collarbone. According to Immi, trapped energy from unspoken emotions is stored there. Whether energy can really get trapped, I don’t know. But when you watch her massage that muscle, it looks very supple. Mine is rock-hard. It literally feels like I’m trying to massage a stone.

Two Pairs of Shoulders

That reminded me of a long-ago time when a friend and I agreed to massage each other’s shoulders regularly. We both had painful shoulders from stress. I remember her shoulders felt just like stone, they were so hard. I could also feel a kind of “knots” in her shoulder muscles, which I sometimes managed to “work out” with a lot of effort, persistence, and determination. After the massage, we sometimes even felt nauseous. She was the one who suffered from that most.

The Heavy Bag

For me, it was mainly my right shoulder that was stuck and painful. It felt as if a heavy bag was hanging from it constantly, one I couldn’t put down. That tension started after my daughter’s father left us (and never contacted us again). Suddenly I was a single mother with a two-year-old. It felt like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Maybe that’s why my right shoulder locked up in a constant cramp.

“It felt like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.”

The Jaw

Shortly before that, her father had gone to Greece for a conference, and he met someone else there. It’s very strange, and maybe a subject for another time, but at the very moment he decided in Greece to let go of our relationship and choose someone else, I was in the Netherlands, and I felt it. I remember that moment vividly. I was walking behind the stroller, on my way to drop my daughter off at daycare so I could go on to work, and right then my jaw clenched shut. That tension stayed in my jaw for years afterward.

Mouth Corners

Then, about eight years later, when I was deeply disappointed by yet more bad luck in love, the corners of my mouth turned down in bitterness, within a very short time. I even developed a tic where, every so often, I would unconsciously pull the corners of my mouth down even further for a split second. I felt nothing of it myself. I didn’t even believe I was doing it until people filmed me and showed me the footage.

Thankfully, that tic went away on its own, but the corners of my mouth still droop. And that’s a shame, because twenty years have passed and I no longer feel bitter. I’m currently in the middle of a medical process to address this, and Botox is being considered, but that’s maybe a story for another time. I started down this path for cosmetic reasons, but apparently a habit like this can sometimes be broken by that kind of treatment.

Shoulders Up

And now that I’ve been paying more attention to my overall posture lately (partly because I noticed I was developing a slight hunch), I catch myself standing with my shoulders raised most of the day. I keep correcting myself by rolling my shoulders back and down. But before I know it, they’re back up almost to my ears. Fortunately, I’m noticing that what used to feel very unnatural, keeping my shoulders low, is slowly starting to feel normal. I think those automatically raised shoulders crept into my nervous system as far back as childhood, which makes this a very old pattern.

My guess is that emotions prompt your body to tense up (shoulders up, jaw clenched, mouth corners down), and that over time this can become a habit that sticks around even after the emotion is long gone.

What do you think? Do you recognize any of this? And have you perhaps found your own solutions? I’d love to hear!

Photo: PLANTADEA