Every day in my clinical practice, I see how our bodies hold the narratives we tell ourselves. A tight shoulder isn't always just a muscle problem; sometimes, it's a manifestation of a responsibility we aren't ready to set down. A locked jaw might be all the words we swallowed instead of speaking. A lower back that seizes every few months might be telling us something about the foundation we're standing on.
I don't say this to be poetic. I say it because after years of working with people's bodies, I've come to understand that the physical and the emotional are not separate departments. They share an office. They finish each other's sentences.
Listening to the Body's Voice
We live in a culture that treats the body like a machine — something to be optimised, repaired, and returned to service. When something hurts, we want to know the mechanical explanation: which disc, which nerve, which muscle. And that information matters. But it's rarely the whole picture.
The body is also a library. It stores the history of our stress, our grief, and our unexpressed boundaries. That persistent knot between your shoulder blades might have started during a period of your life when you were carrying more than your share. The headaches that arrive every Sunday evening might have less to do with your pillow and more to do with what Monday represents.
This isn't about dismissing physical causes. A herniated disc is a herniated disc. But even structural problems exist in the context of a life. They exist in a person who sleeps a certain way because they're anxious, who holds their breath during difficult conversations, who hasn't taken a full day off in months because rest feels like failure.
When we ignore the emotional component of our physical experience, we miss half the conversation. We treat the symptom but ignore the signal.
What the signal is trying to say
I've noticed a pattern over the years. People often arrive at my practice at inflection points in their lives — not just when they've "done something to their back," but when something in their life is shifting or stuck. A relationship is ending. A career has lost its meaning. A parent is declining. A child is struggling. They come in talking about pain, and somewhere in the conversation, a bigger story surfaces.
This isn't coincidence. When we suppress emotional material — when we push through grief, override exhaustion, or pretend we're fine — the body becomes the place where that unprocessed experience is stored. Not metaphorically. Physiologically. Chronic stress changes muscle tone, breathing patterns, posture, sleep architecture, and inflammatory responses. The body is not lying about how we're feeling. It might be the most honest thing we have.
"The body doesn't do metaphors. When it speaks, it means exactly what it says."
Integration, not just relief
This is where I find the most rewarding part of my work lives — in the space between physical treatment and genuine understanding. Relief is important. Nobody should have to live in pain. But relief alone can become a cycle: the pain arrives, we address it, it retreats, and then it returns. Again and again, like a conversation we keep having but never actually finishing.
Integration is different. Integration means bringing the parts of our story that we've rejected or compartmentalised back into the fold. It means asking not just "what hurts?" but "what is this pain part of?" It means being willing to sit with the discomfort of recognising that our body might be carrying something our mind hasn't been ready to acknowledge.
I've watched this process unfold with many people over the years. When someone begins to connect their physical patterns to their emotional landscape — when they see that their back seizes every time they visit their family of origin, or that their neck tension tracks perfectly with a particular work relationship — something shifts. Not overnight. Not dramatically. But genuinely.
Starting the conversation
If this resonates with you, I want to be clear about something: this isn't about adding another layer of self-analysis to your life. You don't need to become an amateur psychologist of your own shoulder pain. The invitation is simpler than that.
Next time something in your body is speaking — a flare-up, a tension pattern, a pain that keeps returning — try asking it a different question. Instead of "how do I make this stop?", try "what are you trying to tell me?" You don't need to have the answer. You just need to be willing to listen.
Sometimes the body just needs to know that someone is paying attention. That's where real change begins — not with a fix, but with a willingness to hear the whole story.