Your Back is a Refrigerator! What's in there?
THIS is why your back hurts.
Even though you have no injuries. (If you have injuries, you know where a lot of your pain stems from.)
And since it isn’t at all straight forward (pun intended), let’s dive into metaphor-land.
Your back is a refrigerator.
The pain is leftover stress.
Just like a refrigerator you didn’t clean out, everything you didn’t want to deal with gets shoved to the back. Maybe you were busy, or entirely too disgusted to look at it, and now it is sitting back there- molding, fermenting, rotting.
And even though you keep putting new, fresh, delicious, nourishing things in the front…. The nasty stuff you keep in the back will infect the good stuff if you allow it.
Like your back pain stopping you from exercising properly.
That front space you reserve for the good things? That’s your heart-space. You protect it and the good things inside it with everything you have, because you are absolutely desperate to cling to what little nourishment you allow yourself as long as you can.
And that is why your posture is bad- forward head position, shoulders rolled forward, tight chest, arms curled front and center until you have the reach of a T-Rex.
That’s right. Your back doesn’t hurt because it’s overworked, your back hurts because your FRONT is overworked. Like a bodybuilder who only does bench presses and always skips back day. Not straight forward at all, amiright?
Most of it is stress. Not just physical stress, but the mental/emotional/spiritual stress too. All our stress becomes physical when we don’t fully process and release it.
Many clients ask if therapists “can get these knots out today,” and follow with, “you can’t hurt me, so be as firm as you want.”
There’s a lot wrong with all of that, starting with the fact that additional pain makes it worse, not better, by activating your fight/flight/freeze sympathetic nervous system- a space where healing is actually blocked from occurring.
But here’s the real catch:
NO ONE CAN PROCESS YOUR STRESS FOR YOU.
Those knots (and tension and the pain they cause) are physical adaptations serving as protective mechanisms, the body enacts these responses in an attempt to keep you safe from further harm.
And the only way to relieve any of that is to deal with your stress.
We can’t clean out your fridge, because we don’t know what’s in there, how long you’ve had it, or whether any of it is past due for a trip to the compost pile.
YOU have to be the one to empty your fridge. YOU have to pull out all the leftover feelings, look at them individually and all together, and decide what to keep and what to toss. YOU.
We can facilitate your healing by giving you an opportunity to do this work -in the form of massage and float therapy sessions, and point out things to check the dates on- in the form of noticing tension, knots, or pain.
Both massage and float activate the rest/heal parasympathetic nervous system on their own, and can temporarily make you feel better, but don’t let them become your lifeline, the fresh food you keep up front that allows you to survive while the leftovers poison the back.
Just like you can’t outrun your fork (you can’t exercise enough to fix a bad diet), you cannot out-therapy a high stress life. No amount of massage or float or chiropractic care or any other physical therapy can fix high stress.
True healing comes from consistently processing your stress in healthy ways.
It’s hard, and sometimes gross, and you might cry and whine and feel like you need to physically purge the toxins.
AND
IT IS SO WORTH IT.
We can help facilitate your healing, and you can heal, if you do the work.
The Float Spa SF located in Sneads Ferry, NC 28460 offers float therapy, massage, cupping, and more! We proudly serve Jacksonville, NC, Camp Lejeune, North Topsail Beach, Surf City, Hampstead, Holly Ridge, Topsail Island, and surrounding areas.