Why your jaw hurts

The dentist gave you a night guard.

Your jaw is clenched because of everything you didn’t say.

I’m not being poetic. Every week, before we start, I ask people to notice where they’re holding tension, and every week the jaw comes up. The chewing muscle, tight as a fist. Teeth together. Lips sealed. And when I ask what it’s about, most people say stress. But it’s more specific than stress.

Here’s what I’ve come to see, in myself and in hundreds of people. The jaw clenches when there’s something we want to say and don’t feel able to. A no we swallowed. A truth we bit back. An answer we didn’t give because giving it felt dangerous. The words don’t leave, so the muscles that would have carried them out stay shut — and they stay shut all day, all week, for years, until the dentist notices the wear.

The throat does the same thing. What you say leaves through your mouth and it’s gone. What you don’t say stays in the throat — a tightness, a sense of something stuck, a voice that comes out smaller or hoarser than you meant it to. I lived with that for a long time without knowing it was there. It didn’t hurt the way the jaw hurts. It just sat there, quietly, holding everything I’d never said.

I’ll tell you something that still surprises me. Years ago, doing a lot of this work on myself — the feeling, the releasing, the slowly learning to speak up — my voice changed. It got fuller. Singing got easier; there’d always been a resistance there, something holding it back, and it eased. I hadn’t done a single voice exercise. I’d just started saying the things.

The mask is the same idea, and it isn’t a metaphor either. When we hide who we are to be acceptable, we wear it on our faces: the rigid, held expression, the face that’s been arranged for the room. Small muscles around the eyes and mouth doing a job for decades. You can feel it if you let your face go slack right now — the drop, the strange relief, the sense of putting something down.

You can test the idea in one evening. Next time you swallow something — a small disagreement, a “no, actually” you didn’t say — put a hand on your jaw a minute later. Feel how set it is. That’s the sentence, parked.

None of this means you’re wrong for holding it. Somewhere along the way you learned that saying the thing wasn’t safe, or wasn’t allowed, or made things worse. So you closed your mouth and kept it closed, and the body kept the receipt. It wasn’t a flaw. It was a very good strategy in a room you’re no longer standing in.

Here’s a two-minute version of letting some of it go. Breathe in through the nose; tense the jaw slightly. Breathe out, long, through the mouth; let the jaw drop — really drop, lips apart, teeth apart. Twice more. Then the throat: breathe in, tense slightly, breathe out and let it soften. Then the face: scrunch lightly on the in-breath, let the whole thing go slack on the out.

Then, later this week, say one small thing you’d normally swallow. Not the big one. A small one. Notice what your jaw does afterwards.

Every Tuesday I run a live guided session online. We start exactly here — the jaw, the throat, the face — and go on from there. Come and try a session, and see how your jaw feels afterwards.

— Adam