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Why so many people are talking about “holding trauma in your jaw” right now

Unclench your jaw and unlock your emotions?

If you’ve ever taken a yoga class or gotten a massage, you may have heard that stress is stored in specific parts of the body: Emotion in the hips. Strain in the shoulders. Anxiety in the gut. And, it seems lately, particularly online, trauma in the jaw.

On social media, videos abound of young women laying face up on massage tables with someone’s hands in their mouths. Labeled as a “buccal massage,” “jaw release,” or “intraoral massage,” the videos depict clients weeping after having their cheeks and jaws manipulated from the inside of their mouths. The caption of one recent video read: “A lot of the time when we work on the jaw, we see deep emotional releases from anger to grief and sadness. It’s as if every time we don’t express ourselves, the emotions move up through the body and end at the mouth.” “While other massages work surface-level, buccal massage reaches the deep facial muscles where we store our unspoken words, unexpressed grief, and unprocessed trauma,” said another. Recently, the singer LeAnn Rimes went viral for appearing in such a video herself, crying after a “deep jaw release.”

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Experiencing tension in the jaw isn’t a new phenomenon, though, Dan Ginader, a physical therapist in New York, told Vox. Jaw pain is easily identifiable — maybe you’re a lifelong grinder — and once you notice it (or become aware of it through social media), the ache is hard to ignore. The fact that so many people are talking about the jaw’s association with emotional release right now could be rooted in the particularly stressful state of the world.

Our minds and bodies are connected, but do our jaws........

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