When You Finally Stop Bracing

There’s a moment in my practice that I’ve witnessed hundreds of times.

A client comes in with their shoulders tight, jaw clenched, body tense. They’ve been bracing for so long that they don’t even remember what it feels like to relax. 

And then, slowly, as we work together, something shifts. They let go a little. It’s not dramatic or sudden, but it’s real. And sometimes what comes next is surprising... they cry. Not always, but often enough that I’ve learned not to be surprised by it, and to simply allow them to experience the release.

It might be sadness, grief, relief, happiness, or even anger. Sometimes it’s all of these at once. When you’ve been holding yourself together for a long time, because you have to in order to keep going, finally having some space to soften can bring emotions to the surface that you haven’t had room to feel.

It can be grief for what you’ve been through or for what you’ve lost. Sometimes it’s simply the relief of realizing that you don’t have to fight quite so hard anymore. 

I think about it like this…

Imagine you’ve been holding something in your hand for so long that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to open your hand. Your fingers are tight around it. You’ve tried to let go before, but it hurt, so it felt safer to keep holding on. Eventually, you start believing, “This is just how my hand is now.”

Then one day, after some subtle shift, you slowly move one finger… and there’s no pain! You move another and then another, until suddenly, your hand opens and what you’ve been holding on falls away. 

There is something incredibly emotional about that moment, because not only is the pain gone, now your hand is free to do all kinds of other things!

It’s a big moment to realize that your body isn’t the problem, only that it has been trying to protect you. But that protection mode can completely change the way you see yourself.

I know it changed the way I saw my own body at the time of my lower-back injury, because I came from being quite strong.

I started to think, “My body is weak.” I was frustrated with it, because I was comparing it to what I used to be able to do, and felt my body was constantly letting me down. 

Eventually I realized something vitally important: My body wasn’t “weak;” I simply wasn’t as strong as I once had been. My expectations needed adjusting.

There’s a difference, because if I wanted to, I could work toward becoming stronger again; but first I needed to accept where I was and be willing to look at the facts. I stopped being angry at my body for not being what it used to be. I started seeing my condition as something I could work with instead of something I had to fight against.

Letting go isn’t a one-time event. There will still be days when the old patterns come back. Stress happens, pain happens, life happens.

But when shifts happen and the pain eases, your world gets bigger again. Like the hand letting go of the ???, much more becomes possible.

One of the things I remember most clearly from my own recovery was being able to travel again. Sitting on a plane for eight hours, getting off on the other side without pain and actually enjoying the trip — it sounds like such a small thing. But when you have lived with chronic pain, it isn’t small at all. It takes all your energy.

To be able to make plans, to see friends, go for a walk, travel, work, laugh; to sit in a restaurant without thinking about your back; to wake up without immediately wondering how your body is going to feel, without having to manage every moment — it’s freedom! (Has it happens it’s my #1 value!)

Chronic pain can be incredibly lonely. It can become just you and the pain. You and the illness. You and the fear of what might happen next. There isn’t much room left for anything else.

And when that starts to change, the ripple effect can be enormously wonderful. I’ve watched this happen with my clients, and I sometimes get emotional because I know how much it takes to get there.

They’ve reached that pivotal realization that their body isn’t the problem, it has been doing the best it could with the information it had. And maybe they don’t have to become exactly who they were before; in fact, they get to become someone who understands their body differently, who trusts themselves more, and who has hope again.

That, to me, is the real gift of letting go.

It isn’t about getting rid of every sensation or pretending everything is fine. It is about creating enough space to discover what is possible now. And often, what becomes possible is much bigger than you imagined. It can be freedom!