Metaphors for Healing: The Tale of the Junk Closet

Life is full of teachable moments if we only pause for a while to reflect on the lessons.  In this way, as we prepare for the annual rite of “Spring Cleaning”, let’s all dive a bit deeper with our continuing series, Metaphors for Healing and the Tale of the Junk Closet.

Imagine that you have a party planned for the weekend, but you haven’t had a chance to properly clean the house and prepare it for your friends’ arrival.  What to do? Many of us might rely on our “junk closet” – get all that mess pushed into the closet and worry about it after the party.

The party is, thankfully, a great success and you have every intention, as you head off to bed, to clean up the next day.  However, the busyness of our lives doesn’t always concern itself with our intentions and schedule, does it?  So, while you may get the party leftovers cleaned up, the “junk closet” will just have to wait.  And wait. And wait.

Then another party, another quick shoving of everything into the closet until it is full to bursting. At some point, you can’t escape it any longer and you set about to cleaning it out.  As suspected, there is SO MUCH STUFF!  As soon as you open the door, the first wave falls on top of you… this is going to take some time.  The good news?  You can clean it out and reorder your house, but it will be a process.

The process of physical therapy is no different.  The constant cycle of injury, stress, repetitive movements, compensatory patterns and the resultant restrictions and weakness within the myofascial system is akin to shoving everything into your body’s “junk closet”.  In a very real way, the restrictions within the myofascial system are like a closet; the body, in an effort to protect the traumatized area as well as provide support and stability, solidifies itself into a restriction.

At some point, when the symptoms become bad enough, when the pain and loss of motion interfere with our work and play enough– we must finally get to cleaning out the closet.  And just like the metaphorical “junk closet”, our own closet of restrictions and patterns will take time to clean out.  Continuing with the analogy, once we set about to dealing with all of these patterns and restrictions, we are often met with times of increased pain, sensation and discomfort; what MFR practitioners refer to as therapeutic painand the healing crisis.  Just as the stuff fell on you when you finally opened the “junk closet”, so too will we often feel the things that we’ve placed inside the body’s “junk closet” – what made us tighten around the area in the first place: pain, discomfort, memories and emotions, the milieu of trauma.

However, the good news remains the same.  You can clean out your house, you can reclaim your life.  All you have to do is take that first step.  And then the one after that.  And the one after that.  Don’t worry, we’ll be with on every step of the journey.

Happy Spring Cleaning!