Bobbie Jonas: The Shoulder That Wouldn’t Let Go

The Body Detective

A story from the table, and a question about what a body does with the things we don’t say.

A man came to see me once, a builder, the kind of person with little patience for anything he couldn’t measure. His right shoulder had been frozen for the better part of a year; physical therapy and cortisone had each helped a little. He arrived mostly because his wife insisted, arms folded, sitting as far from the table as the room allowed.

I asked what he’d been doing the week before the shoulder froze. He said he didn’t remember. I asked again, differently. After a long pause, not looking at me, he said his father had died. He’d flown out for the funeral, come home, gone back to work three days later because there was a roof that needed finishing, and hadn’t mentioned it to a single person on the crew.

Nothing about that shoulder released in one clever pass of the hands – it never does. But once his body had somewhere to put that sentence, once it had been said aloud and nothing bad happened, something in the muscle began to soften in a way eight months of therapy hadn’t managed. His range of motion came back gradually, unevenly, the way most real things do. He never used the word “grief” again. He didn’t have to.

I think about that shoulder often, because it’s such a clean example of something worth noticing in any body, including your own: a position held because some part of it decided, at some point, that holding it was safer than letting go. Sometimes that decision is old. Sometimes it’s as recent as a funeral and a roof that needed finishing. The body doesn’t distinguish much between an old belief and a new one; it keeps following the last instruction it was given, until something gives it grounds to reconsider.

Which raises a question worth carrying around for a day or two: what is your body still holding a position on, long after the thing that caused it has passed? And what would it take – not fixing, just noticing – for it to get the update?

Bobbie Jonas, The Body Detective, has a private practice in Sonoma.