Healing the Emotional Body with Kinesio Tape

I did something to my shoulder last week. I’m not sure exactly what, as I don’t remember any defined “oops” moment, but I had a mild neck ache over the weekend, which led into being barely able to move my left arm and dealing with constant shooting pains that made it hard to do anything. I couldn’t sit or stand, there wasn’t any comfortable position I could put my shoulder in. Driving was necessary but awful, my chest spasming with every slight turn of the wheel.

After a few hot showers and some prodding with a percussive sports therapy gun, I figured out that it’s mostly my chest and upper trapezius that are messed up, rather than the shoulder itself, which is honestly a relief, as those are simpler muscles to heal than a full-blown rotator cuff issue or really anything else with the shoulder joint itself.

Once I figured that out, and after a particularly painful drive to work this morning, I stopped by the drugstore and picked up some kinesio tape, which, if you’re not familiar, is sticky stretchy tape that allows you to pull tension on sore muscles so that when your body moves it is the tape that’s stretching instead of the muscle.

I did some intuitive movement testing and gradually taped up my chest in all the directions that needed support and now I can sit and stand normally, drive comfortably, and only get the occasional twinges when I move. It’s still going to take a long time (at least 4-6 weeks, maybe longer) for everything to heal up, but so long as I can keep re-taping while it heals and get the same same results, I’ll be okay.

And that’s where the title of this entry comes in. I realized that I’ve always believed - really just expected - that my body will heal itself from most injuries, and I guess I’ve been fortunate that it generally does, but I don’t hold the same belief about my emotional body.

For at least the last 15 years - but really for all of my adult life - I’ve been working with my emotions, trying undo childhood damage, and nothing has ever been able to fully stick. I’ve made incremental progress with talk therapy, with esoteric studies and self-reflection, with just living life and having positive experiences, but I’ve never been able to get past that feeling that I’m worthless, that I don’t belong, that I don’t deserve. I’ve never been able to believe in myself.

And yet, I’ve always believed in my physical body’s ability to heal itself, and it’s never let me down. And I’ve been through a lot in life, and although I’ve struggled in different internal ways, I’m still here. Even through self-sabotage and all of the related things, my emotional body has never let me down either. So why wouldn’t I believe in my emotional body’s ability to heal too?

It sounds silly maybe, but there’s something about this particular framing that hits me so hard. It just makes sense in a fundamentally different way to anything else.

Now I’ve had revelations in the past, and they haven’t stuck, so it’s too early to tell if this one is the one or not, but it feels different. All of the activation I’ve been dealing with for the last few years especially feels peaceful. The emptiness and the it’ll never be okay -ness of it all has snapped into a different focus: of course it’ll be okay, because I believe in my emotional body’s ability to heal. No matter how screwed up I’ve felt mentally, or how I’ve complicated things intellectually, it really has never let me down.

I really can believe in myself.