For years I was a great patient.
I showed up. I described my symptoms accurately. I pointed to where it hurt — right ankle, right hip flexor, right side of my pelvis, right jaw. I did the exercises. I came back when it returned, which it always did.
And every time, the practitioner would work on the right side. Sometimes it would go immediately. Sometimes it took two or three sessions. But it went. And I would leave feeling fixed, feeling grateful, feeling like my body had finally been listened to.
Until it came back.
It always came back.
I’ve been a myofascial therapist for years. I’ve studied the body in more depth than most. And yet it wasn’t until yesterday — the day after my first jaw release session — that I finally understood what had been happening in my own body all along.
My right jaw was tender. Specifically the temporalis tendon, painful on chewing. I’d worked hard the day before, my first clinical session, and my jaw had taken the load.
I started to assess myself. I found my hyoid — the small horseshoe bone suspended in the front of the throat, connected to the jaw, the tongue, the floor of the mouth, the entire anterior neck. I tested its mobility, nudging it gently left and right.
Restricted on the left. Clearly, noticeably tighter than the right.
And then it landed.
My pain was on the right. My restriction was on the left. The place that hurt and the place that was driving it were on opposite sides of my body.
And not just in my jaw. My left side, globally, has always been more braced. More held. More set. I just never consciously named it because it didn’t hurt. It was just how I felt.
Here is what I now understand to be true, and what almost nobody told me across years of treatment:
The body has a dominant holding side and a dominant working side. They are rarely the same side. And pain almost always shows up on the working side — not the holding side.
The holding side is silent. It has been bracing for so long that the nervous system has accepted that tension as baseline. It stopped flagging it. It doesn’t hurt because it stopped communicating. It is, in the truest sense, held beyond feeling.
The working side is loud. It’s the side that kept trying to adapt, kept compensating, kept picking up the slack for everything the holding side refused to release. It hurts because it’s still in dialogue with you. It’s still trying to tell you something.
When a practitioner treats the painful side and the pain goes — that’s real. That’s not nothing. They released the compensation. They gave the working side some relief.
But they left the driver completely untouched.
And so the working side reloads. Because nothing has changed on the left. The left is still braced, still holding, still pulling the whole system toward it. The right has no choice but to compensate again.
This is why your pain keeps coming back. Not because treatment doesn’t work. Because the treatment was addressing the symptom and the symptom was never the problem.
I want to be careful here because I’m not blaming the practitioners who treated me. They were working within their model and their model was not wrong — it was incomplete. The painful side needed attention. But it needed attention in the context of the whole pattern, not in isolation.
The whole pattern is harder to see. It requires stepping back from where it hurts and asking a different question entirely.
Not: what is painful?
But: what has gone silent?
Think about your own body for a moment.
Is there a side that always seems to be the problem? A shoulder, a hip, a knee that keeps coming back no matter how many times it’s treated?
Now think about the other side. Not the painful side. The quiet one.
Does it move as freely? Does it feel as present? Or is there something slightly set about it — a tightness that’s so familiar you stopped noticing it?
That quiet side is worth your attention. More than the loud one.
The loud one is trying to help you find it.
In jaw work specifically — which is where I now spend a significant part of my clinical practice — this pattern is almost universal.
A client comes in with right jaw tension. Headaches on the right. Tenderness at the right temple, the right jaw angle. They’ve had treatment before. It helped. It came back.
I assess the hyoid. Restricted on the left.
I assess the left SCM, the left digastric, the left floor of mouth. Held. Silent. Set.
The right jaw has been working for the left side’s refusal to release for months, possibly years. Every night of clenching, every moment of stress, every phone call taken with the jaw braced — all of it landing in the right because the left checked out long ago.
When I work the left first — the hyoid, the suprahyoid muscles, the floor of mouth — the right jaw often releases without much direct work at all. Because the driver has been addressed. The compensation has nothing left to compensate for.
That’s not magic. That’s just reading the whole pattern instead of treating the loudest part of it.
Your pain is not the problem.
I want to say that again because I think it matters.
Your pain is not malfunctioning. It is not your body failing you. It is the most articulate part of your body, the part still willing to speak, still trying to reach you.
The silence on the other side — that is where the work is.
Your pain has been pointing at the silence all along.
We just weren’t trained to look where it was pointing.
If you recognise this pattern in your own body — right-sided pain that keeps returning, a left side that feels globally more held, or the other way around — this is exactly what I look for in the treatment room. And if you’d like more writing like this, my essays land first on Substack.