The Dental Injury That Led Me to This Work

Most of the people who come to me for jaw work are not looking for a facial or a spa afternoon. They are in pain, they have been in pain for a long time, and they have usually already tried everything reasonable. I know that place intimately, because that was me. This work is not an aesthetic interest I picked up. It is the thing that finally gave me my own jaw back.

Nearly a decade of jaw pain

My jaw pain started with a dental incident almost ten years ago, and from there it only got worse. I did the responsible things. I saw physical therapists. I saw massage therapists. I saw people who specialized in TMJ. I took courses myself and worked on my own jaw. And through all of it, I found no real relief.

My dentist at the time told me I needed to stop clenching, that I was damaging my teeth. So I asked my husband whether I was grinding in my sleep. He said no. I told her I did not feel like I was clenching. What I felt was different, and I could not make anyone understand it: my jaw felt stuck clenched. Not stuck as in I could not move it, but stuck the way your shoulders get when they have been tight so long you cannot remember what loose feels like. I could never get it to release. She did not have an answer for that. She suggested more physical therapy.

So it went on. Jaw pain, damaged teeth, mounting frustration, and no one able to tell me why my jaw simply would not let go.

A free webinar I almost scrolled past

Then, on social media of all places, I got an ad for a buccal massage class. It was actually just a free webinar to start. It was run by a wonderful practitioner named Joanna Tringali. I was in so much pain that my attitude was, I will try anything, and this one is free. So I signed in, fought through the usual technical difficulties, and watched.

She taught a couple of intraoral moves I had never had done to me, and never done myself. And from a single one of them, I felt the tension in my jaw begin to let go. Actual release, in real time, from one move. I signed up for the full course on the spot.

Finding the muscle no one had touched

That course was genuinely life-changing for me. It helped me find the tight temporalis muscle that had been perpetually pulling my jaw upward, the reason I could never unclench no matter how much anyone worked on the outside of my face. That one insight reframed years of pain.

It also solved a mystery I had stopped questioning. There was a puffiness in my face I had simply come to accept as how I looked. Once I understood the mechanics, I realized it traced back to that same long-ago dental injury. The jaw and the face are far more connected than most people are ever told. If facial puffiness is what brought you here, I also wrote about the everyday morning version of it in why your face is puffy in the morning.

I was my own first patient

In that kind of training, the first person you work on is yourself. You follow along with the instructor live, working on your own face in the mirror, so you know exactly what your clients will feel. Then you practice on models you recruit, which is never hard, because it turns out plenty of people will happily sign up for free facial work. But the first jaw I ever gave real relief to was my own.

That is how I found this work, and it is why I talk about it the way I do. I have received a great deal of treatment that claimed to help TMJ. None of it changed things for me the way the methods I learned from Joanna did. I still draw on my other training constantly, and I blend modalities in almost every session, which I write about in customized massage. But the root of how I treat jaw tension traces directly back to what I learned in that seminar.

Why this matters for you

I am not promising you a miracle, and you will never hear me talk about this work in miracle terms. What I am telling you is that if you feel stuck clenched, if the outside-only approaches have not reached whatever is actually holding your jaw, there may be a piece no one has addressed yet. Sometimes it is a muscle like the temporalis, reachable in ways ordinary massage does not attempt. I have written about how the jaw drives headaches in why jaw tension causes headaches, and about what a session actually involves in what to expect from a buccal massage session.

If you have been carrying jaw pain for years and you are in Morris County or northern New Jersey, I would be glad to help. I know exactly how that particular kind of stuck feels, and I know what it is like to finally get free of it.

Morgan Larson, LMT, CMLDT

Owner, Firm and Flourish Lymphatic Therapies

Kinnelon, NJ | Serving Morris County