Sometimes You Get Emotional on My Table. It's OK, I Won't Make It Weird.

Occasionally when someone comes in for their 2-hr massage session, we're maybe 20 minutes in, and suddenly there are tears. Sometimes there's a sound... a shaky exhale, a quiet "umph." Sometimes it's just a tear running sideways across their temple while they stare at the ceiling. It happens more than you might think.

If that's ever been you: it's ok. You didn't do anything wrong. You're not broken. You're not embarrassing yourself. Your body is doing exactly what bodies do when their nervous system finally feels safe enough to let something go.

There's real science behind that. Let me walk you through how totally normal this is...

I recently watched a webinar with Thomas Hübl and Amy Elizabeth Fox, two educators who spend their careers facilitating workshops about healing our collective trauma. The webinar was for coaches and consultants and how to identify the underlying dynamics that shape behavior of clients. And so much of what they said applies to people getting emotional on the table in my Las Vegas massage studio.

Screenshot of Webinar titled "When Chaos is the Context"

Their core point was this: most of us have developed highly efficient systems for cutting coping with big emotions. We've been told, implicitly and explicitly, to separate the personal from the professional, the emotional from the functional. We are pushed past our physical and mental limits. We stay in our heads and over-intellectualize. And over time, that non-processing of emotions becomes our default.

The cost of that, they reminded us, is enormous. When you're numb to your own experience, you lose access to your emotional intelligence. Your intuition, creativity, the ability to communicate your needs... all get pushed aside as you struggle to cope.

"Everything's fine."

Until it's not.

When we operate from a limited capacity, our body quietly (or not-so-quietly) carries the rest.

"You can't hurt something you can feel. But you can hurt and devalue something that you don't let permeate you." —Thomas Hübl

That line hit me when I heard it. Because numbing ourselves from discomfort is true in both directions. The numbing that protects us from feeling pain also disconnects us from ourselves. And the massage table is one of the places where people can let their guard down and that numbing gets a chance to lift.

Your autonomic nervous system has two physiological reactions when you're crashing out: sympathetic (fight/flight) or parasympathetic (freeze/fawn/friend). As an anatomy and physiology instructor, here's where the science-y stuff gets interesting for me...

Emotional Release

Hübl described two distinct states that show up when the nervous system is under stress and our sympathetic nervous system is activated. The first way our sympathetic nervous system gets activated is by hyperactivation, or the "electric fence" as he called it. Fight or flight. We've all experienced overwhelm before: the frustration, the racing thoughts, the sense that everything is too much.

The second state that he brought up is less talked about but just as common: hypoactivation. Numbness. Shutdown. Indifference. Over-intellectualizing without actually embodying the big emotions. It's going through the motions without really being present. He called it "turning down the volume of life" and noted that a lot of high-functioning people are living here without realizing it. It doesn't look like distress from the outside. It looks like composure. But inside, the lights are dimmed.

Both states are intelligent responses to overwhelm. The nervous system isn't malfunctioning when it does this, it's doing its job. The problem is when those responses get stuck or when the body keeps running the same protective pattern long after the original stressor is gone.

What does this have to do with massage? Everything. Because sustained, skilled, safe touch is one of the most direct inputs we have for shifting the state of our nervous system. When the conditions are right the system begins to downregulate. And sometimes, in that downregulation, whatever has been held in hyperactivation or frozen in shutdown mode can start to move.

That movement can feel like tears. Or a sudden heaviness. Or a wave of something you can't name. I've experienced a lot of hyperactivation and hypoactivation in my own healing journey.

The container matters as much as the technique

One of the most useful concepts from the webinar was what Fox and Hübl called "the container." This is the quality of safety and groundedness that a practitioner creates.

Fox referenced the work of researcher Amy Edmondson, whose studies on psychological safety show that the level of trust and genuine safety in a relationship directly affects what people are able to access and express. A foundational safety that allows people to be vulnerable, to drop their defenses, to let something real happen.

Hübl put it simply: "If you create the right safe and sound container, then naturally the things that are ripe to be released by the nervous system and the body will come up."

In each session, through slow, consistent pressure I try to create an environment where your nervous system gets the signal that it can relax its grip. No sudden movements. No loud talking. No agenda beyond your wellbeing. The message your body receives, over and over, is: you're safe. You don't have to hold on so tight.

And sometimes the body believes it. And something releases.

Here's where I want to be really clear about my role, because I think it matters.

I'm a licensed massage therapist. I'm not a counselor, a psychologist, or a trauma therapist. I spent three years as a certified Mental Health First Aid trainer through my nonprofit work training people who work with children and adults to recognize mental health challenges and respond appropriately. That background shapes how I think about what comes up in a session. But it also taught me something important: knowing your lane and staying within your scope of work is not a limitation, it's the whole point.

So when emotion surfaces on my table, here's what I do: I keep my hands on you. I keep the work moving. I hold space without making it a moment. I don't pause dramatically. I don't ask probing questions. I don't try to interpret what's happening or assign meaning to it. I witness the release without judgment, without alarm, without trying to stop it or speed it up, and just let it be what it is.

Fox described this in the webinar as "leaving space for someone to unfold themselves." That resonated with me. My job isn't to fix what surfaces. It's to make sure you feel safe enough that it can surface at all, and then to stay steady while it does.

After the session you have a few quiet minutes before you get up when I leave the room. And if what you're carrying keeps coming up is persistent, disruptive, or connected to something you haven't been able to move through on your own I can refer you toward professionals who are actually trained for that work. Making that referral when it's needed is something I take seriously.

You don't have to explain yourself

Most of my clients are high-functioning people. They're used to being competent, composed, in control. The massage table might be one of the only places in their week where someone is simply taking care of them, with nothing expected from them in return.

Fox said something in the webinar that I keep thinking about. She described watching corporate leaders arrive at retreats closed off, formal, on the defensive. And within days, something shifts inside them. They start sharing things they haven't said out loud before. They become kind to each other in their vulnerability. The container did that. The safety did that. Not any single intervention, just the steady, consistent presence of an environment where it was okay to be human.

I'm not running a retreat. I'm running a 90-minute massage in Las Vegas. But the principle is the same. When your nervous system finally gets the signal that it's safe. Deeply, somatically safe so things can shift that have been stuck for a long time.

If something comes up on my table, let it. I don't assign a color to it or try to stop the process. You don't owe me an explanation. You don't need to apologize. Your body is smarter than we give it credit for. It knows when it's safe. It knows when it's finally okay to exhale.

I'll be right there. Not making it weird.

That's the job, and I genuinely love it.

If you're in Las Vegas and ready to give your nervous system a real break, book a session with me. And follow me on Instagram @luckygirliegirl for more on the science of what happens when we actually slow down.