Danielle Tursky LMT

Coat hanger pain..
Oh this one hits close to home because I lived this exact thing.

Let me explain what’s actually happening first, because coathanger pain is not just tight muscles and treating it like tight muscles is why nothing works.

Coathanger pain is a dysautonomia pattern. When your autonomic nervous system isn’t regulating blood flow properly, your upper back and neck muscles become ischemic – meaning they’re not getting enough blood supply. They’re essentially cramping from the inside out. No amount of massage, ointment, or stretching fixes ischemia. You have to address the blood flow problem, which means addressing the nervous system underneath it.

Laying horizontally is super helpful here
Resets the vagus nerve

Military neck makes this dramatically worse. Your cervical spine is supposed to have a natural curve that distributes the weight of your head across the whole structure. When that curve is gone, your head – which weighs 10 to 12 pounds – is sitting like a bowling ball on a flat surface. Your small deep cervical stabilizers are working around the clock just to keep you upright and they are exhausted.

Sleep help for this:

Elevating the head of your bed slightly (even just a few inches under the mattress) can help with the blood pooling piece while still being horizontal. A cervical roll under your neck – not a pillow, just a small rolled towel – gives your spine something to remember its curve by without forcing it.

And if you’re a side sleeper, keeping a pillow between your knees takes the rotational pull off your whole spine including your neck. Your body is one connected chain.

For pillows – I personally sleep with a pregnancy pillow with the top part tucked under my side, not my neck, and a weighted heating pad where my head actually rests. The weight gives my nervous system proprioceptive input and the heat keeps the blood moving. It took me a long time to figure that out.

What actually helps long term is rebuilding the cervical curve and teaching the deep stabilizers how to do their job again through very specific, very slow neuromuscular work. Not stretching. Not strengthening in the traditional sense. Retraining.

For resetting the nervous system specifically around the neck, the most accessible thing you can do is vagal breathing in a supported reclined position – slow exhale longer than your inhale, jaw relaxed, tongue off the roof of your mouth. This directly downregulates the threat response your nervous system is running constantly.

Gentle suboccipital release – just the weight of your own fingers at the base of your skull, no pressure, just contact – can also signal safety to the brainstem. Your nervous system controls that entire region. You cannot muscle your way out of a nervous system problem.

You’re not going to find that in a list of exercises. But understanding why your body is doing what it’s doing is the first step to stopping it.

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Nobody warns you about adjustment shock. They talk about healing like it’s this soft, gradual awakening. Candles. Journaling. Breakthroughs. What they don’t tell you is that your nervous system will fight you the whole way there.

Adjustment shock is what happens when your body encounters a new normal it was never taught to trust.
Think about what you inherited. If you’re looking at the generational line honestly, most of us came from systems built on silence, control, and survival. The Silent Generation didn’t have the language for their pain. Boomers got loud in the world and quiet in the home. Gen X learned to disappear into independence because nobody was emotionally available. Millennials started naming it. Gen Z is screaming it from every platform.

But naming it and healing it are two completely different things. And that gap? That’s exactly where adjustment shock lives.

When you begin doing the actual work, your nervous system doesn’t immediately recognize safety as safety. It recognizes it as threat. Because for generations before you, safety was never the baseline. Survival was. Control was. Silence was. Your biology is literally calibrated to the chaos that raised it.

So when you start setting a boundary, your chest tightens. When you speak a truth that was forbidden in your family, your body braces for impact. When someone treats you with genuine care, something in you waits for the catch. That is not weakness. That is your nervous system doing its job, based on the only data it was ever given.

This is why healing can feel like a crisis before it feels like a release.

I see this in bodywork constantly. The tissue holds what the mind learned to bypass. When the body starts to soften, when the armor starts to come down, there is often grief that rises before there is relief. That grief isn’t a sign something went wrong. It’s the signal that something real is finally being touched.

Adjustment shock shows up differently depending on where you sit in the generational line. If you’re a Millennial, you may be trying to rewire yourself while simultaneously raising children who need something you never got. That’s a compounded demand on your nervous system. You’re doing double work in real time. The shock isn’t just personal. It’s layered.

If you’re Gen Z, you have the language but not always the physiological tools to metabolize what you’re uncovering. Awareness without regulation is just exposure. And sustained exposure without grounding doesn’t heal the body. It exhausts it.

The adjustment shock doesn’t mean stop. It means slow down enough to let the new pattern actually land.
Healing is a biological process, not just a mindset shift. Your nervous system needs repetition of safe experiences before it will stop waiting for the floor to drop out. That takes time. It takes body-level work. It takes people around you who understand that your resistance isn’t sabotage, it’s physiology.

When someone in your lineage decides to break the cycle, the whole system feels it. Not just them. That kind of shift creates friction. People who were comfortable with the old pattern will push back, sometimes without even knowing why.

That friction is not a red flag. It’s confirmation that something real is changing.

Adjustment shock is the in-between. The place where the old way no longer fits and the new way doesn’t feel safe yet. You are not broken because you’re struggling there. You are in the exact place where healing is most active.

Stay with it. Get support. Let your body catch up to what your mind already knows.

The lineage you’re rewriting will carry this forward. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

Who carries their stress in their shoulders!?

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Proprioception for Hypermobility: a movement specialist's insights to retraining your brain to turn your hypermobility into a superpower Welcome to Your Hypermobile JourneyHi there, fellow bendy human. If you've found this course, chances are something in your body isn't quite right, and you're tired of being told it's all in your head. You've probably been told to "just stretch more" or "strengthen your core" for the hundredth time,...

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Proprioception for Hypermobility: a movement specialist's insights to retraining your brain to turn your hypermobility into a superpower Welcome to Your Hypermobile JourneyHi there, fellow bendy human. If you've found this course, chances are something in your body isn't quite right, and you're tired of being told it's all in your head. You've probably been told to "just stretch more" or "strengthen your core" for the hundredth time,...