The Body Keeps Score: How My Grief Has Shaped My Health

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror yesterday and, for a fleeting moment, thought, damn, am I an attractive human being. This isn’t a common experience for me—not because of self-esteem issues, though I certainly have those—but because personal appearance has never been a priority. I focus on hygiene and making sure I’m clothed appropriately for the occasion, but beyond that, the aesthetic aspect of how I present myself has always felt secondary to who I am.

Yet, in that moment, I saw something beyond the familiar lines of my face. I saw resilience. I saw a body that has endured—one that has fought battles most don’t see, battles etched into my bones, my skin, and, perhaps most noticeably, my teeth.

A Losing Battle With My Teeth

For the past 13 years—really, for the past 27—I have been losing an unrelenting battle with my oral health. Once, I had strong, healthy teeth. Until I had children, I never had a single cavity despite my less-than-perfect flossing habits. But after my first child, things started to spiral. First, the cavities came—then root canals, then crowns, then extractions. And for the past three years, my teeth have simply fallen out, roots and all.

I should have 32 teeth. I have 16.

At first, I attributed this decline to the usual suspects—autoimmune disorders, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), dry mouth, my history of GERD. But when I truly examined the pattern, I realized that none of these alone could account for the speed and severity of my deterioration. Instead, a deeper, more insidious culprit emerged—my grief.

The Body Holds What the Mind Cannot

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s groundbreaking work, The Body Keeps the Score, explores how trauma doesn’t just exist as a series of painful memories—it physically embeds itself into the body. It alters our nervous system, our immune responses, even our cellular functions. And for someone like me, someone who lives with Alexithymia—the inability to identify or express emotions—this connection is even more devastating. I do not process my emotions in the typical way; I do not release them, articulate them, or even always recognize them. Instead, they manifest physically. They wreak havoc where my mind refuses to acknowledge them.

The proof is in my teeth.

The day my brother flipped the car and was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, a tooth fell out. The day he was killed, another tooth followed.

It is as if my body, unable to scream or cry or wail, found another way to break.

The Hidden Impact of Embodied Grief

Grief does not simply live in the mind—it settles in the bones, in the gut, in the breath, in the immune system. Studies have shown that prolonged stress, unresolved trauma, and deep emotional burdens can lead to an increase in inflammatory responses, a weakening of the immune system, and even a shortening of telomeres—the protective caps on our DNA that dictate how we age.

For those of us who struggle to process emotions cognitively, the effect is even more dramatic. I do not actively feel my sadness the way some might. I cannot always name the aching loss. But my body does. My cells do. My teeth do.

Learning to Listen

For so long, I fought my body—resented it for falling apart, for failing me, for refusing to hold itself together despite my diligent care. I wanted to believe that if I followed the steps—brushed, flossed, rinsed, avoided sugar—I could control the outcome. But my body was never fighting bacteria alone; it was fighting grief, stress, loss, and everything I had refused to process.

And perhaps I still do not fully understand my grief the way others do. Perhaps I cannot eloquently describe the weight in my chest or pinpoint the precise moment sorrow overtakes me. But I am constantly learning new ways to listen to my body in new ways—to recognize that when my jaw tightens, when my skin flares, when my exhaustion is bone-deep, my body is speaking on behalf of the emotions I cannot name.

Moving Forward

So what does healing look like when grief resides in the body?

For me, it looks like gentleness. It looks like shifting my perspective—seeing my body not as an adversary, but as a messenger. It looks like acknowledging that pain is not always visible, that wounds do not always bleed. It looks like embracing the fact that health is not merely a matter of habits, but also of healing the intangible.

And it looks like writing this—to finally put words to the experiences my body has long carried, to offer them up as proof that we are more than just minds trapped in flesh.

If my body keeps the score, then maybe, just maybe, this is my first attempt at rewriting it.