Dec 28, 2025

Just got my teeth cleaned.

Why can’t we do that for our emotions?

Why can’t we have a twice-a-year cleaning where we sit down, open wide, and let someone scrape the plaque off our inner lives. The buildup. The stuff we swear isn’t there because it doesn’t hurt yet.

Why can’t we get emotionally flossed. Polished. Rinsed.

Why can’t we leave feeling a little raw, a little lighter, and oddly proud of ourselves.

Teeth get maintenance because we agreed neglect turns into pain. Emotions, somehow, are expected to self-regulate forever. If your gums bleed, it’s plaque. If your heart hurts, it’s a personal failing.

But feelings calcify too. Grief hardens. Resentment settles in behind the molars. Old stories build up quietly until they bleed when touched.

What we call therapy is really emotional scaling. Journaling is flossing. Honest conversations are that scraping sound you hate but respect. Crying in the car is the rinse. Insight is the polish.

The problem isn’t that emotional cleanings don’t exist. It’s that we only book appointments when something hurts. We treat maintenance like failure and endurance like virtue.

Imagine leaving an appointment where someone simply says, “This part’s inflamed,” without judgment. Where the old lies and the beliefs that kept them fed get scraped away. Where you’re reminded how to care for yourself between visits, knowing you probably won’t do it perfectly.

You’d leave more polished. Still human.

We don’t need emotional heroics.

We need hygiene.