Mirror Therapy: Areas of the Face to Massage

As you can tell from the description of the specific techniques, we would use the massage to address the pain in specific areas of David’s face. Since I knew that most of his pain was in his eye or in a specific location around his mouth, I would often spend more time in those areas. And if a particular area was more active or more painful on a given day, David would tell me and I would focus on those areas—and they would respond. Sometimes, I could even feel him twitch or flinch in response to something I did. David himself has described to me how he could at times feel himself having an "ah-ha" moment in which the pain would "give up" after a while when I was working "directly" on an area that was in pain. But I always also massaged the entire face. Early on, we found that if I focused too exclusively on the painful areas, the pain would “migrate” into other parts of the face.

When the pain in his eye was at its worst, I would rub directly on the eye and into the socket, gently, but firmly. The only way this worked was for David to keep his right eye closed and his left eye open while I was doing it. We did not do this very often, as it was much easier for David to keep both eyes open, but when the eye pain was very intense, it did give almost immediate relief.