Holding Emotion in Your Body: A Feature, Not a Bug
It can be very frustrating when you’ve done all the mental processing of an event, only to find out that the emotional energy from it is still living in your body and causing a problem.
It can feel like a bug in our development as humans.
What if I told you that instead of a bug, this is in fact a very useful feature?
Many of us have had the experience of being overwhelmed by emotions before – to the point where in that moment we couldn’t have done anything else.
Big Events Create Big Emotions
but often in that moment, succumbing to the tidal wave of emotion would put us in danger, whether that be historically or when sitting in our desk across from a boss who’s just ignited the anger of a thousand suns.
The workaround? Our body grabs that emotion and stores it in our body.
The problem is then that the emotion stays in our body until we are able to process it out.
Many communities across the world have rituals for processing or releasing the emotion from an experience, whether that is grief, or anger, or even happiness.
As the current dominant culture took over the world, however, the idea of emotions and emotional processing as important was squashed down as much as our individual emotional experience has been.
‘Emotional’ is used as an insult, and displaying any emotion (slightly different depending on if you’re socialised as a man or a woman) immediately undermines your standing in the social group.
As such, we’ve lost the respect for our emotional experiences along with the rituals and traditions that gave us space to release the emotion from our body.
There's good reason to tuck emotion away for another moment
What we’re missing is the practice of going back and releasing the emotion that was created.
That’s why I feel so strongly about the work I do.
Not only do we find that held emotional energy to release it, but you also learn the skill to communicate with your body so it can show you in future where things are hiding.
And you’ll have the practices to release the emotions from future events after they happened.
Otherwise, they’ll just take up space and impact your day to day life.
Do you have emotional energy to release?
If you’d like to try a session with me to start releasing some energy, you can try my initial session, or you can schedule a free 20-min chat to get more information about what this work looks like.
And the next time you feel old, unprocessed emotion interfering with your progress, remember – your body was helping you, we just lost the second half of the process.
