What Happens to Your Body When You Repress Emotions?

Image by Kira auf der Heide

I have never understood Western medicine’s separation of mind and body, as if they are two distinct entities. How can this make sense? Your mind is generated by your brain, an organ in your body. Your moods and emotions are regulated through the production of hormones. And you feel those emotions, where? In your body, usually in your chest and gut but also in the flushing of your skin, tensing of muscles or clenching of your jaw. In countless ways, both large and small, your mind and body are intertwined. In fact, it’s more helpful to think of mind-body symptoms and experiences, combining rather than artificially separating them.

Your mind, brain, nervous system, hormonal system, organs, musculoskeletal and many other systems all work together, every second of your life, to help you think, speak, move, digest food, sleep, breathe and countless other things beyond your conscious awareness. So you are a system, or rather a system of systems. All, ideally, working as one.

This helps explain the impact of your thoughts and emotions on your body, something which is explained with customary skill and clarity by Dr Gabor Maté, in his seminal book When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. I am currently re-reading this book and finding it gripping, because Dr Maté makes such a strong case for the impact of both chronic stress and emotional repression on the body.

Why we repress emotion

I have explored the impact of chronic stress in numerous recent posts, so today let’s focus on the all-too-common problem of emotional repression. As with so many of the problems we experience as adults, this repression usually begins in childhood – and often as the result of trauma. If you’re told, again and again, that you are too emotional, too sensitive, naughty, or difficult when you get sad, scared, angry or hurt, over time you will learn not to show those emotions, especially to the person who is shaming and criticising you for having them. At the same time you might be praised and complimented for being rational, grown up, nice, sweet or caring, as long as you maintain a sunny, compliant, smiling disposition.

So you learn to swallow your emotions, bit by bit. For many of my clients the most common emotion to be repressed in this way is anger, which was deemed too much, too intense, and generally unwelcome in their family of origin. Over time, this emotional repression also serves to repress other systems in the body, especially your immune system (remember that these systems are interlinked – make changes in one and you inevitably affect the others). So your immune system becomes compromised, leading to a whole host of ailments, from vulnerability to viruses and infections, to skin complaints like eczema, migraines, digestive issues like IBS or acid reflux, and more serious autoimmune diseases such as MS, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

It’s important to be clear that, if you are suffering with any of these ailments or diseases, it’s not in any way your fault. I have a number of them myself, so I’m not blaming anyone – including myself – for their struggles with physical health. Also important is that there are a whole host of other reasons we become ill, from genetic inheritance to our diet, sleep, smoking, alcohol consumption, toxic chemicals in the air we breathe and water we drink. It’s just helpful to understand that chronic stress in general, and emotional repression in particular, clearly have an impact on your physical wellbeing and mine – so we should do all we can to address these problems.

The practice

Because so many of my clients struggle with their emotions, in a whole host of ways, I created this practice to explain, in a step-by-step way, the optimal way we should feel, process and release our emotions. It’s called The Four Fs and you can listen to my talk and practice in my Insight Timer collection.

Many clients have told me they found it useful in understanding how they were supposed to feel emotions, how to notice them in their body, release them and then find comfort, for example with a soothing hug. I hope you find it helpful too – and do check out Dr Maté’s book. He is a remarkable teacher, so if you haven’t soaked up his wisdom yet, I strongly recommend that you do.

Love ❤️

Dan

The Link Between Trauma, Stress and Physical Illness

I have long been convinced of the link between traumatic experiences, especially in childhood, and physical ailments such as arthritis, eczema, digestive problems like irritable bowel syndrome and a whole host of other illnesses. So I found Dr Gabor Maté’s book, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, to be intriguing.

Dr Maté (a physician working in palliative care and later with addiction in Canada) makes a strong, evidence-based case for the ways in which traumatic or stressful experiences in childhood and throughout our lives repeatedly trigger the stress response in our brain, which causes a cascade of hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, as well as many other changes in the brain and body.

This is meant to be an urgent, life-saving response to threats such as predatory animals or aggressive tribes, which were the life-or-death threats humans faced for much of our evolutionary history (which is when our brains were, to a large extent, formed).

But when, say, you have a highly critical parent, putting you down every day throughout your childhood; you suffer abuse or neglect; or are unlucky enough to be raised in a high-conflict family, where the parents are always at each other’s throats, your stress response is being triggered, repeatedly, which the body is not designed to cope with.

Sadly, when combined with your particular genetic makeup, this can make you more vulnerable to a whole host of physical illnesses, including the big, scary ones like cancer, dementia or heart disease; and autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis (MS) or rheumatoid arthritis.

None of this is your fault

Of course, it’s really important to emphasise that this is not your fault in any way, or that – if you are ill now – you somehow brought this illness upon yourself. Dr Maté goes to great pains to explain that it’s the result of these repeated stressors impacting your growing brain and body, which may cause problems in later life. Nobody chooses to have a harsh, critical parent, or to suffer emotional neglect.

But what it does make crystal-clear to me is that, if you have had a highly stressful childhood, it is so important to get psychological help from someone like me (or any other well-trained therapist practising an effective, evidence-based form of therapy). Because none of this is fixed or irreversible – healing those wounds from childhood, learning to feel and healthily release your emotions, becoming less self-critical, more assertive and kinder/more compassionate to yourself… these are all the magic ingredients which form the medicine that combats the effects of your long-term stress.

Warm wishes,

Dan