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