Trapped Emotions: How to Release Emotions Stuck in Your Body
We were all born to express our emotions openly and freely because we’re emotional creatures. Still, as we grow up, our desire to be accepted, earn love, and fit in can “encourage” us to repress our emotions when we should instead express them. A lot of people use a defense mechanism of pretending and avoiding their uncomfortable emotions to hide them. They end up hiding themselves.
They bury themselves deep inside, where others can’t see them, because they can’t express their emotions through their bodies and minds. The difficulty they have accepting their feelings makes it harder for them to process what is happening. They find themselves emotionally overwhelmed when they experience burdensome events. Our tissues, muscles, and organs are where unprocessed emotional energy is stored, and we create toxicity in our bodies, minds, and hearts when we chronically repress emotions.
What do Suppressed Emotions Cause?
It will become impossible for you to heal, and you’ll be stuck in getting over your emotions if you don’t face suppressed emotions. You may not know it, but your suppressed emotions will keep gaining power over your behavior as they gradually shift from your conscious to your unconscious mind, and this alone is a trap that makes you feel the pain is long gone.
You’ll find it difficult to believe in yourself, and your present and future will keep getting hurt by what your ego projects to you, the more you keep choosing not to heal them. Know that your suppressed emotions will be used against you by your ego, which knows it all.
Three Steps to Process Emotional Energy Stuck in Your Body
Learning to recognize and accept our feelings as they come and go is crucial. Learning to express our emotions healthily will help prevent them from getting stuck. Expression is the opposite of repression, and if you’ve got some emotional energy stuck in your body, you can process it by using these three simple steps:
Step 1: Recognize (self-awareness)
Without being judgmental, you need to be able to feel what’s happening in your body, accept it, and have a clear idea of what’s happening. Feeling the emotion in your body and recognizing it is the challenge, and mindfulness does play a significant role in helping you achieve this.
To process and integrate your emotions into your experience, you must fully experience each emotion. You have to feel it to heal it. The emotion must be felt in your body. Know that the essence of true healing will not be complete without inner freedom, insight, genuine acceptance, and a fully embodied experience. As you go through more difficult emotions, offer yourself self-compassion, and to get better at recognizing your feelings, practice mindfulness.
Step 2: Respond (self-expression)
The goal is to let go of your emotion by moving its energy through and out of the body. For emotions to be processed, they need to be expressed. Foremost, convey the feeling on the bodily level, and understand that there has to be an integration of the body and mind before true healing can occur. This self-expression must be embodied and authentic.
Whether you feel you need to breathe deeply while facing the sun, paint your feelings out, do some TRE, yoga, tapping, or do some gardening, hit a punching bag, dance it out, walk or run, go for a swim, scream into a pillow, cry, or whatever helps you feel cathartic at that moment, do it.
This can help to liberate you from the shackles of the poisonous emotions that you’ve carried within. More so, you can process your deepest feelings and emotions, reconnect with your true self, and bask in a therapeutic experience of self-discovery when you write. Journaling is one of the best forms of emotional healing because writing helps us gain perspective, process, and grasp the meaning of our world and others’. We give our internal world a voice when we write.
Step 3: Reset (self-care)
The goal is to come back into balance and wellness, reset to a relaxed and open state, and realign with your authentic self. Habits that will bring in the feeling of well-being should be indulged in as you get yourself rededicated to body-mind self-care.