I previously shared a blog called Understanding Stored Emotions. In that blog, I talked about how experiences throughout our lifetime can become stored within our central nervous system. The body will store trauma in the muscles, organs, and connective tissue. I gave you a bit of background on what it is and how you can work to uncover it in your life. In this blog, I want to talk about how you can work to release this stored emotion for your own emotional health and well-being. 

So let’s recap just a bit. The body is made up of energy, right? Energy is how cells are made. Electricity is required for the nervous system to send signals throughout the body. So if our body is made up of energy then it only makes sense that stored energy in our body will disrupt its ability to function optimally.  

And that stored emotion is what can come back up for us in our everyday lives. On a subconscious level. You don’t even realize this is an underlying root cause of what doesn’t make you feel well or have you responding to circumstances in your life in a way that you would not ideally choose. It can feel heavy. It can feel like blockage. It can keep you feeling stuck in a loop of negative autopilot behavior. 

To expand a little further, in the book…The Body Keeps the Score, the author Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk shares that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on the mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how we as humans will manage to survive in the present. Even if your mind desperately wants to leave trauma behind, your body will keep you trapped in the past with your emotions and feelings. It is a very insightful book and I highly recommend it. It can be a bit high level with a lot of technical information but I am now a firm believer that the better we can understand how our bodies work we can make better decisions on how to manage it. 

When emotions get stuck you may notice that your ability to create a better life becomes limited. You may find yourself experiencing fatigue, anxiety, and depression. Even further, stored unresolved emotions can lead to chronic pain and disease. 

Traditional therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy that can take us to places of talking about deep tough stuff is helpful to a certain point. 

Sometimes you may feel like you are doing all the right things and yet not feeling relief. This is where somatic therapies can come in.

So let’s review how does this happen? Let’s try to break it down into simple steps.

Let’s use the emotion of fear as an example. 

So what takes place is that something happens to you. A circumstance. You are involved in something or you witness something that creates the emotion of fear. Your body does this naturally as part of your primitive brain. It is constantly scanning for danger to keep you safe. So it recognizes danger and creates the physical vibration in your body of fear. It does this so you will feel that vibration and take action to protect yourself. So the steps are:

1. You develop a physical vibration. 
2. You feel the emotion which includes any thoughts and physical sensations associated with it. 
3. We process the emotion and can take away what we want to learn from it and process it. 

Your brain and automatic nervous system are communicating. The problem arises when this process is interrupted, it can cause the blockage. The higher the intensity the more likely the emotion can become stuck. As children, we can’t fully rationalize, reason, and process intense emotions. So we tend to find a way to cope and suppress what caused us trauma. It is now stored away in our nervous system. Our brain does not have a concept of time. It will not know that the stored emotion of fear was from something 20 years ago. It will present it to you and your mind and body will feel the vibrations as it did 20 years ago. Fascinating isn’t it?

What I really want to share with you is what you can do about this if you have recognized that you could be storing negative emotions in your body. Maybe you are overly emotional, maybe you just don’t feel well. These stored negative energies are not something that our doctor is talking to us about or is even on our radar as a contributor to why we feel this way.

So here are some examples of things you can do with easier access to support yourself:

1. Start with developing somatic awareness. Somatic means dealing with the body rather than the mind. Identify your areas of tension or pain in the body. Make a note of where they are. 
2. Grounding is a way of calming and regulating our nervous system. What is actually happening right now? What do I need to worry or fear? Journaling is a great way for me to ground myself in the truth of what is happening. Not the story my brain likes to create. 
3. Meditation is so useful in calming the mind and body and signaling to your nervous system that everything is okay. So don’t overly analyze if you think you’re not doing it right or your brain is too active. Just the act of sitting and breathing calmly is sending these signals to your body. 
4. EFT Tapping. If you aren’t familiar with this, just look it up. There are many videos on YouTube. Find a resource that resonates with you and give it a try. I have been using the EFT Tapping for a few months now after dismissing it early on and I can feel a calming effect take place. 
5. Massage is a powerful way to signal to your body you are safe. Also if you have a massage therapist who is knowledgeable about deep tissue and where energy is stored this can be a great way to have a release. 

I want to also mention that there are additional therapies you can receive with outside-trained support. I’ll just highlight a few. 

1. EMDR therapy is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR focuses on the specific memories causing the trauma or issue. 
2. Brainspotting could be considered similar to EMDR. It focuses on the eye placement and neural networks associated with a painful memory or trauma. 
3. Hypnotherapy is a deep state of relaxation and concentration to be more open to guided suggestions to make changes that can improve your health. 

I share all this because I don’t believe we need to just deal with it or suffer through it. Again, so much of this is happening as a root cause of what has you not feeling your best. You often don’t even realize what is stored in your nervous system which impacts you negatively. I want to make sure everyone knows there are alternatives out there to only what we know which is typically medication. I was placed on Zoloft at a difficult time in my life and it helped lift some of the clouds. However, I reached a point where I didn’t think it was helping me anymore and that is what began my journey into my own self-care practices and looking for additional ways to bring relief and peace to myself. 

I wanted to share my personal story with you regarding some of these modalities. 

I began my journey with life coaching in 2020 when my physical health and mental state were at their worst. 

I started with making better decisions regarding what I was fueling my body with. Ending my relationship with alcohol and making better choices with my food. Journaling, meditating, and learning all about the brain during my life coaching certification. I was my first client and applied everything I learned to my life and what was troubling me. 

I really had a transformational experience. I became healthier physically and mentally. My numbers proved it. My relationships improved. My mood. My ability to experience calm and peace. To go after things I wanted in my life including a new career. 

3 years into that journey I felt like I couldn’t make any more progress and there would still be these physical feelings that would come over me about certain areas in my life. I just couldn’t overpower the physical feelings that had me acting in ways I really didn’t want to. Like I would get mean, snippy, snarky. I would be feeling high one day and feel like a dark cloud over me the next. I would be perfectly content and then a feeling of doom would come over me. 

So here is where my journey really took a turn. 

I had been getting massages for over 20 years. At one of those appointments I told my massage therapist that I was feeling very emotional. Since my Dad passed I felt like it was always there lurking below the surface to hijack how I really wanted to feel or show up in situations. That day she focused on specific areas such as the hips where women store trauma. It was uncomfortable at times, sometimes making me feel nauseous. She placed a tissue down by my hands and I thought to myself why did she do that? I am not sniffling, I am not crying. I didn’t ask but I wondered. 

About 5 minutes later I just started crying uncontrollably. I wasn’t doing it. I told her, “I am not doing this, I can’t stop the tears”. It felt very strange to not be in control of the flow of tears I was having. I had never felt anything like it before. That was the moment I believed 100% in the fact that we store pain and trauma in our bodies. I knew I needed to focus on releasing whatever I could. So that I can be intentional and in the moment and not have something subconsciously hijacking my physical feelings and have me acting in ways I didn’t want to. 

Following that massage, I revisited a therapy modality that I had learned of about 3 years earlier called EMDR. I reached out to someone local to me, remained patient while on a waitlist, and finally experienced it for myself. I have been going through this therapy for the past few months and have experienced powerful transformational results. I physically feel different. My physical body is now more aligned with all the brain work I had been practicing for the last 3 years. After 1 session I could feel the shift. After several sessions, I feel like a different person. In fact, I went to receive a massage after my 3rd session. My massage therapist who I have been going to for over 15 years made me aware of something.

She said you know that area in your left rib that was always there? It’s gone! I gasped and said, oh my gosh you are right!!! 

I had this tender spot and when she would work on it, I would sometimes really have to breathe through it, or other times it would make me feel nauseous. It was pesky, she would work on it and it would fight her. Sort of jumping around away from her messing with it. It was something I just began to assume would ALWAYS be there. 

It was gone! After these sessions of EMDR therapy, I felt lighter and more at peace than I had ever felt before. My physical body was changed. She had proof of it and pointed it out to me.

So if you can’t tell I am a huge proponent of learning how you can take better care of your mental and physical health and trying the road less traveled. 

My therapist informed me that one session of EMDR is more powerful than a year of talk therapy. Nothing is wrong with talk therapy, I just want you to know that physical relief is available to you, which can assist with the talk therapy being so much more productive. 

There is a very real connection between the mind and the body and I believe I am adding quality years to my life by all that I have let go of.  

This is what I offer to all of you. Any sort of trauma, whether big or small is residing in your body like an unwelcome visitor. Do you want to just ignore it and let it stay for the rest of your life? Showing up whenever it wants? Or do you want to take a proactive step in releasing all that you have stored and give yourself the gift of peace?

If anyone would like to speak to me more about my experience please don’t hesitate to reach out. I will give you an open and honest account of what this has done for me and has the potential to do for so many people who are not feeling their best. 

You may not think you need this. Maybe you think you’re not ready. If you recognize that you have emotions stored, then seriously consider spending some time on this part of your life. So you can feel lighter and more peaceful as you navigate your life. 

“True emotional healing doesn’t happen without feeling. The only way out is through.”

Jessica Moore