journaling - the regular practice of recording your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and observations on paper or digitally
emotional health - the ability to understand, manage, and express emotions in a healthy, balanced way while navigating life’s challenges
I’ve been doing quite the Emotional Health Journey alongside my physical health journey. Over the past few years I’ve read several books that have shaped my understanding of how we can stuff and trap emotions inside our physical being. There’s a lot to this, but if you think about the fact that you can get a headache or a stomach ache after a particularly stressful event or day, that’s a simple example of emotions affecting our physical being. We are electrical creatures, with frequencies running throughout our body. That is just science. That is how our body works. That is how we were created. Emotions themselves have frequencies. I hate to use the word ‘energy’, because some people have made it to be something more mystical than science. But it is, simply, energy. When we don’t process an emotion fully and let it go, its energy becomes trapped somewhere in our body. This can create illness, whether acute or chronic. If it isn’t dealt with, it stays.
I have come to the realization and firmly believe that I stuffed down so many emotions and stress through a particular decade (or more) of my life, I basically became stuck in my sympathetic nervous system. That is the fight flight or freeze part of our nervous system. This part is necessary at certain times, but when we get stuck in it, it causes Chronic Stress which can cause Chronic Illness. I believe this happened for me. I may have had some predispositions for certain illnesses, and stuffing down my perceived 'negative' emotions caused them to develop into more.
There are also emotions that we can absorb or inherit (you can research epigenetics for more). We make meanings out of different traumas and stressful events throughout our development years. All of these things can compound when we are not allowed or don't know how to properly process emotions. Processing an emotion includes stopping the immediate reaction to think about what you're feeling, label the emotion(s), noticing your physical sensations due to the emotion(s), allowing yourself to connect with the feelings, and then letting them go. If at any point along this journey you get stopped or keep yourself from doing the process, the emotion(s) get trapped. They then go somewhere in your body. We have to find ways to process our emotions, whether it is immediately, within 24 hours, or years later when it is causing mayhem.
One particular book I've read that has been incredibly helpful is called The Emotion Code by Dr. Bradley Nelson. He describes this trapping of emotions in better detail than I can, and teaches how to tap into your subconscious memory in order to identify and then release them. Did you know that your subconscious constitutes 90-95% of your brain processing? There's got to be a LOT going on in that percentage of which we remain unaware. Dr. Nelson shows how to use muscle testing to ask your body about trapped emotions, and then how to release them.
This can seem a bit 'woo-woo'. I’ve got a lot of prayer behind this, though. I know that for some (particularly evangelical Christians), this can sound like I'm heading into mysticism and divination. I have done much prayer and seeking about this, and I firmly believe that God created us with much intention to converse with the Holy Spirit and live the best lives we can. Part of that creation is the body's natural ability to heal itself. A LOT goes into that statement, but I believe that God has made it where we can recall past hurts, name the emotions that went with them, cry out to Him about all we humanly thought and felt, and then He can take that from us and we can heal. We can heal in heart, soul, mind, & strength. Every time I do this work, I pray beforehand and afterwards, always thanking God for revealing past hurts, traumas, & events that I stuffed away because they were too hurtful at the time to face. I've decide that it hurts worse to allow these trapped emotions to continue making me more and more ill, than it does to unearth, face, and process emotions that did not serve me well.
One of the other books that I have worked through is by Nicole J. Sachs called Mind Your Body. She focuses on the journaling aspect of Emotional Healing. She calls it JournalSpeak, and it is that real, raw, base, letting out of all thoughts of feelings about a situation that caused us pain. By pairing the concepts from these 2 books, I’m able to identify a trapped emotion and then journal about it if I have lots of 'feels' associated with it. I get out my deep, true feelings. I write stuff that I would never want anybody else to see, and then I burn the papers. Burning stuff for me is just so symbolic and purifying, so that is my destruction of choice.
One of the biggest ways that I can testify to the effectiveness of this work, is that I have drastically reduced my social anxiety. Social anxiety is something I have been able to pretty much hide from most people in my life. I have actually dealt with it a lot, especially over the last 12-15 years, It has been almost a constant thing that I did not want to admit. The nervousness before I got to any place where people are gonna be, even if I know everybody. (This would lessen if I felt comfortable once there, but a lot was going on inside my head on the way there) Then there was the worry over something I did or didn’t say, and the constant replaying of it for hours, even days later. The lack of ability to put myself out there and talk to strangers, even if it was people that are there for the same reason I was, like parents at a meeting at school. I could list more, but hopefully you get the idea. The first time I really noticed how much I had reduced in this anxiety was a few weeks ago during a celebration meeting for my daughter making the junior high cheerleader squad for next year. I went by myself, as my husband was busy doing something else, and realized later that I did not feel sick to my stomach about having to talk to people I didn’t know. I just felt comfortable Being Me. I wasn’t constantly worrying about if I wore the Right thing or my hair looked the Right way or I said things the Right way. I wasn't worried or wondering what anyone might be thinking about me. I was just there. I was celebrating my girl. And I wasn’t exhausted when we got home! This may not seem like much, but it was a HUGE realization for me. And it’s just pretty much gotten better since then. I’m not all of a sudden an extrovert, but I don’t feel the same level of anxiety and worry that I usually do when I’m around people that I don’t know. I don’t feel like I have to explain myself, and I feel like I can just be me and not worry then or later about what people thought about me.
So, I share all of this revealing information about myself (ha) to encourage you to JOURNAL. Make it a habit. Do it almost every day (something I'm still working towards). Recognize the value in it. Get those trapped emotions that are making you sick in some way on the outside and released.
And if you need a guide, a friend who has been there, is doing that, reach out. I'd love to help you on your journey. God doesn't waste anything we learn.
P.S. If you need a pretty journal, you can find some I've created at etsy.com/shop/Wholeish . :)
Links to the above mentioned books:
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