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The connection between repressed emotions and physical pain

Often times when we don’t want to experience strong emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and worry, we subjugate them to our subconscious.  Unless we find a way to express and take care of these emotions, the pain of these emotions will be manifested physically.

Body pain will show up in our back (lower back pain, shoulder pain, sciatica), neck (tight neck and shoulders), head (migraines), jaw (TMJ), and stomach (various gastrointestinal issues). 

What seems to be true at times for all of us is that we would rather have physical pain (this isn’t always a conscious decision) rather than experience and communicate the emotional suffering.  I would suggest there are several explanations for this:

1. We may have been told not to express or show certain feelings, so we learn to keep them to ourselves.  We learn to go quiet.  We learn to shut down.  Often people say “I feel numb”, or “I don’t know what I feel.”  Learning to access our feelings is an important first step to healing. 
2. We may have chosen to project our anger onto others in an unhealthy way instead of learning to take care of our anger.  When this is the case, we do damage to others if we continue to project or conversely, we may choose to do no harm to others, but instead repress the anger, doing harm to ourselves.  There is a middle ground here, where we can learn healthy ways to take care of these strong emotions.
3. We may have experiences where we did share our feelings with someone and our disclosure resulted in being shamed, dismissed, scorned, belittled or ridiculed by another.  If we have enough of these experiences, we learn to internalize the emotions and keep quiet.  We may internalize the belief that it is not safe to disclose. 
4. Expressing and sharing emotional experiences may have never been shown to us. In other words, communicating emotions just didn’t happen.  In this situation, someone may just need to learn how to get in touch with their own emotional experience.

With respect to the first three scenarios, emotions are definitely repressed, most often consciously.   This is where physical pain will show up in the body. 

Facing our emotions is a courageous act.  We might think we will fall apart and get scared.   Even if “falling apart” happens (whatever that looks like), this will be followed by putting ourselves back together in a different way.  In fact, I believe this is how healing happens and how resilience is created.

Learning to access (identify) our emotions is a first step.  Expressing, communicating and taking care of our emotions is a second step.  There are several ways that people can do this:

1.  Verbally expressing to a person to whom we feel safe 

2.  Writing in a journal/diary/notebook

3.  Writing poems

4.  Painting – the well known Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, painted both her thoughts and feelings on canvasses and on her body cast (after a bus accident)  -- she said “The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”

5. Other creative pursuits such as dance, sculpture, literature and music (writing lyrics and composing music for songs are a definite way that many people express both their emotions and thoughts

6.  Exercise – go for a walk, run, bike, swim, hike, etc.

We all know there are ways of taking care of our pain that ultimately are not too healthy for us.  Michael Stone, a teacher, thinker, activist says the following:  There would be economic collapse if we learned to just sit with our emotions.”  I love this quote as he is suggesting that we wouldn’t turn to drinking, drugs, gambling, shopping, and pornography to soothe our pain.

If you are in a relationship with someone who belittles you, scorns you, ridicules you or dismisses you, and you start to think there must be something wrong with you, there is not. When you are in a relationship, whether this is the beginning of a new relationship or a long-term relationship, know that if you stay or if you have stayed for a long time, you will start to believe what is told to you.  You cannot possibly have clarity about the true nature of the emotional vilification, until you are out of that relationship for a while. 

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet and peace activist offers a beautiful and practical way of taking care of these strong emotions.  I will paraphrase what he teaches:

We have two levels of consciousness – our store consciousness (subconscious) and our mind consciousness (present awareness).  When we know we are feeling strong emotions such as anger, sadness, worry and grief, but we don’t know what to do with them, he offers this:

In our store consciousness, we have seeds – seeds of anger, seeds of sadness, seeds of joy, seeds of worry, seeds of grief, etc.  When we are triggered by an event in our life, these seeds come up to our mind consciousness.  This is where we learn to take care of these feelings.  (examples as stated above) Once we have taken care of these emotions, the feelings go back down into the store consciousness and each time we learn to take care of these emotions when they are triggered, we take care of them again.  And every time, they go back down into our store consciousness, the intensity of these feelings gets smaller. 

Clearly, we experience pain due to a physical trauma, but I also encourage you to think psyhologically when you have pain in your body.  Are there feelings that you are repressing such as anger and fear?