Where stuffing away emotions gets you. . .

Pain is an interruption in the natural & normal flow of communication.

When we experience something too big for us to handle, our emotional brain (the limbic system), shuts down to protect us, sending the chemical memory of the trauma into our tissue, which tightens to hold the emotion.

We literally carry all our emotions with us, packed away in tight little bundles — until somewhere along the line we say “the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” (Anais Nin)

This walled off part becomes ‘dis-integrated’ with the rest of your body, and loses connection with the control center in our brain. It becomes a lost and forgotten part, a missing piece in the puzzle of our lives.

The dis-integrated area becomes dense tissue, pulling the surrounding area into it, creating more pain, until it becomes a behavioural center, sending messages back to the brain from the original trauma.

We’ve stuffed our emotions back down into our body, and we don’t even know we’ve done it. We get a backache, tummy troubles, and when someone asks how we are doing, we tell them, “Fine.”

But of course, we’re not fine at all.

In next month’s newsletter I’ll write about how your body can be coaxed to release its emotional baggage with soft-touch therapies.

Aviva takes appointments at Carp Ridge on Fridays, and can be reached at happybodyworks@gmail.com