What Happens When You Hold In Emotions?

In so many ways, the body has everything it needs to heal, whether that be physically or emotionally. When it comes to emotions, the body has natural ways of dealing with emotional energy.

Crying, screaming, shaking, laughing, etc.… These are all ways that the body can naturally purge and process emotions.

Unfortunately, over time, we learn to stop doing these things, which leads to real problems.

At various points in our lives, all of us have been made to feel bad for processing or expressing our emotions. It just kind of happens naturally in our modern world. I don’t know if I could say that it’s ‘normal’, objectively speaking, or that it’s a necessary truth of the human experience, but it’s certainly a truth of our modern world.

We’re told to hold it in. We’re mocked for crying or showing our passions. We’re avoided, ignored, or rejected for being emotional even in times when it’s completely justified to be emotional. This has happened to all of us to one extent or another.

Well… what happens when we’re holding on to too much?

The thing is, there is a certain amount of energy behind all of those emotional reactions. The energy that is supposed to be purged and processed through actions like crying or shaking. If we don’t allow our bodies to do what they need to do in those moments, the energy doesn’t go anywhere. It’s like excess calories building up in the body.

Eventually, that energy starts to clog up the works (so to speak).

A body that is holding onto too much unresolved energy starts to shut down. That’s why I often speak to people who tell me they tend to dissociate or randomly stare off into the distance and not notice. Or people who have a lot of brain fog or who find it hard to focus in conversations or on their work. It’s how the body has learned to cope with holding onto so much unresolved energy that it doesn’t know what to do with. When there’s too much trying to run through it, it just shuts down.

The good news is that finding our way out of this cycle is ‘easier’ than it seems. I mean… it takes work… but it doesn’t need to take years and years, and it doesn’t need to be a painful process. We can learn how to start releasing the emotions naturally and get the body back to full operating capacity.

All we need to do is learn how to get out of our own way and let the body do what it’s been trying to do this whole time.

The body knows how to heal. We just need to let it happen.