Releasing pent-up emotions: Old hurt no more

Speaking is silver, silence is gold. Don't hang out the dirty laundry. There are quite a few sayings about keeping things to yourself, but ultimately this can lead to pent-up emotions and that can certainly affect your life as well.

If nothing else, you might suddenly have a Freudian slip.

In almost every culture, it’s important to keep your emotions in check. For example, there are rules about when and in what context you’re allowed to feel certain emotions. Crying at work , for instance, is something many people don’t appreciate. Although there is increasingly more room for crying at work in modern times, there are still plenty of companies where it’s really not done to start crying when it all gets to be too much.

How you regulate your emotions is often by acting on them internally - in your mind - and this can have both positive and negative consequences depending on the context[1].

After all, you can also bottle up emotions and never express them. In the end, that's not helpful either. You'll just spend years walking around feeling like you should have done something, or saying something and not being able to do anything with it.

Very irritating.

Bottled-up emotions influence

Suppressed emotions certainly have an impact on your life. For example, research on people in prison—who often have a traumatic past —shows that suppressing emotions can ultimately manifest in outbursts of aggression or self-harm[2], such as scratching.

In addition, bottling up emotions can also affect your health, especially if you keep it up for a long time.

For people who are not in prison, bottling up emotions can ultimately lead to panic attacks[3].

A study among students also revealed that men are more likely than women to bottle up their emotions, and unfortunately, the men also received lower grades than the women[4]. It’s not yet entirely clear whether this is due to bottling up emotions, but it’s quite possible that you can’t focus properly if you’re holding yourself back all the time. However, the young men did have higher self-confidence than the female students.

Suppressing your emotions—both good and bad—also has an immediate impact. If you suppress your emotions, it directly causes you to experience less enjoyment, for example, when watching a movie. Physically speaking, people showed increased activity in their cardiovascular systems immediately after watching both positive and negative films. So, not expressing your emotions can directly raise your blood pressure[5].

Expressing your emotions is also good for your well-being, whereas if you don't express your emotions this causes you to feel more negative during the day as well[6].

This is also evident with other issues. For example, if you have a serious illness, such as cancer, and you suppress the emotions you feel about it, this can lead to more depressive symptoms than if you simply expressed your emotions about the illness[7].

Bottled up emotions physical complaints

So emotionally, bottling up your emotions is a good way to get into a slump and generally have less fun, but what about your physical health?

At least the Chinese think so. In ancient Chinese healing theory, there is the idea that certain emotions affect certain organs. Below is a summary:

1. Anger and frustration - Liver and gallbladder
2. Fun, surprise and hate - Heart and small intestine
3. Worry and anxiety - Stomach and spleen
4. Gloom and sadness - Lungs and colon
5. Anxiety and stress - Kidneys and bladder

According to Chinese ancient health teachings, there is a trade-off to both. If you take in food that is good for certain organs, then that in turn is good for your emotions. If you have thoughts that cause certain emotions, that in turn also affects those organs[8].

Modern researchers also find an indication that people who suffer from depressive feelings are also more likely to suffer from low-back pain as a result[9]. So do you have chronic lower back pain? If so, you may also want to take a look at how you are doing emotionally.

Other research also sees a direct link between bottling up your emotions, not being properly aware of your emotions, not being able to process emotions properly and emotional stress with pain. The more emotional stress and bottling up of emotions, the more you suffer from pain[10]. Researchers also indicate that a solution to chronic pain should also be sought in better coping or expressing emotions.

Research on hypnosis shows that the importance of resolving negative feelings is important for reducing psychosomatic complaints[11]. So you have physical complaints that doctors can't find a cause for. Then they often say it's between the ears.

This can include, for example, certain heart conditions, neurosis, sleep problems, headaches and migraines, stuttering, and even asthma (source 11). Anxiety, for example, can worsen an asthma attack.

Stress, a source of negative emotions, can also trigger intestinal symptoms and problems (source 11).

Releasing pent-up emotions

So doing something with those pent-up emotions, such as letting go, is definitely a good idea for your well-being and for your health.

Research on people who suffer from nerve pain and receive injections for it shows that this problem causes a lot of emotions. One way to release those emotions at first was mostly crying. Just expressing how k∗t you find the problem.

Another way people dealt with the emotions was to look at their memory that was also painful with more distance and to process the memory that way.

In addition, the experience of the treatment was reframed, making the pain more bearable and allowing them to express their emotions more effectively[12].

The great thing about this study is that people used techniques that allow you to get help from a hypnotherapist.

Examining and processing a memory, for example, is also something you can do with regression. With this technique, you can properly process pent-up emotions due to old hurts so you can release them. You can create more understanding of why this happened to you and you can even forgive (not forget) people who did something to you that you are still suffering from now.

With regression, you go back to a time when a belief that is now causing you to bottle up your emotions occurred. With the help of a hypnotherapist, you will repair this moment so that it no longer gets in the way of you expressing your emotions[13].

In regression, you can also enter into the conversation with your inner child and encourage your inner child to let go of a particular fear, hatred or other pent-up emotion that is no longer helping you in your current life.

You can even start the conversation in mind with someone with whom you need to revisit something. For example, sometimes you are dealing with something that a parent did to you, but because that person has died you are stuck with it and can't do anything else about it. With hypnotherapy you can still have that closing conversation. Your brain does not always realize that what you visualize in hypnosis is not real and you feel that you have been able to bring closure.

You can also do a lot with visualizations to release emotions. You can even combine this with breathing exercises, such as using the suggestion that you breathe out negative emotions and breathe in positive ones.

You can also use a metaphor for the emotion to talk about it with your hypnotherapist[14]. This is sometimes more convenient if you find it difficult to express your emotions, so you can still express what is bothering you.

Reframing your view of things, such as why you are bottling up your emotions, is also a good way to give yourself space to express your emotions as yet. That way, it can also make it easier to get back to people in your real life about issues you still have something to say about.

Another exercise I sometimes have people do is revenge in mind. If you are sitting with angry emotions because someone has done something to you, you can do anything to that person in your mind. Beating them completely lens, setting them on fire, throwing them off an apartment building. All in your mind just until it feels a little better.

In fact, this gives you the emotional space to move forward in treatment with other techniques. If it is still necessary to talk to that person afterwards, you can do so in a calm and controlled manner.

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Instead, do you have problems with pent-up emotions and could use some help? Then visit bestetherapeut.co.uk.

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