Emotional Cleansing

For many of us, due to our cultural upbringing, the role of emotions in our lives has been severely downplayed. Many of us have received the message that our emotions are inappropriate, even shameful. Faced with situation after situation of grief, heartbreak, violation or loss, we have not been given permission to feel and express our emotions and so we’ve pushed them deep down into the recesses of our psyche. This behavior pattern, left unchecked, will continue long into adulthood. Practitioners in the healing arts are desperately trying to awaken people to the severe health costs of unprocessed emotional history.

Western medicine is slowly recognizing the connection between unprocessed emotion and illness, but in general, is still reluctant to accept the wisdom found in older medical systems, such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which has been used in the treatment of the underlying psycho-emotional causes of disease for about 5,000 years. While nascent Western medicine (about 200 years old) aims to master understanding of the physical body as a machine, older medical systems rooted in an indigenous, shamanic world view place the physical body within a larger context of multi-dimensional existence.

Our wise indigenous cultures understood that the human entity is multi-existential – having many bodies – and that illness and its subsequent treatment must be approached from many angles.

Western physicists are racing to prove theories about the nature of multi-dimensional reality speculated about by Einstein. String theory proposes that the universe as we understand it may consist of as many as ten different dimensions. Others propose the entire universe is holographic. This all brings us inevitably back to our wise indigenous cultures. What we understand from indigenous shamanic, Chinese, and Ayurvedic medical systems (which are rooted in thousands of years of clinical practice and study) is that as entities, we are comprised of multiple bodies.

While there are many theories on the number and nature of our existential bodies, there are a number of them that are widely agreed on across cultures: these are the mental, emotional, physical, energetic and spiritual.

Psychotherapy

The mental body benefits from Western psychotherapy. Thinking, talking, sorting through and ordering events, attributing meaning to them or diminishing their significance—these tasks can all be carried out by the mental body through various methods of analysis and talk-therapy. Self-help books are one of the largest and most profitable markets these days, and there is a plethora of helpful tools from journaling (The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron) to neuro-linguistic programming (Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins), which empower individuals to employ their mental capacities to heal on this level.

This is necessary work that must be done as part of one’s complete healing journey. Treating trauma can be complicated, because the experience itself can be very complicated.

Like any one component, psychotherapy has its limit, and is unable to address all aspects of wounding or illness, which is why many people who attempt to heal only through talk-therapy eventually just get ‘stuck’ and cease making any real progress. If you get to the point where this is occurring for you, it is time to look around at some other methods and move on.

Body Work

Body work is extremely helpful in targeting unprocessed emotional history. It would seem on the surface that body work would benefit the physical body through stretching, massage and physiotherapy, for example, which would appear to offer enhanced flexibility, relaxation and ease of movement. While all that is true, body work has a secondary healing function with far-reaching implications.

We are beginning to understand across disciplines that trauma, be it physical (car accident), emotional (sudden death of a loved one), or mental (long-term drug use altering brain chemistry) stores an imprint upon the body.

The muscles, fascia, and as some claim, the very cells of the body, retain an imprint of the trauma. Imagine the implications for a complex trauma such as long-term sexual, physical and verbal abuse during childhood. Imprints of trauma are retained in the mental body (thought patterns, beliefs and memories), physical body (tension from receiving force), emotional body (unexpressed responses of shame, anger, sorrow), energy body (blocked energy flow due to muscle tension and emotional resistance), and spiritual body (split from the physical body due to aversion to the experience). As you can see, treating trauma can be complicated, because the experience itself can be very complicated.

It is worth your time and expense to seek out the support that is best suited to your specific needs.

Just as you experience a trauma in a multi-faceted way, healing must come in multi-faceted ways. Body work can be of benefit because muscle tension in the body is linked directly to traumatic events, and so by releasing the tense muscle through massage, yoga, Alexander technique or Linklater voice work, for example, unexpressed emotions can also be released, and the electric charge held in the body can be dispelled from the memory association.

When commencing body work therapy, take the time to select a practitioner that is experienced in treating trauma to the extent that you have experienced it. It is a mistake to place yourself in the hands of a well-intentioned but inexperienced practitioner if you are the survivor of complex trauma. It is worth your time and expense to seek out the support that is best suited to your specific needs.

Get in Touch with Your Feelings and Needs

Emotions are typically best targeted through the body, due to their close association with the muscles and organs. Traditional Chinese medicine physicians believe that the organs of the body store unprocessed emotions and that left long enough, this condition will give rise to physical illness such as cancer or immune disorders. Many highly specialized alternative health procedures (such as myofascial release, craniosacral therapy, acupuncture and qigong) target chronic and deep-seated illnesses from a position that these imbalances are the direct result of unprocessed emotional trauma-responses held within the physical body.

A recent development in the field of emotional therapy is a group talk-therapy method called “non-violent communication” (NVC), developed by Marshall Rosenburg. Rosenburg reduces all external and internal conflict to the drama of unmet emotional needs. Reading his book, attending one of his courses, or listening to his teaching CDs, may be of great benefit to you in learning how to connect to your own emotional states.

If trauma has touched your life, it is highly likely you have not been given the appropriate support to fully process and release the emotions associated with the experience. Taking the time as an adult to seek out the appropriate therapy to undergo the release work is a necessary step in healing that will liberate you from pain on multiple levels.

Jill Stephanie Morgyn, BA, is a freelance writer, qigong practitioner and student of traditional Chinese medicine through the World Medicine Institute in Hawaii. You can reach her at www.jillstephaniemorgyn.com.