Chances are good if you hear the word ‘pain’ it will spark memories of a broken bone or scrape or stitches, or a back pain that immobilizes you from bending or lifting.  There are so many types of injuries and conditions that can elicit pain.

Emotional pain can also be felt physically.  Pay attention the next time you hear sad news; feel if there is an aching around the region of your heart.  Anxiety and dread may be felt in the pit of your stomach or in your gut region.  I have heard depression described as a ‘heavy rock that sits in my stomach’ or as a ‘queasy stomach’ and ‘faint feeling’.

According to the Emotional Freedom Technique (a type of psychological acupressure): 

Emotions do NOT reside in your mind or brain; that is only where

they get labeled.  Emotions originate in your heart and solar plexus area

(stomach area), and they manifest in other parts of your body.

In her article, Where Our Pain Hides, Dani Shapiro suggests that emotional pain manifests in our body as a type of psychological scar tissue.  Shapiro believes that pain is there to help us grow.

WHY PHYSICAL PAIN?

If you experience pain from an injury then it is your body telling you not to use or move that body part while it gets what it needs to heal.

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL PAIN?

It is a signal from your body that you need to pay attention or address a certain aspect of your life, for healing.

Why are you feeling sad, angry, hurt, frustrated, guilt or shame?  What do you need to understand about a situation or what is your soul/instinct/intuition trying to tell you about a person?

Pain is an indicator, it is telling you something you need to pay attention to in order to move forward and heal.

NUMBING THE PAIN.

There is an appropriate quote from Sigmund Freud: “Unexpressed emotions will never die.  They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”

The thing about numbing your pain is that you numb all of your feelings.  They stay buried, even the positive ‘good’ feelings that let you live life to its fullest and experience joy.

Understand that when we are growing up and being taught boundaries, children who experience trauma or abuse will learn to suppress their feelings because they have no power or control over the situation.

We need to give ourselves permission to honour our feelings and establish healthy boundaries.  Boundaries help us establish our comfort and safety, which may not have been taught to us, as children.  For more information, a good place to start is with Anne Katherine’s book, Boundaries:  Where You End and I Begin.

BE BRAVE.  FIND YOUR COURAGE.

After you have allowed yourself the time to feel the pain and discovered what you think it’s trying to tell you, release those feelings.  Acknowledge the fear of feeling your emotions and also acknowledge the strength it takes to do that.  Notice where your feelings sit in your body and allow yourself to let them go.

Do whatever you need to do to express your emotions.  Talk to friends/family, a therapist, journal your thoughts & feelings, draw, walk or run, meditate or do yoga.  Your feelings will no longer be buried and they lose their power to ‘come forth later in uglier ways’.

This is an invitation to feel and be real; to suppress and numb is hard on your body and it’s not being true to your soul.  Don’t become discouraged, you are trying and there is courage in that.

Out of a couple of thousand of PINS I have on Pinterest, this is the one that has been re-pinned the most:

 

In Memory of my cousin Gary L. “Ease His Pain”,  Field of Dreams <3