When you repress your emotions, they don’t just disappear. As time goes on, they begin to surface in various ways that may surprise you. So what are some telltale signs of repressed emotions?
A) Overreactions
You overreact to small things – this is known as emotional leakage. The emotions, denied in one area of your life, literally spill out in other areas. So if you are irritable, overly sentimental, get hurt by small things, even road rage, these are signs that you could be suppressing emotions in another area.
B) Low or no Energy
Feeling tired – it takes energy to carry emotions (that’s why it’s called emotional baggage) and it takes even more energy to suppress them. If you are lacking in energy, need more sleep than most people or just have no get up and go. Many of my past clients suffered from chronic fatigue or ME, which disappeared once they released their emotions.
C) You have physical pain or even illness
I’ve received a lot of questions about illness, heart problems, chronic fatigue, auto-immune, chronic pain and so on.
Pain, illness or physical discomfort is one of the ways our unconscious minds communicate with us. Your unconscious mind is communicating with your conscious mind all the time, but in the highly logical, rational, left-brain society, we have been conditioned to ignore those silly irrational feelings and only to pay attention to rational thinking.
But no matter how irrational they might seem, they do have a rational cause. It’s just that our conscious / logical mind doesn’t have all the information. So, it assumes the unconscious mind is wrong and overrules it.
This is what happens with our emotions and illness. Our unconscious mind will tell our conscious mind that something needs to change or move, or it will just give us some feedback. But our conscious mind ignores it, so our unconscious mind tells it louder and louder and we turn it off and become numb to our emotions.
The problem is still there, so our unconscious mind tries another way of communicating. The unconscious mind runs the body and it governs all those automatic processes like our immune system and muscles etc.
So, if we ignore our emotions, our unconscious mind gives us the messages as pain or illness. But when we pay attention to the emotions and release them, the physical problem can disappear.
This is particularly true of all those psychosomatic illnesses. That doesn’t mean they are not real. The pain and the problem is VERY real, but it is caused because we don’t have a mechanism to release our emotions, so we suppress them.
Dr Lisa Turner
