Take time to slow down and be alone, get out into nature, make art, listen to music while you cook your favorite dinner, meditate to cleanse your mind and relax your body, take a bubble bath or a nap to restore.
When we're blocked emotionally, we don't have a healthy relationship with our feelings. We're not able to express or communicate them. In fact, we have a hard time understanding them at all. Our emotions leave us bewildered, and we're unable to come to terms with them.
Emotional information is stored through “packages” in our organs, tissues, skin, and muscles. These “packages” allow the emotional information to stay in our body parts until we can “release” it. Negative emotions in particular have a long-lasting effect on the body.
Suppressed emotions stay in the body. The effects of suppressed emotions include anxiety, depression, and other stress-related illnesses. Such suppression can lead to alcohol and substance abuse. (Read more about the link between childhood trauma and addiction here.)
During the purification process, you'll face and address uncomfortable feelings you've stuffed away to avoid dealing with them. An emotional detox pulls up all the repressed feelings of fear, anger, hurt, sadness, and frustration to clear them away, effectively hitting the reset switch on your emotions.
Emotional trauma can last from a few days to a few months.
Some people will recover from emotional trauma after days or weeks, while others may experience more long-term effects.
Treatment for trauma
By concentrating on what's happening in your body, you can release pent-up trauma-related energy through shaking, crying, and other forms of physical release.
People who have unprocessed trauma often report having commonly known symptoms, such as intrusive thoughts of the event(s), mood swings, loss of memory and more. However, some people may be struggling with unresolved trauma without even realizing it.
They may start crying, laughing, screaming. The emotional release may bring back flashbacks, memories, or visions they forgot they had or have never experienced before.
Research has found that in addition to being self-soothing, shedding emotional tears releases oxytocin and endorphins. These chemicals make people feel good and may also ease both physical and emotional pain. In this way, crying can help reduce pain and promote a sense of well-being.
The aching body, headaches, nausea and fatigue often felt during a healing crisis are primarily the effects of detoxification. In the healing process, the body is working to eliminate its storage of toxins; materials that have been collected in the colon, the tissues and in individual cells.
Emotional healing can be incredibly rewarding but it can also be painful in the interim. You might want to consider talking to a mental health professional who is trained in working with people on emotional healing journeys every day.
Bottling up negative emotions like anxiety and anger can disrupt the normal function of your stress hormones called cortisol. This results in lowered immune function and an increased risk of developing a chronic illness. Not expressing your emotions is also a gateway to developing mental health conditions.
People sometimes suppress their emotions and avoid fully experiencing or responding to them. Suppressed feelings may be channeled or redirected into physical activities. People may mislabel or misinterpret a suppressed emotion to replace the uncomfortable feeling with a more acceptable one.
Symptoms of an emotional blockage
Signs that we might be experiencing an emotional blockage are: Avoiding people or social situations. For example, avoiding situations because you are scared of how to act or what to say.
Your nervous system has two responses: the sympathetic response and the parasympathetic response. Both serve an important function in helping us process through intense emotions like trauma and anxiety, but when we interfere with our natural ability to calm down, those emotions can get trapped in the body.
What is Trauma blocking? Trauma blocking is an effort to block out and overwhelm residual painful feelings due to trauma. You may ask “What does trauma blocking behavior look like? · Trauma blocking is excessive use of social media and compulsive mindless scrolling.