Emotional Bypassing: What Happens When You Suppress Your Emotions

We don't get away with not feeling our feelings and processing big emotional experiences.

I surely never did.

We seem to be the only species that has learned not to express and process our emotions fully.

Look at the animal world. Sound and movement is how animals dissipate emotions and energies.

Or look at children and babies, they still have a healthy emotional expression. They don’t ask for permission to burp or fart or be angry, they just do it.

But then conditioning happens and we are taught to keep in anger, sadness, fear..

Humans have developed a cultural consensus that expressing emotions through sound or movement is only something uncivilized, primal people, kids or animals do.

But our biology needs to express. We as humans have the same mammalian biology and nervous system response as animals for survival.

For emotion to express there has to be sound or movement, there has to be some sort of vibratory frequency - but so often we hold it in. So often we don’t make sounds because culturally making sounds is weird and we think we have to keep it together.

We have to complete our emotional cycle, because otherwise we buffer and store them in our bodies.

Which is what happens when we experience trauma - it is an experience that is too big and scary to process and feel. But trauma doesn't just happen on the psychological level - it happens on the physiological level just as much..

Suppression of emotions and old stored trauma keep living in the body, activating our stress response, triggering our fight/flight branch of the nervous system, chronically releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

All this causes elevated blood levels, anxiety, decreased immune function and nutrient absorption in the gut, indigestion, brain fog, and inflammation in the body. The list goes on.

Our culture hurts our biology.

We have created cages that keep our biology captive and sick and depressed.

We have to let out our emotions and we have to learn tools that help us regulate and balance our nervous system.

How to process and express your emotions:

Crying.

Shouting.

Moving.

Shaking.

Somatic psychotherapy.

Deep integrative breathwork sessions.

Somatic meditation.

Breathing practices.

Your mental health is really your emotional health, which is your physical health.

Feel to live.

Feel to stay healthy.

Feel to be creative.

Feel to fully experience life.

(This is atomic essay #6, which is part of 30 Days of Writing #Ship30for30)