I know the idea of emotions affecting physical health can seem farfetched for people.
But did you know that emotions are actually little neuropeptides going from receptor to receptor…
That means your emotions are actual, physical things.
This is one of the reasons why bottling up your emotions doesn’t work out well in the long run.
“Bottling up” basically means causing stagnation.
Stagnation is going to either cause behavioral patterns that don’t serve you…
… or it’s going to create sickness.
I got to profoundly witness this in a patient of mine when I was working in Germany.
She had chronic ear infections and couldn’t find anything to help her.
She had been to all sorts of medical doctors, had taken tons of antibiotics.
Even chiropractic adjustments weren’t helping, which is surprising since chiropractic adjustments work amazingly against ear infections.
I asked her if she would be willing to try an emotion / energy technique with me.
What happened truly amazed me!
As I worked with her, she started remembering being a little girl during the war.
For her, the memories were largely tied to auditory memories – bomb warnings going off, being in bomb shelters, coupled with the fear of never knowing…
As you can imagine, it was a very emotional session for her.
By our next appointment, her ear infections had cleared up completely without her having done anything else.
Of course, while the ear infections were gone there was still more work to do to help her resolve and integrate her experiences.
The thing though is that it doesn’t have to be something as traumatic like growing up in a war to cause emotional stagnation leading to disease.
We pick up a lot of beliefs and patterns during our childhood that truly don’t work out in our favor as adults.
That’s not to say you had a bad childhood, or that anyone is to blame, but as children our brains are basically in a state of hypnosis.
Couple that with a brain that isn’t fully developed until around age 25…
… benign and even well intentioned events get easily misinterpreted as something bad.
For example, a patient of mine was struggling with always working too late, taking on any task asked of her by coworkers, and because of that never having time for herself.
During one of our sessions she remembered how, as a child, during a school holiday she decided to clean the whole house to help her mom who was at work.
When her mom came home, her mom thanked her for this great surprise.
What my patient’s child perspective did was turn that into “I have to go above and beyond in order to be loved and appreciated.”
Hence her overworking herself, always being afraid she won’t be accepted if she doesn’t do everything that is asked of her.
She didn’t remember this memory until our session.
I am happy to report that with a couple of sessions on that topic, this patient is now setting boundaries, getting to have time for herself, and her coworkers still love her just like before.
For the second patient, the emotions didn’t cause sickness but a distorted life view that made her miserable! It was a behavioral pattern that didn’t serve her.
Emotions can present themselves in all sorts of behavioral patterns or as physical manifestations.
Sometimes the connection is obvious (auditory memories and ear infections), other times the connection isn’t clear at all initially.
Either way, we don’t actually have to put up with the things that make us suffer.
We have the power to choose to find out what caused that behavioral pattern, that physical manifestation, and most importantly -> resolve it!
Especially with EFT, I’m amazed at the kinds of shifts I’ve created in my own life, as well as for my patients.
