Your body talks, are you listening?
Posted on October 16, 2021 by Jacquie Ottema, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
Is your work affecting your body?
When there is something you’re not allowing yourself to feel, admit, or acknowledge, it can become a form of energy that is stored in the body. This energy causes tense muscles, less blood flow to certain organs, and eventually, illness or pain.
This hidden process of stuffing down emotions into your body is also called “somaticizing.” “Soma” means body in Latin. When you somaticize, you are transferring your emotional and mental state into your body, and it manifests as physical symptoms. Because you don’t face and feel your emotions directly and consciously, your body starts to speak for you through symptoms. Many people somaticize and they don’t even know it.
It starts when an emotion arises in them that they don’t want or are scared to experience fully. But instead of allowing themselves to feel those emotions, they ignore them. Or they distract themselves with work, social media, or TV. Or deny that there’s anything wrong. Or pretend they’re above all that. Months or years later, they develop inexplicable backaches, headaches, weakness, fatigue, even a chronic illness or dis-ease that cannot be medically explained?
If so, it’s possible that there’s some truth you’re not facing or accepting about yourself. In other words, your physical issues could be a sign there’s something you don’t love about yourself and un-experienced and unexpressed emotions.
Coming to terms with this is not overwhelming or frightful. It is liberating! Stop hiding from yourself. All of it was just a way to avoid feeling emotion. Emotions are not bad.
We don’t want to suffer, so we stuff it down. We stuff it into our organs, our muscles, our nervous system. And it’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because by denying our truth we end up creating all the pain and suffering we were trying to avoid in the first place. Admitting our truth doesn’t cause suffering, it ends it. Facing our truth is freeing. It releases the pent up energy that’s causing us to feel stiff, achy, and out of sorts, so we can feel at ease instead of dis-eased.
Otherwise we’re not human beings, we’re humans fleeing. We’re fleeing from our emotions and therefore from our authentic self. There is no unity in flight from ourselves. And there’s no well-being in that, either. When you repress your emotions, you increase the likelihood that they’ll show up later in your body in the form of pain, tension, illness, or under/overweight.
Doing things like taking supplements, pain relievers, exercising, doing yoga, or getting massages may make you feel better and resolve the issue temporarily, but these do not address the core problem, which is that you’re somaticizing something trying to get your attention.
Resolving those somaticized issues means learning how to love yourself and everything you’re feeling, no matter how imposing it may seem.
Need help with this? Don’t wait until it’s too late. Message me.
Be safe, stay well, get support.
Jacquie
