Emotional pain is physical pain you feel in your body after having something emotionally intense happen to you or around you.
This pain from emotional situations in your life can manifest as physical pain and show up in weird places in your body that don’t make sense to your mind. It’s not always muscular pain, but possibly pain in your gut, lungs, head, teeth, heart, etc. I am no longer surprised with how & where this pain shows up for people.
When a pain in your body is nagging, just won’t go away even when you are “doing everything right”, I invite you to consider the possibility of deep, stuffed pain wanting and needing your attention.
This is part of a Series: “Understanding & Healing Emotional Pain in the Body”
Next Article: How Does Your Body Ask For Help?
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor of any kind; these are my theories and opinions from my personal experiences. If you are feeling pain or depressed, please see your health care provider.
Tips For Understanding Emotional Pain
The older emotional pain is, the deeper it hides.
Only when someone has the support they need, and feels enough safety and grounding in their life, will their body start to “ask” for help to unravel what it’s been “holding” for you. How does your body ask?
Related: How Does Your Body Ask For Help?
This emotional pain can also be felt immediately. For example, during a divorce, a breakup or death, or it can hide & not be felt until weeks to decades later. When your emotions are so intense right now, and those feelings manifest into physical pain right now, you can use these tips to help process it. Try not to wait long or at all to process them. The longer you wait, the harder it is for you to let them go.
The type of emotional pain that shows up later can be tricky to understand, unravel & heal from, but it is VERY POSSIBLE.
Often times, dealing with this type of stuffing or numbing of our feelings is what Self-Care is focused on preventing or calming. This is also the main reason why SELF-CARE IS NOT SELFISH.
Related article: Self-Care Basics: A Beginner’s Guide
What Causes Emotional Pain?
Physical pain manifests from emotional situations that we don’t process at that time OR is so stressful that parts of our body exhibit pain when our mind thinks about those feelings or situation.
Some of us are better at letting go of emotional pain than others, without even knowing that we are, or how or why. However, some of us are not good at recognizing that we are holding emotions in, and even worse at knowing how to let those emotions go.
You See Something Hard To Witness
You could have seen something hard to witness, or you could have heard something painful to hear about you or about something or someone you love.
Most of these situations are “saved for later” by your body, or stuffed deep down, so that their intensity at the present time doesn’t “kill” you or cause more stress than you can handle at that moment. I say “kill” you because the body often feels threatened to the point of fearing death. It’s not always logical, but very common.
You Go Through A Life-Threatening Time
The most easily explainable and logically understandable situations that cause this type of emotional “stuffing”, burying, or numbing, are being beaten or abused, going to war, or any other life-threatening (emotionally threatening) attacks. We’ll look more in-depth at these in another post.
Life Was Cruel In A Moment
But, there are many other examples that feel just as intense as those very life-threatening situations. And, depending on how you responded, how old you were, the support/non-support you had at that time, and many other factors, your body will react to your mind’s ability to process those situations.
Which Emotions Cause Pain?
Any emotion can cause pain, if it was intense enough for the person who went through it. And, the bodies reaction is instinctual, instant, not thought about and pondered. It just happens automatically.
This is why we often **don’t EVEN know** that stuffing emotions has happened at all.
Examples of feelings that can be stuffed—for as short as a few days all the way to as long as many decades—can be fears, hopelessness, powerlessness, anger, rage, grief, and many more.
Each Person Will React To These Emotions Differently
Our body reacts differently as well. One person may have headaches or jaw pain, while another person could have foot pain or gut issues.
These reactions & feelings get stuffed away for our own safety. While this MAKE PERFECT SENSE TO A CHILD, or to A PERSON WHO JUST EXPERIENCED TRAUMA, this is NOT LOGICAL TO A SAFE ADULT. When your mind is too young to understand logic, or the situation as a child OR an adult is **too stressful** at THAT MOMENT IN TIME, the body will hide the emotion and the memory. These stresses & memories DO NOT ALWAYS GO AWAY, instead it is stored in our tissues.
Interestingly, the body can act like the child from long ago when it is hiding these emotions. The stubbornness of muscles, tissue and the rest of the body can act very young, defensive & scared. The client, during times of healing these stuffed emotions can, without “logical reason”, start sweating, choking, crying, laughing, and their hearts can start racing.
Emotions Felt By The Mind Vs The Body Can Be Different
When your body lets your mind or a therapist close to the parts its been “saving for later”, just be ready for some illogical fear and resistance.
The longer your body has kept a feeling or memory down, the fiercer your body will fight to keep it hidden. Not because it’s good or bad, but because it’s a pain pattern, a habit.
This is one example of when you’ll need to homework, either with journaling, with meditation and prayer or with a counselor. Explore with these techniques, or a counselor to find out **WHAT YOU NEED TO FEEL SAFE**. And remember, there is safety for the mind which can be different from safety for the body.
Then, use what you have learned about safety to ground yourself and reassure your body that letting this go won’t kill you. Because often, your body LITERALLY FEELS like IT’S GOING TO DIE if it lets this stuff go.
Your Body Hides Pain From The Mind
Your body sometimes “hides” things from the mind, like physical pain in an athlete so they can keep playing. We discuss this in more depth in another article.
When a person is stressed for years at a time, overwhelmed with their daily obligations, the body doesn’t have the energy or support to process any stuffed emotions.
BUT, once a person has the extra time, and things are a bit more calm in their lives, this stuffed pain can come out quite strongly.
This is why emotional pain can show up years later, “FROM NOWHERE”, because the body has been hiding it from the conscious mind. A common statement from clients who show up with this kind of pain pattern is: “I was feeling fine last week, and now I have terrible neck and chest pain from no-where! Everything is going great in my life! There is NO explanation! No car accident, no fall, I didn’t sleep wrong or hurt myself in any way.”
Even if you are doing “all the right things”, great diet, great spiritual practice, positive self-talk, plenty of rest, daily exercise, etc, sometimes, there are things “we don’t know that we don’t know”.
It might take some support from the outside to help you listen. This does not mean that you are any less of a great person, or any less positive to yourself. We all need help sometimes, and maybe that is the gentle lesson for you.
Unfortunately, many people ARE NOT LISTENING to their bodies. At all. Instead of trying some simple options to help their body, they try meds, surgery & other drastic measures to calm the pain. When simple Self-Care may have helped to first gain awareness & then start to re-train the pain pattern.
Emotional Pain Patterns
Our bodies create a system of movement to protect stuffed emotions. I call these systems of movement: Pain Patterns.
And, they are a “system” of movement because there is A LOT going on BEHIND THE SCENES to keep everything SAFE and UNDISTURBED.
We don’t realize we are creating these ways of movement. Nor do we realize it’s an entire WAY OF BEHAVING just to keep the emotions stuffed and dormant.
This is well stated in Michael Singer’s Book: The Untethered Soul:The Journey Beyond Yourself, when he talks about our thorn that we avoid at all costs. This is a great book for understanding why we stuff things.
We can avoid this stuffed emotion or thorn for decades and not even know it until be become aware of ourselves, like watching yourself from the outside.
An Example Of Emotional Pain Surfacing Years Later:
An example from my own massage practice of some emotional pain patterns showing up decades after they happened:
A client comes in with general angst in their behavior, lack of trust for the world (and me) with what they are saying, and is here to see me for low back pain, constipation, insomnia, headaches, neck pain and can’t calm down.
After some massage sessions, journaling, seeing a counselor, and really digging into some illogical reactions to the world, this situation from 40 years earlier is uncovered:
As a young child (3), this client witnesses the favorite and much loved family pet cat get killed by a car. The parents yell to try to stop the cat or the car, which the child perceived as yelling and blaming of the child. The child was not able to stop the car or the cat.
The feelings that this person was still feeling 40 years later which were manifesting in their body (and life) as pain:
FEAR: (Back Pain, Constipation)
“Don’t EVER go near the road, drive a car, get another cat, etc”
POWERLESS: (Lack of breathing, headaches, insomnia)
“I can’t stop bad things from happening to things I love”
GUILT: (Constipation, Neck pain)
“I am responsible for the death of my cat, therefor I am not trustworthy or worthy in general”
HOPELESSNESS: (lack of breathing, back pain…)
“Bad things happen around me”
What happened to the client’s pain was amazing. All of the back pain, constipation, insomnia, headaches & neck pain went away! It wasn’t immediate, and took work from the client with me, doing Self-Care homework, and working with their counselor. But, with more awareness of their bodies reaction to memories, the client was able to separate what was a TRUE threat to the body and what could be let go. This is commonly referred to like this, “let go of what is not serving you anymore.”
How To Help Emotional Pain
We will discuss many ways to help emotional pain in others articles. Here is a quick example of using massage with counseling to help on the journey to heal emotional pain.
With massage, an example to help is by holding the area of pain in the back, while holding breathing points or points of pain in the gut. With very light pressure, see if they affect one another, especially while the client talks about the stressful parts of their life.
When we can pinpoint the exact area of pain, and bring the client’s attention to that physical pain while they are mentioning a stressful moment in time, amazing things can happen. The client becomes AWARE of the pattern their body is in: **When I think about the cat, my back hurts**.
1. Hold back muscles that hurt, and either lung points, neck points or stomach points at the same time.
2. You talk about your childhood cat
3. Your back starts to lock down, contract intensely, you stop breathing, start sweating and your stomach gets very tight
4. You breathe and are able to relax your back and body
5. You start to recognize how your body tenses WHERE you’ve been feeling back pain anytime you mention your cat dying.
6. You also realize that breathing, journalling, hot showers, tea time and other forms of Self-Care calms your back down.
Now the fun work begins for you! Instead of not knowing why you were hurting and what to do about it, now, you work on changing the pain patterns you are living in.
Your healing work is to keep recognizing how the thought of the emotional pain from that day (and subsequently other times in life) would trigger PHYSICAL PAIN OR TIGHTNESS in the body!
Once this is discovered, you are able to DISSOLVE the pain! FIRST WITH AWARENESS, then with breathing, relaxing instead of tensing the area and working in meditation & prayer or with a counselor to create ways to redirect that tension.
Important note: the feelings are NOT GOING AWAY. Instead, it’s the MANNER IN WHICH YOU REACT to these feelings that changes your pain.
Summary: What Is Emotional Pain
We can feel physical pain after emotional intense situations in our lives that manifest into the physical pain we feel.
Our bodies hide painful, scary and stressful feelings to keep us safe and alive. The difference between emotional pain and non-emotional pain, is how chronic and stubborn it is.
Most of the time we are not even aware that we are stuffing emotions at the time of the intense situation, which makes it difficult to let things go that we didn’t even know we were holding onto.
We can hold emotions from our younger years all the way to a few minutes ago, and each can cause odd pain in our bodies that are logically hard to explain.
The mind and the body don’t always see eye to eye which makes unraveling these emotional pains challenging. Once we can get the mind and body to recognize the pain pattern in which they are spinning, the healing is much easier.
Awareness is the main ingredient in starting the healing process, then breath work, journaling, seeing a counselor are a few Self-Care suggestions to implement to start feeling better.
Please share your examples of emotional pain and how you recognized it, and how you deal with it? What works best for you? I’d love to hear from you!
