The Two Emotional Habits That Affect Your Health

In a previous post titled “Emotions that Kill, Emotions that Heal” I emphasized the importance of healthy emotional expression. Emotional expression is repeatedly tied in with health and well-being while non-expression and repression are repeatedly tied in with poor health and immune suppression.

We Do Not Consciously Make Ourselves Sick!

I seemed though to have missed the mark and in some way made few of my readers angry. I believe it was the notion that we consciously choose to suppress our emotions, thus manifesting illness in our lives that offended them the most.

Hopefully, this post will set the record straight and shed more light on the part emotions play in sickness and health.

The first thing I want to address is the difference between suppressing emotions and repressing emotions. It is the difference between the two that demonstrates that we did not consciously chose to be sick.

Though both suppressing emotions and repressing emotions are forms of non-expression which have shown in research to promote illness (Bleiker 1997, Temshok 1985), suppressing emotions refer to holding back emotions that we are aware of, while suppressing emotions refers to the psychological defense mechanism where we do not know which emotions are present.

It’s true that neither suppression nor repression releases emotions or resolve their intensity (energy), in fact, emotions intensity only increases when swallowed whole (Pert 1997). However, we cannot take direct ownership or responsibility for crafting unconscious psychological defenses. Those serve a purpose and are necessary for our sense of security.

Once illness is present, cancer or any other life threatening illness, we are faced with dire need of change and this is what Immersive Healing let us do. Part of this change includes revisiting many of our psychological patterns and defenses and questioning their necessity.

Some time ago I stumbled upon a good book that addressed exactly the topic of emotional toxicity and how they affect us; the book name is “Feeling Buried Alive Never Die’s” by Karol K. Truman. If my memory serves me well she struggled with brain tumor and lived to tell the tail.

For the most part, we as people tend to repress emotions which mean we are not fully aware of the fact we are doing so. This is an important statement that brings to a halt any attempt to further blame yourself for your illness. Having said that, now that you know better, and by that I mean that you know of the cost you are paying to hold yourself and your emotions back, you can do better.

If you have a safe and effective way to let your steam out, please share?