Trapped Emotions:
How They Get Lodged in Your Body and How To Get them Out!
Betty L. Smith
Find out how toxic emotions get trapped in your body in the first place and five steps to release toxins and open the way to self-healing: a special perspective just for family caregivers and their loved ones.
Since early spring 2011, I have been releasing trapped emotions on my husband who has Parkinson’s and on myself as his primary family caregiver. So far, using the methodologies outlined by Dr. Bradley Nelson in The Emotion Code, I have released about 2000 trapped emotions on each of us. There are still many more to go!
Toxic Results from the “Good Person” Code
I am convinced that people of our generation have a higher-than-usual number of trapped emotions. Why? We were trained from early ages to follow the code of “good” people. When we were growing up, for example, children were to be “seen and not heard.”
My husband always said that it was better not to say anything, never to speak from his true feelings in his family, because, he said, “If you speak from your genuine feelings, you just made things worse for yourself anyway.” So as a generation, we learned to swallow our emotions and numb out our feelings.
Especially when repressing anger, a powerful emotion, we end up cutting off the other emotions in the process. Censoring anger censors every other emotional expression. My father used to tell me, when I was expressing anger, “There’s enough hurt in the world already, without you adding to it.” So I learned to shut up and numb out my feelings instead of expressing them.
No Place To Express Your Genuine Feelings
We grew up with what I’ve called “life negating communications.” This is the opposite of what Marshall Rosenberg calls “Non-Violent Communication” in the book of the same name.
We literally have no place where we can safely express our true feelings. Tej Steiner, founder of Heart Circles, highlights this problem when he observes that there is no place that people can express their genuine feelings — not at home, with family, at school, work. I have observed that if it hadn’t been for psychotherapy that became available in the 20th century, we would still not have a place to share our genuine feelings!
How we talk to each other — when speaking in the sanctioned “good person” model, not allowing for the sharing of our genuine feelings, when the listening is done with judgment and not with acceptance, when expressing an emotion makes a person “Wrong” in the listener’s opinion — all of these contribute to an epidemic of toxic, life-negating communications.
Feelings Buried Alive…The Roots of our Illnesses
What happens when we do not express our genuine feelings? Well, they don’t come out our mouth, do they? So where do they go? Our feelings, unexpressed, turn in on us. They become the trapped emotions that are held in places in our bodies for a lifetime. Those trapped emotions then cause pain and aches in our bodies as they age and leave us vulnerable to diseases, especially the degenerative aging diseases.
Even when there’s an intent to speak in life affirming communication (non-violent communication), if both parties are not fully engaged with this endeavor, then it can turn out just as life-negating as most of our conversations that mask our genuine feelings. I know I’ve been through this recently with someone. I wanted to speak in genuine life-affirming communications, but everything seemed to go wrong. All I can say is, old toxic habits of communicating die hard.
I’ve concluded that one of the sources of these trapped emotions comes from our life-negating communication patterns and not speaking from our genuine feelings. We’ve been trained not to speak our genuine feelings for a lifetime.
Encouraging Your Miracle Body to Self-Heal
One of the most important ways to shift the energies from toxic to healing is by introducing practices where we learn to love, honor, and respect ourselves unconditionally — exactly the way we are right now. Loving yourself unconditionally is a powerful approach for sidestepping these toxic trapped emotions that seem to be at the root cause of disease.
Moving forward, I am taking my own advice, focusing on one day at a time and acknowledging to myself that “I’m OK in this moment.”
5-Steps to Health, Wellness, and Personal Well-Being
Below, you’ll find my 5-Step Recipe for opening the way and encouraging the body to repair itself without all the stress:
1 *Maintain that present moment focus.
2 *Release trapped emotions using the Emotion Code process.
3 *Speak with life affirming communications.
4 *Speak from your genuine feelings — so you don’t reintroduce trapped negative emotions you’ve just released.
5 *Make a regular practice of loving yourself unconditionally — accepting, honoring, and acknowledging yourself for who you are right in the moment.
Know that there are many paths to self-healing. It’s important that you find one that resonates with you. As someone who has been pioneering changes on the cutting edge my whole life, I encourage you to connect with the perfect people, those from whom you get a good feeling. Trusting your intuition about what will be most perfect for you in any given moment — the connections, information, people who come your way — opens the door so that your health, wellness and personal well-being can shine!
Please contact me at bsetnow(at)sonic(dot) net to schedule a conversation about your personal well-being and how to feel better.