How Suppressed Emotions Affect Your Body (And Why Healing Starts There)

How full are you??

I've been listening to a lot of Gabor Maté lately.

I've known of his work for years. Honestly, I assumed I already knew what he was going to say. I've spent years immersed in trauma therapy, Brainspotting, Ayurveda, yoga therapy, nervous system regulation, and integrative mental health. I figured we were speaking the same language.

We were.

But I didn't know it the way I thought I did.

His books have been rocking me.

The research he shares on the connection between emotional suppression, poor boundaries, chronic stress, people-pleasing, and physical illness is...well...startling.

I joked on Instagram recently that after reading his work, I'm not sure how I'm still alive.

I'm kidding. Kind of.

Because when you really stop and think about how much of ourselves we suppress just to belong, it's incredible how resilient the human body actually is.

It also makes me wonder how much our bodies have been carrying all these years.

It makes me wonder...

How full am I?

Sometimes I can almost see it in my clients.

They just feel...full.

Full of grief, trauma, sadness, and unexpressed anger

Full of all the ways they weren't seen, soothed, protected, or honored as children.

All of the things they learned to suppress simply to survive.

This is one of the themes that keeps coming up in Gabor's work: the cost of suppressing ourselves.

Not just the big emotions like grief or rage.

The small ones too.

The disappointment we swallow because we don't want others to feel bad.

The resentment we convince ourselves isn't a big deal.

The tears we push away.

The "yes" we say when every part of us wanted to say "no."

Most of us become experts at overriding ourselves.

Not because we're weak. Because somewhere along the way, we knew it was imperative to our survival.

Those emotions don't simply disappear because we ignore them.

Ayurveda has a beautiful concept called ama, often translated as toxins.

Most often, we think of ama as undigested food.

But Ayurveda also teaches that emotions can become undigested.

The experiences we never truly allowed ourselves to feel.

So, the body carries them.

I sometimes imagine my body as a house full of junk drawers.

Every time I don't allow myself to feel something, my body decides,

"Where can I put this for now...that won't kill her?"

Another drawer gets stuffed. Then another.

Eventually, something doesn't close anymore.

The ama begins to spill over.

And often, that's when symptoms begin.

None of this means you've done something wrong.

As children, our nervous systems know our survival depends on staying connected to the people caring for us.

So we learn to pretend we're okay, to stop crying, to swallow our anger, and to become easy to care for.

We make other people more comfortable, often at the expense of ourselves.

Not because we were weak.

Because we were surviving.

"What's wrong with me?"

Maybe the better question is,

"How full am I?"

How much grief am I carrying?

How much anger have I swallowed?

How many tears have I blinked away?

How many times have I said "yes" when my whole body wanted to say "no"?

How often do I override myself to make someone else more comfortable?

Maybe healing isn't about becoming someone different.

Maybe it isn't even about getting rid of the symptom.

Maybe it's about becoming curious enough to ask what the symptom has been trying to tell us all along.

I think I know the answer to my Instagram question, "How am I even alive?"

It's because my anxiety eventually became so loud that I couldn't ignore it anymore.

It forced me to pay attention.

It invited me to start cleaning out the drawers.

To feel the grief.

To even realize I was angry!!

To stop pretending I was okay when I wasn't.

Looking back, I don't think my anxiety was working against me.

I think, in its own exhausting way, it was trying to lead me back home to myself.

The funny thing is, the more I heal these parts of myself, the calmer I become about money, too.

Because it was never really about the money.

This week, instead of trying to fix yourself, simply become curious.

Ask yourself:

How full am I?