Emotions You Don’t Process Can Be the Root of Your Dis-Ease

When was the last time you swallowed an emotion down?

Perhaps a conversation that went somewhere you did not want it to go. Perhaps news you were not ready for.

Most often, though, it happens in the closest relationships we have. Something your partner said, or did not say, and you chose the peace over your own truth because the nice girl in you has always found that easier than the argument. So you smiled through it, and then thought about it for the rest of the week.

Where did it go? It did not vanish, so where did your body put it?

The fast version we all recognise. Your stomach turns over. Your chest goes tight before you have finished understanding the words. Your appetite is gone before anybody has spoken.

The slower version is the one nobody asks about. What happens to the thing you never finished feeling? It does not leave. It waits. A week becomes a season, a season becomes a few years, and all the while it goes on quietly asking to be felt while you carry on with your life as though it were not there.

So where does yours go? Some women feel it in the gut. Some in the jaw, or the shoulders, or a throat that will not swallow properly. Some stop sleeping.

And if you do not know, you are not alone. Many of us were never taught how to look, or how to notice. So stay with me here as you read, and see whether you can start to identify what you have been holding in your body all these years, so you can begin to be more present with her.

Where unprocessed emotions show up in my body

For me it is nearly always digestion. My gut is at its worst in the weeks I am holding something.

Not the weeks I eat badly, though those are not brilliant either. The weeks where a conversation was left unfinished. Where I am quietly furious with someone and being lovely about it. Where something happened and I decided I did not have time to feel it, so I put it somewhere and got on with my day.

Digestion is the loudest one for me, but it is not the only place I feel it.

My jaw. My neck and shoulders, and especially the small piece of neck where my hairline begins, which is where I seem to hold everything and where it can ache for days. My hips, which surprised me the first time I noticed it. And my eyes, which go tight and sore when I am holding back a cry I have not let myself have. Sometimes they twitch for days on end, and that is nearly always the week I have been busiest and the least honest with myself about how I actually am.

And it is not only me. Every woman I talk to about this has her own version of it. Shoulders that have been up around the ears since spring. A chest that goes tight in the car park before a particular visit. Sleep that stops being sleep. It seems to find whichever part of her is already tired.

Listen to the way we talk about it. Something is hard to swallow. Something we cannot stomach. A lump in the throat. Someone getting on our nerves. A weight off our shoulders, as though the weight had ever been anywhere else.

Nobody invented those phrases to sound poetic. They are old, and every language has its own, because this is where we have always felt it.

So what is hard for you to swallow at the moment? What are you carrying that you would put down tomorrow if somebody told you that you were allowed to? What comes up for you might be nothing like mine, and yours is the one worth trusting. You do not have to do anything with the answer today. Noticing it is the whole beginning.

What helps me process emotions

These are the things I reach for, and every one of them is smaller and softer than you would expect.

Saying it out loud

There is a name for this one. Verbal processing, which is really just hearing yourself say the thing. For years I assumed it had to be said to another person, and it does not.

Out loud in the car counts. So does recording a voice note and sending it to yourself, which is the one I reach for most. I have even sat and spoken to an AI about something I was turning over, which sounds strange until you try it. Something about having to put it into words, out loud, gathers up the loose parts of it and lets them move through me.

If I do not say a thing out loud, it never quite feels expressed. That is the plainest way I can put it. Journaling works for me too, but never the way speaking does.

It helps me most after a disagreement, when it is still sitting in my chest and the person I need to say it to is not there, or it is not the moment. Rather than carrying it around for a week, I say it to myself and let my body hear it.

A friend does just as well, and sometimes better. A phone call, or a voice message sent off to one of the few people who know me properly and care how I actually am. Not for advice. Just so it has been said to somebody who gets me.

We all process differently and this might not be yours. But if you have never tried it, try it once and see what your body does.

Sitting with it & breathing

My instinct is to tidy a feeling up. Understand it, explain it, file it neatly and get on with my day. What actually helps is the opposite of that.

I breathe into my diaphragm, low and slow, right down into the belly until my whole body has to slow with it. Sometimes I scan through myself and notice where the feeling has settled. Sometimes I put on a yoga nidra and let somebody else's voice walk me back into my body.

And then I allow it. That is the whole thing, and it is the part I had to learn. Whatever arises, I let it be there. Not managing it, not talking myself out of it, not deciding what it means yet. Surrendering into the feeling instead of bracing against it.

Here is what I have found. There is only so long I can stay inside an emotion before it begins to shift on its own. It moves because I finally stopped fighting it. Emotions are not built to sit in us for years, and it is the holding on that keeps them there.

Moving it through

An emotion is energy, and if I stay still too long with it I ruminate. I turn it over, build my case, replay the conversation, and end up more stuck than when I started. Moving puts the whole thing back into motion.

Stretching shows me where it has settled. Walking, gentle yoga, shaking it out. Something about not being still reaches feelings I cannot get to by thinking, and thinking is my favourite way of avoiding them.

Sometimes it needs more than gentle. A pillow to punch, or a pillow to scream into. Letting the cry come rather than swallowing it back down, which is usually what my body was asking for the whole time.

Letting a song reach it

Music gets underneath me faster than anything else here. The right song does not ask me to explain myself or to be reasonable about it. It finds the feeling and brings it up where I can reach it.

I keep a few that do it reliably. One for when I need to cry and cannot get there on my own. One for anger, played far too loud. One for afterwards, when it has moved and I want to feel like myself again.

And singing along does as much as listening. Using my voice opens something in my throat and lets it move, in much the same way that saying a thing out loud does, and often the lyrics have already found the words I could not.

Getting into the water

Water is the one I underestimate every time. A swim, a long shower, a bath with a good handful of magnesium salts in it.

Water softens me. My muscles let go, I stop holding myself so carefully, and I drop into something far more surrendered than I can usually reach on dry land. Whatever has been stuck tends to find its way through while I am in there.

Being held & being touched

Touch is the one most of us go without. A massage, a hug held a little longer than usual, somebody's hand on your back. We were never meant to process everything on our own, inside our own skin.

And when there is nobody there, it still counts. Curling up with an animal. Putting my own arms around myself, which sounds a little silly right up until the moment you try it. A weighted blanket belongs in this category too, because the weight of it is close to the feeling of being held.

Asking for space

This one changed things for me. When emotion rises in the middle of a difficult conversation, I ask for some time on my own before we carry on.

Not walking out, and not the silent treatment. Just saying that I need a little while to feel this properly. Then I go and do one of the things above, and I come back to the conversation grounded instead of loaded.

Writing with nobody watching

No structure, no wisdom, no audience. The page nobody will ever read is the only place some of it comes out, and you are allowed to throw it away afterwards.

What journaling does for me is map the thing out. While a feeling is still in my head it is garbled, and I go round the same loop for days without arriving anywhere. Written down, it stops being one enormous tangled thing and becomes a few smaller ones I can actually look at.

It does not have to be words, either. Some days I sketch or doodle instead, and it moves things just as well. The whole point is getting it out of my head and onto something I can see.

Keeping a list I can reach for

When I am in it, I cannot think. That is the whole problem. The moment a feeling gets big, everything I know about how to look after myself goes straight out of my head, and I suspect that is exactly how things end up stuck and frozen in us.

So I keep a list. Mine has two halves. One is for while it is happening: the breathing, and the few things that bring me back into my body when I am nowhere near it. The other is for afterwards, the recovery part, when the wave has gone through and I need to come back to myself slowly and be kind about it.

It is not clever. It is a note on my phone. But in the middle of it, having something to read that my calmer self wrote for me is worth more than anything I could think up in that moment.

Help from someone qualified

Over the years I have worked with a few different people. Psychologists, somatic experiencing therapists, counsellors, and art therapy, which surprised me by being one of the ones that reached the furthest.

This one sits differently from everything above it, because it is not something you can reach for while the feeling is rising. Nobody is available in the middle of it, at eleven at night, when you need them most.

Where it earns its place is the harder parts. The stuck ones. What sits underneath trauma, or the pieces I simply could not get to on my own however many baths I ran or pages I filled. Somebody qualified reaches things I cannot, and that is worth more than any amount of reading, this page very much included.

For my Australian sisters, the Australian Psychological Society lets you search for a psychologist by what you are actually dealing with, and if cost is the thing standing in the way, Beyond Blue is free and there at any hour.

If you are reading from anywhere else, look for your own country's psychology or counselling register rather than whoever has paid to be at the top of the page. Search your country plus "register of psychologists", or try "somatic experiencing practitioner near me", or "trauma informed therapist" with your city after it. That is usually enough to find the real list.

And when it is physical

I want to be careful here, because this is where this idea gets misused.

What I carry emotionally affects how I feel. That is my experience and I stand by it. What I will not tell you is that it caused an illness, because I do not know that, nobody selling you a course knows that, and I have watched that belief land on women who were already frightened and leave them feeling their body was a personal failure.

So a symptom is a symptom. If something in your body is worrying you, please have it looked at properly, whatever else you think might be going on underneath it. If you are in Australia and you are not sure whether a thing is worth an appointment, Healthdirect will tell you plainly, and it is free. Wherever else you are in the world, your own doctor is the place to start.

There are two documentaries that sit with these ideas, Heal and E-Motion, and I have watched both. A good deal of what they say resonated with me. I would watch them the way I would read anything in this world, as one perspective among several, because a body is a multifaceted thing and no single explanation has ever accounted for the whole of mine.

The way I do it is both at once. When I am in physical pain I see a physio, and I keep working with the emotional side alongside. One has never been a substitute for the other.

Where to go next

If your gut is where you feel it, digestion and emotions covers the same ground from the other end. And intuitive eating is about learning to hear what your body is asking for around food.

If the harder part is hearing yourself at all, my female intuition is my superpower is where I would send you.

And if you notice these feelings arriving at the same point every month, tracking your cycle is a lovely place to start exploring that, because the same week can land very differently depending on where you are in it.

One more thing, if you have been thinking about a weighted blanket. Earth Blankets is made by a woman I know and think the world of. She uses natural materials, organic cotton and glass beads, and every one is made by hand in Bali. Weighted blankets have been a real support for me, and I became an affiliate because I wanted to support her, so I do earn a commission if you buy through that link.

I hope this has given you something to sit with, and a look at how I do this rather than a list of instructions. If you recognised yourself anywhere in this, come and find me on Instagram. I would love to hear from you, and to meet you.

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