🌿 What Are Trapped Emotions?
Part 2 - Exploring what the body may be holding, and why it matters
What are emotions?
We are energetic beings, and emotions are how we feel our body’s language. Therefore, we are also emotional beings.
We often talk of emotions as positive or negative and are taught from a young age that it is wrong to feel certain emotions. Emotions like anger or sadness are commonly thought of as negative. When you attach shame, guilt, or judgement to an emotion, it can feel negative. It is not the emotion itself that is negative.
Even when you deny or repress what you are truly feeling, the body still feels it. These denied feelings can become part of your cellular memory, causing this memory bank to become overloaded. Your cells can become like a pressure cooker that is unable to vent. Eventually, it may release, sometimes as an explosion of rage or hatred, or as illness, including depression, cancer, or heart disease.
Our emotions are like a rainbow. Without all the colours, there is no rainbow, and to be whole and healthy, we need the full range of emotions. By sitting with them, or expressing them from a place of safety as they arise, emotions can pass through more easily and are less likely to lead to intense outbursts or long-term imbalance. If you don’t feel one side of the emotional spectrum, it can be difficult to feel the other. Without anger, there is no passion. Without sadness, it can be harder to feel happiness.
Don’t confuse emotions and feelings. Emotions arise within the body, often spontaneously in response to a situation, like feeling scared in a haunted house when something jumps out at you.
Feelings, on the other hand, are the story your mind creates about the emotion or experience. So when you are sitting at home and all is safe, but suddenly feel afraid, that may come from the mind. It can be difficult to control emotions, other than suppressing them, but they often find a way to surface again. However, you can shift how you feel by changing your attention.
By learning to expand your emotional range and express emotions safely, it is possible to find meaning and even moments of positivity within those we might otherwise resist.
Trapped Emotions
What if emotions don’t always pass through us as cleanly?
What if some of them remain… held or stuck?
Dr Bradley Nelson describes what he calls “trapped emotions” as emotional energies that become lodged in the body, often as a result of experiences that were too overwhelming, too sudden, or simply not processed at the time. Many may form in early life, when we do not yet have the language or understanding to process what is happening around us and within us.
Dr Nelson suggests, “we can feel energy when it is in the form of emotions, and if negative emotions become trapped within us, they may adversely affect us. Trapped emotions are made of energy, just as energy makes up our bodies and everything else in the universe.” (Dr Bradley Nelson - The Emotion Code)
It’s an idea that, at first, might seem unusual if you are not familiar with everything being made of energy. Many people feel that emotional experiences can play a role in physical symptoms, and it is surprising how often symptoms like pain seem to ease when emotional release occurs.
Across many ancient traditions, the body has never been seen as separate from our emotional and energetic experience.
In Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and other healing systems, balance is central. Emotions, physical health, and energy are all understood as interconnected. When something is out of balance, it is not just one part of us that is affected.
What is held within us is not always visible.
Reflecting on my own life, I can see moments where emotions may not have had space to fully move through.
Times of loss.
Times of fear.
Times where it simply wasn’t possible to feel or express what was happening.
Perhaps, in those moments, something was held. Not consciously, but somewhere within the body. Something lodged, with larger, more traumatic experiences adding further layers around the heart.
What I find most interesting is not the idea itself, but the possibility it opens.
If something has been held, perhaps the body also holds the wisdom for it to be released.
This is something I have begun exploring in my own personal development journey, and also with clients, particularly in relation to what I spoke about last week, the idea of a “wall around the heart”.
I see this wall not as something fixed or permanent, but as something that has formed over time, possibly even in the womb, through ancestral patterns, or from past experiences, building layer by layer.
I’m still in the process of understanding this, not as a theory, but as an experience.
And I find myself becoming more curious about what the body might be holding, what it might be ready to let go of, and what the most effective ways of doing so might be.
I know from personal experience, and from stories shared by others, that deep massage can sometimes release held emotions. Many people report suddenly bursting into tears for no apparent reason during a session.
Some things we can explore ourselves using processes like those taught in The Emotion Code. At other times, we may benefit from working with a practitioner, or within a group setting. I learned as a Heart Intelligence coach that much of our experience is shaped through interaction with others, and often, it is through others that healing can also unfold.
A Heart Intelligence retreat led to a profound opening and softening of my own heart. I’ve described it since as an intense orgasmic expansion, and even now, many years later, the memory of that experience brings a sense of openness through my chest.
It was during this time that I began to truly feel my emotions, opening the door to releasing many that I had not even been aware of.
Have you ever felt that certain emotions linger longer than they should?
Have you experienced pain or discomfort without an obvious cause?
If something is being held within the body, the next question becomes:
How do we begin to listen?
Over time, I’ve come across a number of ways people explore this, some simple, some more structured.
In the next reflection, I’ll share one of the approaches I’ve used for many years, a way of listening to the body that may offer some surprising insights.