The connection between old, outdated emotional baggage and weight issues – and what to do about it

A guest post for JustAverageJen.com by Gen Edwards, Intuitive Energy Healing Facilitator, helping you shift from pain to peace, from chaos to calm – whatever that looks like to you!

Well, I think we probably all agree – that emotions we felt intensely, emotions that we couldn’t process at the time and that we just shoved a lid on rather than dealt with – tend to come back and haunt us.

Old events tend to haunt us, emotionally

The connection between old, outdated emotional baggage and weight issues

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The Healing Report:

I bet if you think about a traumatic event – like the divorce you had five years ago, the fear you felt when the river down your road was overflowing its banks and your house got flooded, your feelings of overwhelm when you had an abortion – you re-experience some of the emotions, you find they flood back up again. And not only that – emotions that we can’t deal with at the time get locked in our tissues and organs, helping us to ‘predict’ what might happen if we have a repeat of the experience. So – reluctance to re-engage emotionally again, trust issues, because ‘I might get hurt again.’ Worry when you hear the news that heavy rains are expected because ‘the house might get flooded again and we’ll have all that hassle to deal with – again.’ Fear of falling pregnant, fear of the pregnancy, constant worry about what might happen. And not only that – as an energy healer who specialises in energetically releasing this old, outdated, emotional baggage – what I believe is that the old emotional baggage contributes to imbalances in our physical and emotional wellbeing.

The link between emotions and snacking

My experience as an energy healer to date has been, that when we are unable to process and release emotions like (for example) Confusion, Failure, Crying, Rejection, Frustration, Bitterness, Helplessness; they turn into Trapped Emotions. So – by definition – emotions that get stuck in our tissues and organs are known as Trapped Emotions. What I know so far, is that if they get stuck in our bladders or urinary systems, they may result in incontinence issues; if they get stuck in our hips or back, they may result in back pain, if they get stuck in our digestive system, they can have a knock-on effect that causes us to snack too much on the sugary or salty stuff. And so on.

We all know that comfort eating is a thing, we all know that lots of us tend to turn to food when we’re overwhelmed, but judging from what I’ve seen to date, it’s more than that – because we are still carrying the emotions around, they are one of possibly many, contributing triggers causing us to turn to food when feeling down.

So regardless of the original event that caused us to feel the emotions in the first place, from what I’ve witnessed in my healing practice, it seems that they now have a link to choices we make in everyday lives. The examples I’ve listed here are, in this case, relevant to incontinence, pain, food and weight issues – they could just as easily have a negative impact on our self-sabotaging behaviours, relationship issues, abundance issues and so much more.

Why do we hold onto, or ‘trap’ emotions?

Trapping emotions is a bit like breathing in – then forgetting to breathe out. So – we hold onto the emotion instead of releasing it, and trap it in one or more organ.

What’s happened? We haven’t processed it, we haven’t sat with it, allowed it to be, and worked through it. And possibly, we haven’t done that, because we just couldn’t. There are so many situations we encounter every day, that cause our emotions to bubble up. Some of them can feel overwhelming. It’s much easier to just push our feelings down, try to ignore them and get on with our day. And then, of course, because we haven’t dealt with them or processed them, they are never really resolved and so feel free to come back and haunt us at night, or cause us to have just one more biscuit, or piece of cake ‘because it makes me feel better.’

When we experience strong emotions, or have a rush of feeling, it’s like we flip our lids, and lose control of our frontal cortex (which is the grown-up part of our brain that makes rational decisions) and get hijacked by our lizard brain (which is the instinctual animal part of our brain that we share with all animals).

Our amygdalae, which are two small almond-shaped glands deep in our brains, are the parts of our brain that generate emotions and trigger our flight, fight or freeze reaction. They cause our bodies to flood with adrenalin and cortisol, and literally, shut down our frontal (cerebral) cortex, or thinking brain. Our amygdalae, or emotional brains, are always ready to take charge in any situation. This is because the amygdalae evolved to keep us safe – safe from people from another tribe, safe from a charging mammoth. But the problem is that our amygdalae can fire as a result of stress, of anxiety, of situations where we feel uncomfortable or threatened, or foolish. And when this happens, our thinking brain shuts down and our emotions flood our bodies.

Tips to process and let the emotions go before they get stuck

One of the ways to process what’s happening to you when you notice those emotions appearing in your body is to choose to acknowledge the emotion by saying out loud; “I am angry. I am disappointed. I am sad.” If you can pinpoint what caused this feeling, then do so, and again out loud say, “I am angry because I felt ignored when I wanted to talk about our relationship. I am disappointed because he was late and that makes me feel like he doesn’t care about me.” Then make another choice by saying, “Even though he didn’t want to talk about our relationship and I FELT angry, now I choose to feel neutral about it and get on with something else instead.”

This last bit – about choosing to feel neutral about the incident and getting on with things – is important.  It seems that natural reflection – thinking about things in an introspective analytical way – may cause you some discomfort, but rumination – when we ruminate endlessly after a stressful event – leads to higher blood pressure, elevated heart rate and higher levels of cortisol in the body long after the cause of the stress has disappeared.

Rumination is probably also the stage where we tend to comfort ourselves, and turn to food or alcohol in order to feel better, but of course building a habit of eating or drinking for self-comfort is such a damaging thing in the long run because when it’s a habit, that tends to be when we pack on the pounds, or spiral out of control; and also it can turn into the go-to coping strategy which in the long run makes us feel even worse. It’s a vicious cycle.

It is so much better for our emotional health to recognise emotions than it is to suppress them; and so with that thought, here are some more tips and strategies to cope with them in the moment, or at least soon after:

  • Embrace your feelings. Acknowledge them, sit with them, name them correctly.
  • Take control of your breath. As you breathe out, imagine that you are letting go of the feeling, much like you’re letting go of the out-breath.
  • Do a mind-dump. No structure, no grammar, just stream-of-consciousness stuff. ‘Vomit’ onto the page, physically vent your feelings if you feel like doing so. Just don’t wallow in physical venting – vent; move on.
  • Tell a friend how you’re feeling, and why you’re feeling it. Talking is a form of processing – it allows your brain to make some sense of what has happened, and it forces you to think about what you want to say.
  • Comfort yourself by wrapping-up with a warm woolly blanket, with essential oils in the form of scented candles or rubbed on your skin. Used with a carrier oil they permeate the skin barrier and travel in the bloodstream to your brain where oils like Rose will have a calming effect; Geranium will have an uplifting effect, etc.
  • Try tapping, or Emotional Freedom Technique (aka EFT). You can Google that – there’s loads of good sites on the internet that give you demos and explain what effect tapping has in calming the amygdalae and thus slowing down or stopping the flood of stress hormones into your body. When you tap, verbalise what you’re feeling and why it upset you – this will help to process and release the emotions which makes you less likely to get hijacked by a cake or a bottle.

Doing any or all of these will help us calm the amygdalae glands in the brain, stop the rush of stress hormones and thus help move us back into rational thought processes where we are able to problem-solve as opposed to reacting.

Find out more about releasing old, outdated Trapped Emotional baggage and the different illnesses we can manifest because of them in my free book sample here – The Miracles of Energy Healing.

Book a free discovery call – start getting some outside help to release the baggage you have already trapped, and that is possibly at the root of physical, emotional, mental issues you may currently be grappling with.

Wishing you all good things!

Gen x

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