Greetings, Reader!
When you were a child, what happened when you had big emotions? Were you comforted? Were you punished? Were you told to suck it up?
Did anyone teach you how to feel your emotions all the way through to completion?
I wish I had more people in my life when I was young who modeled emotional integration. Many of the adults in my life suppressed their anger until they exploded, or sacrificed their own needs to keep the peace. I learned that emotions should be contained, but what I needed to learn was how to hold space for what I was feeling without getting overwhelmed, shutting down, or running away.
A healthy nervous system is built through attunement and communication. It requires listening to your body's needs and tending to what you feel, but so many of us were never taught how to do that.
Unfortunately, the nervous system regulation so many people have turned to as adults has become another tool for bypassing and suppressing emotions. It frames calmness as the goal, which makes having big emotions feel like a failure.
True nervous system resilience doesn't ask you to avoid feeling; it gives you the capacity to meet your whole experience with presence and care so that when big emotions arise, you aren't knocked over by them.
I don't want to be exempt from anger, because anger is a form of sacred love that protects what matters most. I want to be able to embody anger when its appropriate, without being consumed by rage.
I want to be able to hold sadness and hurt with deep care, and to move through fear without freezing or running. I don't want my joy, love, or compassion to be dulled as a consequence of holding my emotions at a distance. I want to be in relationship with the world, and that means not shutting myself off from it, even if that is sometimes uncomfortable.
I see too many messages in healing spaces that perpetuate the myth that we should be comfortable all the time.
- If you need to narrow your life so much that nothing disturbs your peace, your nervous system isn't healthy, it's protected.
- If you need rigid boundaries to protect you from discomfort, your capacity hasn't expanded, you've just shut out the things that challenge you.
- If you use breathwork, vagus nerve exercises, or other self-care practices to calm you down without first digesting and integrating your experience, you haven't completed the stress cycle, you've just suppressed your feelings.
There is a difference between soothing and facing what needs to be faced. Soothing pushes the emotions away and provides temporary relief. Embodied presence turns towards the emotion and transforms the relationship with it.
When your nervous system is thriving, you feel more, not less. You are attuned to what your body is communicating, and you don't need things to be a certain way to be okay.
In my practice, one of the most effective ways to build emotional intelligence is to open the avenue of expression through CranioSacral Therapy. Restricted emotions often get choked up in the body, blocking our ability to sense and express how we feel. By releasing fascial tension and energy cysts inside the mouth, and throughout the head, throat, jaw, neck, and chest, we can reconnect mind and body and liberate your voice.
Pairing specialized intraoral work with somatic practice offers an opportunity to communicate directly with the pain and emotions you've been holding back while receiving the deep support that may have been missing when your nervous system was organizing around protection instead of presence.
You do not have to process, digest, or carry it all on your own. If you'd like support, let's connect. Schedule a free consultation here.
In love and solidarity,
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Rachel
Doctor of Physical Therapy & Integrative Pain Specialist
Rewire your nervous system and break the cycles of chronic pain, depletion, burnout, and overwhelm so you can be fully present for what matters most in your life.
Click here to book a free consultation with me.
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