What Happens When You Release Trapped Emotions?

Just yesterday evening I was messaged by a young girl absolutely crippled by trapped emotions. Our chat reminded me of a dark time in my own life. Like so many of us, I had some childhood trauma that I tried to suppress and ignore for years. Seemingly innocent things would be massive emotional triggers. Releasing my trapped emotions changed my life.

What happens when you release trapped emotions? Besides the literal feeling of a weight being lifted off your chest, releasing trapped emotions also releases trapped energy. Suddenly what seemed impossible now seems within your reach.

The average adult has 200 or more trapped emotions. Most of the time the trapped emotions are in clusters which means that it is possible to release them in clusters as you release the grip of trauma.

What Is A Trapped Emotion?

The easiest way to describe a trapped emotion is those emotions that you have been holding onto without even realizing it. More often than not they are as a result of dramatic or traumatic events that happened earlier in life.

Not all events in your life cause trapped emotions. However, when there has been an event in your life that was either emotionally unprocessed or not completely processed, that event and the emotions connected to it stay locked inside you until they can be fully processed.

The types of events that most commonly result in trapped emotions are things like being fired, a car accident, a divorce, losing a loved one all the way through to the extreme traumas of physical or sexual abuse.

If after such an event you had to immediately receive trauma counseling and had the opportunity to release and vent all of the pain and anger you were feeling until completely empty you would finish the process and normally have no lingering emotions.

However, if the process gets interrupted or suppressed then all of those feelings get trapped inside. This is what is extra devastating about ongoing physical or sexual abuse is that the victim is beaten down into a numbness that makes processing the emotions next to impossible on their own.

What Trapped Emotions Do To You

Trapped emotions hold you back. Many people think that it is a lack of confidence or a lack of self-esteem that hold you back. In reality, it is the limiting beliefs and fears that come from the trapped emotions. Have you ever noticed that no matter how hard you work, you just don’t get where you want to be, or get there fast enough?

If left unchecked those same trapped emotions can cause many difficulties in your life, both physical and psychological.

• Physical Illness: For example, most chronic pains are linked to some form of trapped emotions. Last week I chatted with a family health doctor and he indicated that easily 90% of the patients that he sees, their physical illness can be tied to some form of untreated mental health issue. And those issues are often years or sometimes decades old.
• Difficulties in Relationships: If a girl grows up in an abusive family, she often ends up in an abusive relationship in her adult life. Her other coping mechanism will be to push away those that love her before she has the risk of getting hurt.
• Self-sabotage: This is most often the outcome of sexual trauma. For example, you feel that you are not good enough at the most important moment of your life. As a result, you talk yourself out of your dream life that you would love to have. For example, many rape victims will become chronically overweight in a subconscious attempt to look less attractive.
• Self-harm: Sadly, if left unchecked trapped emotions very often lead to self-harm. My experience in this area is that it is not so much that self-harm is the goal at first. it is more that everything feels so numb inside that the stinging pain of self-harm is a way to just feel something.

The Layering Of Trauma Anchors

When trauma occurs, you will create an exact, detailed memory of that trauma, down to the tiniest detail. This can include weather, colors, smells, clothing, absolutely everything. Sometimes things that happened immediately prior to the trauma can get locked in with the trauma too.

Each of these memories of the different details surrounding the trauma is an anchor that holds it in place.

My goal with someone in therapy is to revisit the trauma but get to each and every one of those anchor memories. Sometimes it takes many sessions that seem repetitive before the last hidden anchor is found and lifted.

Expanding Cascade Of Triggers

Have you ever noticed how you sometimes feel emotional for seemingly no reason at all?

Those same anchors that are keeping your emotions trapped are part-triggers as well. This means that if you encounter a repeat of enough of those anchor memories simultaneously it triggers an upswell of emotions linked to the original trauma.

When this happens your mind takes a new snapshot of your surroundings and these new memories add a new collection of triggering memories to the original trauma. Over time more and more things in your surroundings can trigger emotions linked to the same original trauma like ripples expanding across a still pond.

This is why leaving trauma untreated for decades will massively slow down the therapy process to release the trapped emotions as all the other layers of triggers need to be peeled back before you can get at the trauma that caused the trapped emotions.

What Happens After Your Trapped Emotions Are Released?

Keeping emotions trapped inside your body is exhausting. Imagine trying to hold a basketball or one of those plastic beach balls underwater.

You are pushing against nature that is trying to bring the ball to the surface of the water to release the pressure. The longer you push the ball down the more tiring it becomes.

I have heard some people refer to the feeling that comes at the moment that trapped emotions are released as a weight being lifted off them. For me, the feeling was completely different.

When I went through the therapy process of releasing my trauma I broke out into a cold sweat and even ended up getting sick into a bucket. By the end of the session, I was completely shattered and I think I slept for twelve hours.

When I woke I had this burst of energy. It was like all of the energy that I had been using to suppress and trap those emotions was suddenly released and free.

The most common result of releasing trapped emotions is that any pain or illness that was connected to the trapped emotions usually clears away fairly quickly as well.

Why You Need To Work On This With Your Therapist

Many girls believe that if they make a huge change to their life like moving to a new state or even country or perhaps something bigger like transform their appearance or even transition that all of the trapped emotions will be left behind in the old life.

The trouble with trapped emotions is that they follow you. Often even if you have made a massive change to your life you will have to revisit the old life in order to release the trapped emotions.

All I can say is that if you and your therapist are able to isolate a trauma that has internally trapped emotions, be brave and work through everything in as great a detail as you can. Your future growth will be stuck if you don’t.

I remember my therapist used to say to me that the only way out was through…