Body contractions and emotional repression

What is body contractions?

Bodily contractions are energetic blockages and a type of inwards pressuring energy pattern.

It is the opposite of expansion, which is relaxing spacious energy pattern.

Contraction is constricting, tense, tight, dense, pressuring, uncomfortable, while expansion is light, transparent, spacious, relaxing and pleasurable.

Emotional repression creates body contractions

Contraction is the body’s way of holding back the free flow of emotion.

By holding back free flow of emotion, I mean resistance to feeling or expressing an emotion. In other words, emotional repression and suppression.

Emotion is just energy, and when that energy is blocked from flowing freely, due to suppression or repression, it creates contraction/energetic blockage in the body.

The difference between repression and suppression, is that suppression is conscious and repression is unconscious.

Therefore, when we consciously avoid or stuff down an emotion, it is suppression.

For example, you are sad, but choose to distract yourself by watching tv or stuff down the emotion by eating food. This is suppression because you are feeling the emotion (in this case sadness) and consciously choosing to avoid it.

Let’s give another example of suppression to clarify further. For example, you may be angry at your partner because they broke they lied to you. Instead of expressing and showing to your partner that you are angry, you pretend that nothing bothers you and you are feeling fine. In this case, you are suppressing the expression of anger.

On the other hand, repression is when you unconsciously avoiding feeling and expressing an emotion.

By unconscious I mean, that you are not even aware that you are having this feeling (because it is repressed). Repression is hidden.

When, you repress an emotion, the repressed emotion itself will not show up in your experience, it will instead manifests as a different safer emotion, contraction, pain or illness.

For example, if you repress sadness, then you will not feel sadness. When something triggers the emotion of sadness, the sadness will show up in your body as a contraction (f.ex. a tight dense energetic contraction in your chest) or a safer emotion for you (f.ex. anger). Therefore, you don’t feel sad when you should feel sad, instead you feel contracted or angry, because sadness is repressed for you.

How emotional repression creates unhealthy patterns and addiction

Emotional repression creates uncomfortable energetic contractions in the body, which can eventually turn into chronic pain or illness if the emotional repression is not reversed and deprogrammed.

Because of the discomfort created in the body (contractions, chronic pain or illness), the body and mind craves relief. Relief from the discomfort and pain in the body created by emotional repression.

Therefore, the mind seeks out an activity or substance to escape or soothe the pain in the body created by emotional repression.

This can be any activity or substance, as long as it provides relief from the discomfort created by emotional repression.

Some examples could be working too much, binge eating, promiscuous sexual behavior, obsessing over ones external image to obtain external validation, substance abuse issues, love addiction where one obsesses over one person or jumps from relationship to relationship, escaping into beliefs and complex philosophies, and so on.

What creates emotional repression?

When we are born, we feel and express the full spectrum of emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, hurt, joy and so on.

However, as we grow up we are programmed/conditioned by our family and society. As young children learn that certain behaviors are accepted, and others are not accepted by our family (those closest to us as children). We learn that in order to be safe and get love in our environment, certain behaviors needed to be avoided.

This is how emotional repression is programmed by the family into the mind and body of young children. Usually, the parents pass on their own repression onto the children unconsciously, which they picked up from their family during their upbringing. In this way, emotional repression is passed on from generation to generation.

If the parents repress hurt, then they teach their children to repress hurt also unconsciously. They do this by conveying primarily implicitly (but also explicitly) trough socialization to the child that hurt is not accepted in this family. Therefore, the child conforms to the parents expectations, by repressing the feeling and expression of hurt, in order to stay safe and get love from his/her family.

For example, let’s say a young boy starts crying because a friend said something mean to him. The father does not comfort the boy, and the child can sense the father is withdrawing from him. When the boy seeks out the father for support, the father tells him to stop being weak, and not to cry. The father repeats what he himself was imprinted with from his own father as a boy. The boy then feels that his father does not love him when he is feeling and showing hurt.

Another example, would be when the boy tells her mom that he is hurt by something she did. The mom get’s angry at the boy and says she is tired of talking about this. The mom doesn’t want to talk about this because she herself is repressing hurt and therefore uncomfortable with others showing hurt to her. She acts to her son according to the hurt repression that her parents programmed into her when she was a young child. The mom’s unconscious repression mechanism won’t let her near the feeling of hurt in herself or others, and instead resorts to anger and shutting down the conversation. The boy feels that his mom does not care about his hurt, and feels that it is unsafe to show his hurt to her.

Trough repeated experiences like this, the child learns that he has to not feel or show hurt in this family in order to be safe and loved. To survive in his environment as a child learns to repress hurt.

Repressing hurt may have been necessary in his environment due to unconscious parents who themselves were repressing hurt. However, as he grows up, this hurt repression is no longer necessary and continuing to repress this natural emotion, will create a lot of suffering in the form of contraction, pain, illness, relationship issues or addictive behavior patterns.

Repressing emotion comes with a high cost. The emotion that is repressed, will get stored in the body, which will eventually turn into chronic contraction, pain and illness. The repressed emotion will remain trapped in the body until the emotion is released from the body by reversing the emotional repression.

How is emotional repression maintained?

Emotional repression consists of a series of unconscious programs and commands that are telling you to not feel and express the repressed emotion.

Programs and commands such as ‘don’t be weak (a.k.a. don’t feel or show venerable emotions like sadness, fear or hurt)’, ‘hold back anger’, ‘I have to hide my sadness’, ‘I have to be good (a.k.a. not feel or show anger)’, and so on.

This mind programs are stuck in the body and keeps the repressed emotion/emotions trapped in the body. The repression programs and commands and the trapped emotion/emotions manifest as contraction, fatigue, pain and illness, and cause people to engage in unhealthy patterns to cope with the discomfort.

Trough somatic inquiry, the repression programs and commands can be deprogrammed and the trapped emotions can be released from the body.