Whenever I hit a bottleneck in my physical healing, I have learned to look at the emotions that might be impacting my health.
Emotions—including repressed and suppressed emotions that have not been processed—are believed to be stored in the body and influence one’s physical health. Several theories explain this phenomenon, including studies on the frequency of specific emotions and their correspondence with the frequency of particular organs. Chinese medicine also correlates specific organ systems with emotions.
Another theory postulates that in the limbic system of the brain, neurons for emotions and those for organs are adjacent to each other. As a result, during intense emotional states (such as extreme anger or fear), excess energy produced by this emotion is directed to the corresponding organ to be stored there. Still, this emotional energy can change the way the organ functions. The organ may not return to optimal function until the emotional state that is causing it is corrected.
For example, the kidneys are often associated with fear and the liver with anger—both of which I have been trying to process.
Working through unprocessed emotions is a bit like peeling an onion. There is always another layer. I recently learned that anger can mask shame, as it allows you to channel your rage either internally or externally to distract you from experiencing shame or the feelings that may accompany it.
In other words, processing repressed and suppressed emotions often brings up the very emotions that are the most challenging and most painful to work through, especially the toxic and intense feeling of shame, which are perceived to be the lowest frequency emotions and consequently, the most damaging to your health.
What is Shame?
Shame is an unpleasant self-conscious emotion that involves negatively judging oneself when one believes they’ve failed to live up to either their standards or the standards of others.
Shame can cause you to feel like a “bad” person, defective, worthy of contempt, or that you are fundamentally flawed or inadequate. Shame is a feeling of embarrassment or humiliation that arises from the perception of having done something dishonorable, immoral, or improper. Shame is also associated with negative self-evaluation, a motivation to quit, and feelings of pain, exposure, distrust, powerlessness, and worthlessness.
Feelings of shame are familiar to people who grow up in abusive environments where they might get the message that they are undeserving, inadequate, and inferior, and should feel ashamed. You might also have grown up with emotionally immature parents who expected you to meet their emotional needs, which is not a reasonable request for a child. When you are unable to meet these unrealistic expectations, you may be blamed, punished, or made to feel inadequate, which can cause shame. Shaming goes beyond guilt to make you feel inadequate. It demeans you as a person, not just your actions.
Shame is an intense emotion to deal with and may prompt coping mechanisms to help you escape from your emotional pain or inability to face yourself, including:
- Withdrawal: You may live in constant fear of being rejected, so you avoid pain, judgment, and potential rejection by avoiding social situations and relationships.
- Anger: Because you feel emotional pain, you become angry as a way to redirect your pain away from yourself.
- Self-Criticism: You may have internalized the criticism of others, and are therefore much harder on yourself than you realistically need to be.
- Low Self-esteem: You may feel that others don’t value you, so you don’t value yourself.
- Perfectionism or unrealistic expectations: You may engage in overachievement or adopt controlling behaviors in your attempt to avoid being shamed again.
- Defensiveness: May cause you to become defensive and shame others in return.
- Dissociation: Distracting yourself or checking out through overwork, overexercising, substance abuse, or other addictions can serve as an escape from your emotional pain or inability to face yourself.
- People Pleasing or Codependency: You feel as though you need to constantly please others, especially romantic partners, because they may not value you or remain committed to you.
- Extreme sensitivity to the opinion of others: You’ve grown to expect that others’ criticism of yourself will be harsh and even abusive. This can escalate to the level of rejection sensitivity, where you are so sensitive to the idea of being rejected that it affects your daily behavior.
- Difficulty receiving compliments or praise: Feeling uncomfortable or suspicious when receiving positive feedback.
- Self-sabotaging behaviors: Actively undermining yourself or your relationships to avoid feeling vulnerable.
- Feeling “not good enough”: A persistent feeling of being inferior or flawed.
Symptoms of Shame
Shame can present as several self-defeating reactions, including:
- Feeling sensitive or being worried about what others think of you
- Thinking you let someone down
- Remembering mistakes from your past
- Feeling unappreciated, used, or like others take advantage of you
- Thinking that you are stupid or attributing mistakes to your “stupidity”
- Believing you are a failure or thinking of yourself as a loser
- Feeling rejected, regretful, inadequate, or like you have little impact
- Thinking that people hate you
- Believing that others are better than you are
- Feeling inadequate
- Constant negative inner dialogue
- Thinking of yourself as unlovable or unworthy of love
- Hiding yourself from others or feeling that if people truly knew you, they wouldn’t like you
How Shame Impacts Health
Shame lies at the root of many toxic emotions, subtly influencing your thoughts, actions, beliefs, and behaviors. Imprinted from a young age, shame often plays in the background of all your thoughts, keeping you stuck in maladaptive stress responses that impede healing.
Shame is connected with the limbic system, the part of the brain that influences the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight-or-flight response. An experience of acute shame, also known as a “shame attack,” can trigger immediate physical changes associated with a fear response, which can shut down your ability to think clearly and problem solve. Research supports this, noting that when your brain’s limbic stress response is more active, the prefrontal cortex, which controls logical thinking, is less functional. According to the research, “Exposure to acute, uncontrollable stress increases catecholamine release in PFC, reducing neuronal firing and impairing cognitive abilities.”
Our thoughts influence our reality. If, as a child, you could not rely on your caregivers for safety, comfort, and care, you may blame yourself for the abandonment or abuse you experienced. In other words, you adopt a belief in your inadequacy or unworthiness as the reason you didn’t receive the care you were seeking, with internal messages to the cells and the body like, “I am bad”, “I don’t matter,” or “My needs don’t matter”.
This internal dialogue sends a message to your tissues and cells to fall out of coherence and into imbalance. This is one of the reasons that shame, unlike anger, which usually propels people to change, can also prevent personal change and growth, causing people to feel “stuck.”
Essential Oils to Unravel Shame
Essential oils may help unravel and transmute the underlying beliefs and patterns that contribute to shame.
Your sense of smell links directly to the emotional control center of your brain, known as the amygdala, where emotional memories are stored. Neuroscience research demonstrates that emotional, morally judging brain systems operate swiftly and out of conscious awareness. Your sense of smell is the only one of your five senses that is directly linked to this unconscious area of your brain, known as your limbic lobe, making the sense of smell and the tool of essential oils the most direct path to healing emotions like blame, shame, and guilt.
Essential oils inhaled through the nasal passageways enable immediate access to the regions of the brain that house intense emotions, such as anger, shame, and guilt, allowing you to integrate and release them. The word “emotion” can translate as “energy-in-motion.” Emotion is the experience of energy moving through our bodies. This emotional energy operates at a higher speed than thought, and essential oils can help clear the energetic residue of blame so that it doesn’t remain in our thought patterns, negatively impacting our energy field or our health.
Limbic Reset™
To access and release emotional trauma, such as shame, you need to stimulate the amygdala. The best way to do this is through your sense of smell. Smell is the only one of your five senses that is directly linked to the lobe of the brain that houses emotions, like shame, and is shown to have a direct effect on the limbic system.
Your limbic system works in conjunction with your parasympathetic nervous system to regulate your emotions and respond to physical, mental, and emotional threats. Your limbic system is often referred to as the “emotional nervous system,” as it helps you interpret sensory information and determine whether external stimuli are threatening or benign. If a threat is perceived, your limbic system prompts your nervous system to activate the “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system response.
Your limbic system is your “threat-detection and response” mechanism, wired to respond to sensory information, especially the sense of smell, to help keep you safe. Olfactory stimulation with essential oils can be used to reset the volume of threat perception and help calm the overactive firing of your limbic system.
Limbic Reset™ can be used in combination to help rewire neural circuits in your limbic system and calm an overactive stress response.
Limbic Reset™ contains a carefully selected combination of oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety signals, helping to reset your limbic system and support healthy emotional regulation. Limbic Reset™ was formulated explicitly with Helichrysum, Sandalwood, and Melissa oils, which are renowned for their benefits to brain function and their ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, thereby assisting in oxygen delivery to the limbic system.
More specifically, Helichrysum supports emotional regeneration. Melissa is known to harmonize the mind and body, helping to facilitate emotional detox and help combat stress and overwhelm gently. Frankincense is known as the “Oil of Truth”, working on a deep cellular level to help you release negativity, including assisting in the removal of negative energies and addressing core wounds of shame and abandonment. Cedarwood provides feelings of stability and grounding when external circumstances threaten your feelings of stability.
Limbic Reset can be topically applied over Emotional Points located on the forehead (above the eyes and on the temples), an emotional release point situated at the base of the skull at the back of the neck, on the bottom of the feet, and especially on the amygdala reflex point on the big toe. You can also apply over Filter points located on both sides of the back of the skull, which are used to filter energies that could pull you back into the old pattern.
Emotional Points are located above the eyes on the forehead. You can also lay your hand over your forehead. I write more about the forehead points for healing emotional trauma HERE.
The Release Point is located at the spinal cord at the base of the skull
Heart™
The key to unraveling shame is compassion, which can be experienced through the heart. Your heart is the organ most responsible for forgiveness and self-acceptance, helping you treat yourself with kindness and understanding instead of harsh self-criticism and shame.
Your heart connects you to feelings of love, balance, and connection to others. When you process things through your heart (as opposed to your head), you are better able to be kind and compassionate to yourself and unravel shame. Your heart also helps to support feelings of self-acceptance, self-love, compassion, openness, and unconditional love of others. Looking at the world through your heart center allows for the kindest, most genuine response and helps you avoid the desire to engage in conflict or negative self-talk, such as shame. A heart-centered focus will enable you to bear witness and hold space for others, validating their experience without judgment, allowing you to be a kind and supportive witness and validate the experience of others without the need to carry their pain for them or diminishing your value or self-worth.
The heart integrates and balances the physical, emotional, and mental aspects of the body, providing blood to every cell and organ. It also serves as a complex information processing center, influencing brain function, the nervous system, the hormonal system, and most of the body’s major organs.
When any part of the body isn’t functioning at an optimal level, the heart has to work harder. For example, when the body is in a state of stress, it requires more oxygen, which increases the heart rate. The heart is our body’s reset button. Still, a state of constant stress can fatigue the heart and compromise our ability to reset, leading to inflammation, infections, toxicity, and heart disease. By returning the heart to balance, we support the cardiovascular and circulatory system, regenerate the structure of the heart, and help to reset the homeostatic mechanism for the entire body. Apply 2-3 drops of Heart™ over the heart (left side of chest) 2-3 times daily.
Flower Oils, such as Rose, are powerful when you need to emerge from a dark place. Rose oil is also known to evoke a sense of love, create a feeling of well-being, and release past hurts, like grief. Its benefits have been documented in studies that found breathing and blood pressure to be relaxed after Rose oil was applied to the skin. I like to apply this one over my heart.
Fascia Release™
Suppressed emotions—such as shame—can be stored in your tissues, specifically in your fascia, the tissue surrounding every cell in your body. Your emotions—or energy in motion—travel through your fascia to be released. When your fascia is tight and constricted, emotions do not flow and are not released, but instead become trapped in your tissue.
Essential oils can help you release and transmute emotions of shame at a cellular level, allowing your fascia to unwind and move your mind and body out of a “frozen” traumatized state. This gentle release of restrictions enables your body to function without needing to protect itself.
Essential oils can help emotionally signal your cells and tissues that you’re “safe” and physically remove restrictions, rehydrate the fascia, restore elasticity, and widen the space between the fibers to improve circulation and help blood and oxygen flow smoothly around the body again.
Fascia Release™ also helps open up the space around your physical body. Releasing fascia constriction in the back of the body, specifically between the shoulder blades at the back of the heart, physically releases fascial constrictions and adhesions around the heart, which may help open the heart to the healthy flow of emotional energy.
The essential oils in Fascia Release™ are uniquely formulated to simultaneously work on physical and psychological levels, working quickly to break down inflamed, fibrous tissue, removing toxins while unraveling deeply held tensions, constrictions and energetic blockages in your tissues to reduce pain, improve blood and lymphatic circulation and release fear, repressed emotions, and tension held in the body (organs, muscles, tendons, bones and joints) or the mind.
Fascia lies just below the skin, so topically applying essential oils onto the skin allows for easy and immediate access to the fascia. The skin is the largest organ and is relatively permeable to fat-soluble substances, such as essential oils. The Fascia Release™ blend is uniquely formulated to unravel deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages in your tissues, reducing pain, improving blood and lymphatic circulation, and releasing fear, repressed emotions, and tension held in the body (organs, muscles, tendons, bones, and joints) or the mind.
Application Tip: I have been applying Fascia Release™ to my fingertips and tapping on key reflex points to actively engage my safety response. The video and graphics in this post provide more detailed instructions on how to tap.
Featured Oils:
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References:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26404712/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19370942/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3203284/
