I used to visualize full body armor as a protective mechanism during rush hour on the New York City subway.
It was the only way I could physically and emotionally navigate that many people and that much hostility.
At the time, I didn’t realize how accurate that visualization was.
Since early childhood, I have been creating emotional armor to protect myself from pain, rejection, criticism, and other hurtful feedback or interactions. Armoring was a necessary defense mechanism that allowed me to survive my childhood. I learned to count on myself and suppress my feelings, wants, and needs so that I would never be disappointed. I made myself small—often believing I was invisible—and rarely asked for anything.
While this coping mechanism allowed me to survive my childhood, it cast a long shadow over my adulthood – especially in my intimate relationships, where my inability to communicate my wants and needs left me feeling frustrated and unsupported.
As I have been working to release fascia restrictions and physical armor, the unraveling of my emotional armoring has brought a sense of relief and liberation.
What is Emotional Armoring?
Emotional armor refers to the protective wrap you put around yourself to prevent the things that have hurt you in the past from ever hurting you again. It acts as a barrier between you and your emotions, protecting you from feeling deep hurt.
You may develop emotional armor throughout your life as a protective mechanism to shield against emotional and physical threats. As you may recall, your body doesn’t differentiate between physical threats and emotional threats, including wounding words or parental absence or abuse during formative years. Your body may brace for impact with a defensive, tight, or tense posture or stance to protect itself from a perceived threat.
Physically, it may present as unconscious or involuntary tension in your muscles and connective tissue that dampens or blocks emotional expression, alters the perception of physical or emotional experiences, and diminishes or eliminates your awareness of pain. These tensions in the fascia and the musculature are believed to create a physical armor that may shield or protect you from unresolved traumas, stress, and negative emotions.
Emotionally, it can present in response to intense emotional assaults or feelings of shame, blame, guilt, rejection, criticism, or other attacks on your self-esteem. Emotional armor can take the form of avoidance, denial, dismissing, or distraction as a way of protecting yourself from any possible hurt from losing control or being less independent. For instance, you might find yourself avoiding certain conversations or situations that trigger these feelings, or you might dismiss compliments or positive feedback to protect yourself from potential disappointment.
Emotional body armor often manifests in the body as the habitual contraction of specific sets of muscles, which then function as a unit. Armoring also occurs within the organs and tissues in various parts of the body. For example, armor can form around your throat if you feel you need to hold back or repress your thoughts or feelings to conform to the expectations of your family or community. Armor can also present as a psychological defense mechanism, including social withdrawal, depression, anxiety, irritability, or isolation.
Armoring protects you from the pain of not expressing those parts of yourself that you have been indoctrinated to suppress or ignore. As such, armoring may help you cope with or adapt to chronically stressful and traumatic events, encapsulating the memories and emotions associated with these experiences.
Your armor is a protective layer held as a form of memory, and it will not be released until you know you are safe.
Symptoms of Emotional Armoring
Body armoring can present in various physical or emotional ways, including:
- Neck Tension or Pain: Armoring in the neck involves the holding back of anger and grief. A throat-closing up occurs whenever we repress our true thoughts and feelings.
- Digestive Issues: Emotions that we fail to process or “digest” often remain trapped within the abdomen, contributing to intestinal pain and digestive disorders.
- Shallow/restricted breathing: Holding your breath, shallow or restricted breathing in the chest area may result from an attempt to guard against or suppress overwhelming emotions or situations. This kind of armoring may, in turn, prevent your ability to fully express your emotions, contributing to greater feelings of anxiety.
- Tight Jaw and Clenched Teeth: Clenching your jaw or grinding your teeth can reflect repressed anger, frustration, feelings of powerlessness, or a need to control your emotions.
- Stiff Back and Rigid Posture: An inflexible or rigid posture may indicate a need to protect yourself from vulnerability, criticism, or fear of judgment.
- Raised Shoulders: Rounded shoulders and a hunched back can indicate a desire to physically withdraw, shield yourself, or create a physical protective barrier. Tension in your shoulders might also reflect an unconscious “shouldering” of emotional burdens resulting from a sense of responsibility, stress, or the need to carry the weight of others’ expectations. Raising your shoulders is a primal impulse to protect yourself by appearing bigger.
- Clenched fists: This defensive stance correlates to close-mindedness, or an unwillingness to embrace—or even explore—new possibilities.
- Fidgeting: Keeps you prepared to fight or flee as part of you may be convinced that it is not safe to relax and not safe to feel.
- Tighten Abdominal Muscles: Clenching your abdominal muscles can be a response to fear or a need to protect your vulnerable core in relation to emotions or feelings of insecurity.]
- Rigid Pelvic Muscles: Tension in the pelvic area might stem from sexual shame, guilt, or past trauma. This kind of armoring may impact your ability to experience pleasure or feel comfortable in your body.
- Tense Focus or Frozen Facial Expressions: A lack of facial expressiveness may indicate an attempt to hide genuine emotions, often in response to social expectations or past experiences.
- Tight Glutes, Thighs, or Restless Legs: Holding tension in your lower body may reflect a desire to be in control or guard against the lack of control experienced through feelings of instability or insecurity.
- Numbness or feeling disconnected: a way to protect you from feeling pain. We can quickly become very desensitized or go numb when we’re subjected to ongoing stress. Parts of our consciousness start shutting down, and then all that emotion remains trapped within our bodies. These stressful emotions cause our bodies to tense up. Parts of our bodies become armored when tensing up becomes a habitual pattern.
Benefits of Releasing Emotional Armor
While emotional armor may shield you from painful emotions, it also hinders the experience of positive ones. It can impede the flow of energy, emotions, and even your capacity for pleasure. Overcoming this armor is not only possible but essential for healing and growth. Long-term emotional armoring can prevent you from healing the underlying wounds that keep you in a chronic stress response, but it’s not a permanent state.
Emotional armoring can significantly influence your perception of the world, yourself, and your relationships. It silently shapes your expectations of yourself and others, influencing what you believe you deserve and are entitled to ask for. Understanding this influence can help you become more aware of your behavior and its impact on your relationships.
Emotional armor can also affect the way your body functions. Your nervous system, limbic system, and body may all be impacted. For instance, chronic stress, a common result of emotional armoring, can lead to physical health issues such as high blood pressure and a weakened immune system. You may create emotional armor to protect yourself and build walls around your heart to avoid the pain of rejection or abandonment.
Building walls around your heart may appear to create a safe where no harm can touch you, but it also blocks your ability to receive love and support from others. This was definitely the case for me.
My fear of being hurt, rejected, or abandoned by others contributed to armor that helped me keep others at arm’s length. I labeled myself an introvert, but in reality, I was such a well-armored machine that I prevented anyone from getting close enough to hurt me.
At the same time, I prevented anyone from getting close enough to love me.
And I kept my body stuck in a state of emotional numbness, detachment, and chronic stress patterns driven by these suppressed emotions.
Emotional armor not only shields you from connecting with the outside world but also hinders your connection with yourself. Overcoming this armor is a journey of self-discovery and self-connection, allowing you to release and detoxify repressed emotions. This process puts you in control of your emotional well-being.
Essential Oils for Releasing Emotional Armor
Essential oils can be topically applied to help you gently and easily release emotional armor and tension from your tissues and your heart. Oils are useful tools to help process emotions
By becoming aware of and releasing these armoring patterns, you regain the ability to fully experience and process your emotions, leading to improved emotional regulation.
Research demonstrates that somatic (of the body) and visceral (felt in internal organs, like the gut) feedback plays a role in the repression of emotion. Armoring can disconnect different parts of your body from awareness, cutting you off from your full range of sensory and emotional experiences.
The inhalation and topical application of essential oils can help send safety signals to your body and brain which then allow you to transmute and digest the emotions and memories that often facilitate the need for your armor.
Topically applied essential oils like Fascia Release™ and Lymph™ may help you to break down and dissolve layers of your emotional armor, which then allows your blood, oxygen, and life force to flow more freely throughout your body.
Your sense of smell offers a direct channel to the emotional center of your brain known as your limbic system. Smell travels through your olfactory system to your limbic system, relaying signals of both danger and safety.
Inhaling essential oils is the fastest and most efficient way to create physiological or psychological balance in your limbic system to allow you to feel the sense of safety necessary to begin to dismantle your emotional armor.
For example, Limbic Reset™ contains a proprietary blend of essential oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety queues to help reset your limbic system and support healthy emotional regulation. Limbic Reset™ was specifically formulated with Helichrysum sandalwood and Melissa oils which are touted for brain function and known to cross the blood-brain barrier and assist in carrying oxygen to the limbic system to help rewire neural circuits in your limbic system and calm an over-active stress response.
Shifting your focus by engaging your senses – such as your sense of smell – also helps distract you from an internal state of distress, thereby lessening its intensity and the intensity of your responses to others. This allows you to feel safe and access more possibilities and options.
READ THIS NEXT: How Smell Signals Safety
Releasing Emotional Armor is a crucial web of connective tissue that not only gives your body structure but also permeates, surrounds, and supports muscles, vessels, nerves, organs, and bones. Under normal circumstances, your fascia moves and stretches, playing a vital role in your overall physical health.
When you experience stress, a part of you becomes resistant. This resistance triggers a physical reaction, causing you to contract, constrict, or pull away from perceived danger, negative thoughts, or emotional aversions. This physical tension in your muscles and connective tissue is a protective layer known as “armoring.” It’s like your body’s way of holding onto the stress and the emotions that caused it until you feel safe again.
Armoring restricts fascia and limits movement and energy flow throughout the body. When the fascia is healthy, hydrated, flexible, supple, and unrestricted, your tissues can move freely – allowing good things, like nutrients, to get in and bad things, like toxins, to get out. However, when fascia is restricted due to stress, your body’s ability to heal is compromised, underscoring the importance of stress management in maintaining good health.
The health of every cell in your body depends upon its ability to receive nutrients and eliminate waste. The fascia surrounding your cells plays a crucial role in this process. If it has tightness or adhesions, detoxification and provision of nutrients for the cells suffer, highlighting the importance of maintaining healthy fascia for overall health.
Fascia can harden and become dehydrated as a result of emotional trauma and the body’s response to extreme stress. This could be a sudden loss, a traumatic event, or prolonged periods of high stress. This dehydration, tightening, and hardening decreases the space between the fibers, causing fibers to shorten, thicken, and constrict, trapping emotional energy.
Fascia Release™ generates a state of coherence in the cells of your fascia, supporting order and alignment in the body. Topically applying Fascia Release™ liberally around the tight or armored tissues may help unravel your emotional armor and deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages in your tissues to reduce pain, and improve blood and lymphatic circulation to support bone health.
