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How to Detoxify Emotions

By Jodi Cohen

Woman standing on a beach looking into the water

Your body stores toxic emotions along with physical toxins – like metals, mold and pathogens. When you mobilize physical toxins, it is common to mobilize emotional toxins as well. If you are unable to process and release emotional toxins, it can impede the progress of your physical detox.

Research on the health-promoting and health-damaging effects of emotions

ound that unprocessed negative emotions “appear to be associated and/or promote disease and ill-health.”  “The health-deleterious impact of negative emotion” – like anger, fear, sadness, grief, anxiety, and depression – were “implicated in a full panorama of diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer, to arthritis, and diabetes and the common cold.”

This likely has to do with the fact that emotions activate your “fight or flight” stress response and unprocessed emotions are always running in the background keeping your sympathetic nervous system on high alert even when no physical danger is present.

The word emotion is derived from the Latin word exmovere, which means to move out, agitate or excite.  The English word “motion” is also derived when this word.  When emotions get stirred up, they trigger movement or readiness for action which, in turn, activates stress hormones and alters brain activity.  

Left unprocessed, these negative emotions influence your thoughts and your behavior and ultimately your health.

When you begin to release toxins from your tissues, you may release both physical toxins, like mold, metals and biological waste, along with emotional toxins, including emotions that you may not have been able to process during periods of intense trauma, like anger, fear, grief and sadness.

You may not realize that your emotions produce physical energy and when you release them you may feel physical detoxification symptoms (like nausea, fatigue, flu-like symptoms, headache, joint and muscle pain) along with emotional symptoms (like sadness or anger), in addition to possibly unleashing memories surrounding the original unprocessed trauma.

These stuck emotions are similar to physical toxins in that they can contribute to stagnation and compromise the function of your cells, tissues and organs.

Certain organ systems are thought to have a greater affinity for certain emotions.  According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) trapped emotions vibrate at specific frequencies that correlate with and impact the function of specific organs.  For example. anger is believed to correlate with your liver, fear with your kidneys and grief with your lungs.

Emotions are in fact energy that prompt and organize you for action.  This energy resonates at specific vibrational frequencies and serves as a warning system to alert you to danger.  

When a particular emotion is triggered, your whole body goes on a sort of alert to be ready for action related to that emotion.  For example, anger can organize you mentally and physiologically to become aggressive.  Fear helps you prepare to flee by triggering fear-based thoughts to prime your body for safety.

According to the book, Don’t Let Your Emotions Run Your Life, emotions can also:

  • Prompt and organize you for action
  • Provide important information about what’s going on in a situation (especially social situations)
  • Motivate you (anger in particular is very motivating)
  • Help you with communication with others
  • Can help you become adaptive.

Essential oils can help you move emotion through the body to prevent and reverse disease.

shift to more positive emotions and release emotions that may be stored or trapped in your body.

Detoxifying emotions is really just helping to transmute and release the emotions that you either do not want to feel or don’t know how to process so you suppress them.

When you don’t transmute or work through your emotions, your body continues experiencing those emotions even when you’re not thinking about them.  Your body is so good at protecting you that you may even dissociate from these painful emotions (so you don’t actively experience but they still run on repeat in the background, contributing the fight or flight response). 

Just like a physical detoxification, and emotional detoxification is a multi-step process:

Phase one: In physical detox, phase one neutralizes toxins so they can then be excreted or easily removed from the body.  For an emotional detox, you similarly need to neutralize the intensity and toxicity of the emotion through the practice of nervous system regulation and heart coherence.

Phase two: In physical detoxification, phase 2 is where the liver attaches another molecule to the “intermediate toxin” to render is less harmful. Toxic emotions can get wired into your organs and your nervous system.  Essential oils can be used to help you release the specific unprocessed energy from the emotional toxicity from your organs and tissues.

Essential oils can help you mobilize, process, transmute and integrate stuck emotional energy and re-create nervous system and heart coherence within your body.  

The key to releasing negative emotions is love, compassion and empathy, both for yourself and for others involved in the situation.   If someone hurt or betrayed you, you may stay stuck in a place of anger at that person or fear of future interactions.  These emotions dysregulate your nervous system, throwing you into a sympathetic dominant state, and take you out of heart coherence.  

Essential oils are powerful tools to help you embrace positive emotions and sort through more challenging emotions.  Sadly, positive thinking alone cannot override your fight or flight nervous system.  

But your sense of smell (used to inhale essential oils) has direct access to the emotional center of your brain that controls your hormones and influences your emotions and your mood, known as your limbic system.  

On a physical level, only two synapses separate your amygdala from your olfactory nerve.  No other sensory system has this kind of direct and intense contact with the neural substrates of your brain’s emotional control center.  Your other four senses, including sound, sight, taste and touch must travel to other regions of the brain first, before reaching your limbic system.

You can use this direct physiological access to rewire your physiology and detoxify emotions.

The inhalation and topical application of essential oils work with your natural physiology to support an emotional detox!

The following essential oil blends can be used to help support nervous system regulation and heart coherence to neutralize the intensity and toxicity and help to transmute the emotion for easier detoxification.

Your Parasympathetic branch of the nervous system allows you to feel safe and less reactive to intense or toxic emotions.

Topically applying the Parasympathetic® blend behind your earlobe on your mastoid bone helps to shift you out of emotional reactivity, allowing you to transmute and detoxify intense emotions with less difficulty and intensity.

Activating your parasympathetic nervous system may help to neutralize the emotional charge that keeps the toxic emotion stuck in your body. Acknowledging your emotions from a mindful state allows you to observe your experience from a more detached, less emotional place which makes it easier to process, transmute and release.   You might physically feel the discharge or release.  For example, some clients report that they shiver or physically shake off emotions during this process.

READ THIS NEXT: Parasympathetic Pause

Your heart integrates and balances your physical, emotional, and mental body.

More specifically, your emotions are reflected in your heart rhythm patterns. When you are in a state of fear or anger, your heartbeat reflects that negative energy through a chaotic heart rhythm known as an “incoherent heart rhythm pattern.”

Your heart then sends signals to your brain that influence the release of hormones that impact your mental and emotional experience. Incoherent heart rhythms inhibit higher cognitive functions such as attention, perception, memory and problem-solving that help support emotional detoxification.

Conversely, when you’re experiencing positive emotions like love, joy, gratitude and compassion, you creating a state of heart coherence or “coherent heart rhythm patterns” that look smooth, ordered and stable. Coherent heart patterns help your body’s systems synchronize and work better, enhancing your ability to think clearly, learn, remember, reason and make healthy, thoughtful decisions – and detoxify emotions.

Heart™ blend helps you activate heart coherence by energetically aligning your heart into coherence to help you focus on positive, peaceful, loving and harmonious thoughts and emotions.

Your heart plays host to 40,000 sensory neurons through which it communicates to the brain and the body, producing and releasing hormones into the blood stream.

Heart™ blend was designed to harmonize these chemical and electrical signals to help support an optimal state of heart coherence that allows you to detoxify and transmute intense emotions.  To use it, simply apply 2-3 drops over the front of the heart (left side of chest).

During times of intense sadness, use as often as is needed (every 20 -30 minutes).  During times of normal stress, use 2-3 times daily to support heart coherence and emotional detox.

The issues are in the tissues, and before you can begin to unpack your blocked or stuck heart energy, you need to open up the space around your physical heart with fascia blend.

Releasing fascia constriction in the back of the body – specifically between the shoulder blades at the back on the heart – helps to physically release fascial constrictions and adhesions around the heart that may help open the heart for the healthy flow of emotional energy.

When you experience stress or heartbreak, part of you is resistance, which triggers you to physically contract, constrict, or pull away from a physical danger, a negative thought or an emotional aversion.  In the process, you constrict and physically guard your heart in preparation for attack.  When you do this, you internalize the fear without release or recovery.  In short, energy doesn’t flow and your body constricts – which locks the stress in your body.

Fascia Release™ may help “unwind” your fascia and emotionally signal your body that you’re “safe” and physically remove restrictions and physical tension in your muscles and connective tissue known as a protective layer or “armoring”,  which will not release physically or emotionally until you know that you are safe.

Topically applying Fascia Release™ over the physical heart – with focused application and both above on the clavicle bones in sweeping outward motions and in a gentle vertical caress from your throat and the sides of your neck down over and below the heart– opens the space to allow energy and emotions to flow down and out of your system.  You can also apply over the back of your heart.  This allows the fascia and muscles surrounding the heart to help release toxic emotions, like anger and sadness.

The following essential oil blends can be used to calm the intensity of emotionally toxic energies – including anger, fear, sadness and grief – to allow you to micro-dose emotional release and detoxification from your internal organs.

In Chinese medicine different emotions ‘gravitate’ to and are related with different organs. For example, the emotions relating to the liver are anger and frustration. When you start to physically detoxify your liver, it will often start to self-clear emotionally.  If you are unable to process the intensity of the emotions, it can impede your physical detoxification.

Essential oils and the sense of smell allow you to activate and release intense emotions and sensations over brief durations – providing a small amount of stimulus to engage your body in releasing the pain without flooding and shutting down your system or keeping you stuck in a state of emotional denial or suppression.  

Once you have calmed your nervous system, you can then begin to release specific emotions in small doses  – think eye dropper, not fire hose.  Intense feelings can be painful to release, so try to be compassionate and patient with yourself.  The only way out is through, but there is no rush to get there.

On a positive note, essential oils help you control the duration of challenging emotions, releasing just a small amount of the intensity at a time, much like you would slowly and carefully unscrew the top of a carbonated beverage to gently release excess carbonation and avoid an explosion.

I recommend inhaling essential oils and gently releasing intense emotions with your exhale.  Just place the bottle under your nose and breathe deeply, fully inhaling the oil for 3 – 7 breaths. It helps you breathe into and work through the emotion.  Try to extend the exhale and really allow yourself to release the painful emotion and any associated pain and intensity.

Anger can take many forms – from rage, to blame, frustration, hostility or irritation.

Anger that we don’t process and release can get stored in your liver, according to Chinese medicine.  Any stagnation, congestion or compromise in the healthy function of your liver allows toxic chemicals to build up and accumulate in your body.  Frustration, rage, and anger tend to build up when toxins build up.

Liver Support™ helps support the release of anger, including frequent irritation, impatience, resentment or frustration, being critical of yourself or others, control issues, an inability to express your feelings, feelings of not feeling heard, not feeling loved, not being recognized or appreciated.

Just place the bottle under your nose and breathe deeply, fully inhaling the oil for 3 – 7 breaths.  It helps you breathe into and work through the emotion.  You can also apply it around the ankles as this is often an area where we hold resistance to moving forward in life and block the ability to receive joy and pleasure.  Start at the back of the ankle and apply under the ankle bone around to the front and back under the other ankle bone, all while allowing yourself to release challenging emotions. 

Fear is the emotional response to an immediate threat.  It’s defined as an unpleasant feeling that stems from perceived danger or threat. It plays an important role in survival as it alerts you to the presence of danger and allows assess our ability to deal with situations that are perceived as threatening.  It often triggers a fight or flight response to help ensure that you are prepared to effectively deal with threats in your environment.

Fear can also be triggered by anticipated threats or even our thoughts about potential dangers. When over-activated, it can feel like anxiety, nervousness, compulsiveness.

The goal isn’t to “overcome your fear” or turn it off. It’s to feel it, embrace it and learn from it.

In addition to the Parasympathetic® blend, which helps to calm the fight or flight response, Kidney Support™, when applied over your kidneys (one inch up and out from belly button), back of neck, or around the outside of earlobes, can help dispel fear, and assist you in feeling safe.

Fear is often associated with your kidneys, two bean-shaped organs that sit on top of your adrenal glands and regulate the balance and flow of fluids in your body, by selectively filtering out or retaining various minerals and electrolytes.  In Chinese medicine, fear is associated with the water element, as water is symbolic of your unconscious, or that which you do not understand and therefore might fear.  These feelings of fear and paranoia can be held in your kidneys impairing function. Topically applying Kidney Support™ over your kidneys 2-3 times daily may help calm your fear response.

Sadness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of disappointment, grief, hopelessness, disinterest, and dampened mood.  Sadness allows you to become aware of and release anything that no longer belongs to you or hurts you.

According to Chinese medicine, feelings of grief and loss are stored in your lungs where they can obstruct ability of your lungs to accept and relinquish, impeding their function of “taking in” and “letting go” of oxygen and feelings. Grief that remains unresolved can become chronic and create disharmony in the lungs, weakening the lung’s function of circulating oxygen around the body. Lung Support™ can help release these feelings of loss and support your ability to transport oxygen from the atmosphere into the capillaries so they can oxygenate blood – and eliminate carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere. Apply 2- 3 drops over the lungs, allowing yourself to deeply exhale any grief as you apply the blend.

READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Grief

Jodi Cohen

Jodi Sternoff Cohen is the founder of Vibrant Blue Oils. An author, speaker, nutritional therapist, and a leading international authority on essential oils, Jodi has helped over 50,000 individuals support their health with essential oils.