The Silent Cause – Suppressed Emotions Are the Root of Dis-ease
- Brainz Magazine
- Oct 13
- 10 min read
Updated: Oct 14
Written by Kate Alderman, Somatic Sexologist
Kate Alderman is a Somatic Sexologist, Intimacy & Relationships Coach, Psychedelic Integration Coach, and the founder of: You’re A Strong Woman Foundation - Domestic Violence Prevention and Recovery. With a decade of experience in plant medicines and extensive expertise in sexual empowerment, trauma-informed healing, and somatic coaching, Kate empowers individuals and couples to reclaim their power and thrive through embodied practices and transformative coaching.
Most people believe “time heals,” that if we distract ourselves long enough, the emotions will fade. But avoidance doesn’t heal, it postpones. True recovery happens when we safely feel, process, and recalibrate our nervous system, not when we bury emotions and hope they go away. Our body and our emotions aren’t working against us, they’re the map guiding us back to health, clarity, and wholeness.
We live in a world that rewards stoicism and punishes emotional authenticity. From an early age, many of us were taught to hide our sadness, suppress our rage, and smile even when our hearts were breaking. Over time, this emotional armoring disconnects us not only from others but from ourselves.
What we suppress doesn’t disappear, it stagnates, stores, and silently shapes who we are. Eventually, it makes us sick.
As a trauma-informed somatic therapist, I’ve seen it time and time again, chronic tension, dysfunction, exhaustion, mysterious symptoms, autoimmune conditions (particularly in women), digestive issues, pelvic pain, hormonal chaos, and even cancer emerging not just from physical factors but from long-held emotional charge the body was never able to integrate.
We’ve normalized nervous system dysregulation to the point where exhaustion, tightness, numbing out, and taking prescription medication to mask symptoms have become part of everyday life. These aren’t just stress-related inconveniences, they’re signs of emotional and energetic congestion, signs that the body is quietly saying, “Something here needs to move.”
When emotions are suppressed, the nervous system reacts as if danger is present. This threat isn’t external, it lives inside us, constantly signaling danger to our nervous system even when nothing around us is unsafe.
This keeps the body locked in survival mode, storing experiences long after the moment has passed, a truth your body remembers even when your mind believes it has moved on. In this state, the mind is foggy, perception is narrowed, and we become more vulnerable to influence, manipulation, or patterns that don’t serve us.
The body doesn’t forget, even if you think you have
When emotions are suppressed, whether consciously or unconsciously, they don’t vanish. They take root in the nervous system, in our tissues, and in our breath. Each emotion is a biological signal designed to help the nervous system process experience. When we ignore those signals, the system stays stuck in survival mode, dysregulated, hypervigilant, or shut down.
Unprocessed trauma doesn’t disappear, it reappears as patterns and conditions, not as forgotten history. What the mind tries to forget, the body remembers.
It often shows up as:
Depression or chronic worry
Procrastination or perfectionism
Chronic muscular tension or burnout
Emotional numbing or dissociation
Overthinking and people-pleasing
Repetitive relationship dynamics or self-sabotage
Difficulty setting boundaries
Addictive behaviors
Digestive issues or appetite dysregulation
Insomnia and disrupted sleep
Hormonal imbalance
Chronic inflammation
Autoimmune conditions
These are not personal flaws, they’re the body’s intelligent adaptations, its way of saying, “Something here still needs to be felt.”
Think of it like a river that’s been dammed. The energy that was once flowing becomes stagnant, and this is where dis-ease begins to accumulate. Healing requires integration, bringing safe, regulated attention to the emotion so the charge can be sequenced and life force can flow again.
This isn’t just a metaphor, it’s biology. Over time, the body’s internal ecosystem becomes so overwhelmed by unmetabolized emotion that its capacity to heal and self-regulate is diminished.
Trauma is “nervous system indigestion.” When experiences aren’t fully felt, the body holds them like undigested energy.
Emotions are not abstract, they are energy in motion. In Chinese medicine, each emotion corresponds to specific organs, meridian lines, and physical regions of the body. Anger, for example, is linked to the liver, grief to the lungs, fear to the kidneys, and worry to the spleen. These are just a few examples. Every emotion has a physiological home and a corresponding pathway through which it is expressed.
Every organ and meridian is part of an internal electrical grid designed to conduct life-force energy. When emotions are suppressed, that current is disrupted. Circulation weakens, vitality dims, and the body becomes a stagnant breeding ground for dis-ease and illness.
We are either moving toward greater health and aliveness or away from it, toward disconnection, disease, and decay.
Nikola Tesla once said, “If you want to find the secrets to the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” The same applies to healing the body. When emotions, energy in motion, are suppressed, they distort the natural frequency of our system. Over time, this disruption of energy flow creates the conditions for disease to strengthen its roots and grow.
Chronic stress includes unsequenced emotion
Many people talk and act as though chronic stress is just a normal part of life. It isn’t.
Acute stress is the body’s natural survival response, mobilizing us to fight, flee, or freeze. When that response is allowed to complete, the system naturally returns to a state of harmony. But when the cycle is interrupted, when emotions are suppressed, denied, or the source of stress persists, the body can’t return to balance. The charge stays active. This is when stress becomes chronic, and chronic stress functions like trauma in the body.
PTSD arises from a single identifiable event, something overwhelming that imprints the nervous system in an acute moment.
C-PTSD develops through repeated micro-events over time, moments of neglect, dismissal, disconnection, or emotional abandonment that quietly accumulate. It’s harder to pinpoint a single cause because the pattern becomes woven into the fabric of our nervous system, shaping how we relate to ourselves, others, and life itself.
We’re conditioned to believe that this is “just who we are.” It’s not.
Unprocessed stress is trauma, and trauma is what happens inside us when we can’t fully process what happened outside of us.
Our culture glorifies “strength,” but at what cost?
Our mainstream culture doesn’t teach or promote emotional attunement or authenticity. Instead, it rewards stoicism, agreeability, appearing unbothered, over-functioning, people-pleasing, and self-abandonment.
For women, the message we’re programmed with is, This is how you stay “safe.” Don’t be “too much,” too angry, too sad, too quiet, or too loud. Stay agreeable, serve everyone, stay attractive to men, and never point out injustice.
For men, the programming is another version of the same suppression. If you’re not dominating, you’ll be dominated. Don’t cry, don’t be weak, don’t be angry, don’t talk about how you feel, and definitely don’t speak about your vulnerabilities or insecurities.
These messages don’t make us stronger, they make us sick, disconnected from our bodies and from others. We become unrelatable, robotic versions of ourselves. These messages program us to override our instincts, needs, desires, and truth.
Most people grow up in families or systems where emotional expression is dangerous or dismissed. Our nervous systems adapt brilliantly by fawning, freezing, or disconnecting entirely.
Over time, these survival strategies become ingrained, creating the patterns of C-PTSD. Those same patterns that once kept us safe are the ones that silently erode our health and well-being when left unexamined.
Dis-ease begins where true safety is absent
To release what’s stored, the body needs to feel safe, not just logically safe but physiologically safe. This is why cognitive strategies and talk therapy are not enough on their own. Healing begins when we reconnect with the body, not as something to control, but as something to listen to and learn from.
Somatic therapy, nervous system recovery, trauma-informed practices, and embodied emotional processing all offer pathways back to ourselves. They help the body learn that it’s safe to feel again, to be here, to soften, to release, to rest, and to restore.
This isn’t about painfully reliving trauma, it’s not necessary to turn yourself inside out. It’s about creating the conditions where the body is safe to explore new pathways and finally release what it’s been holding on to.
The mind may perceive safety, but until the body genuinely feels internal safety, the echoes of survival remain, silently influencing how we live and relate to the world.
The good news is that the nervous system is neuroplastic. It’s not fixed. With awareness, safety, and guided integration, new pathways emerge as old patterns naturally release. The body remembers, but it also has the capacity to be rewired, allowing freedom, clarity, and ease to take root.
Rewiring the nervous system
We can’t erase memories stored in our nervous system, but we can integrate new patterns and pathways that align with who we desire to become. The old patterns become memories without emotional charge, while the new patterns become strong, natural, and familiar.
It’s like upgrading from an old phone to a new one. At first, the new system feels clunky to navigate, but soon you forget how to use the old one. The upgraded pathways become embedded in your nervous system. The benefits of switching far outweigh staying stuck in the old, dysfunctional, and outdated.
Environments that heal and environments that harm
It’s not just what’s happening inside us that matters, it’s also what’s happening around us. Our surroundings matter as much as our inner work.
Our environment is either nourishing or depleting. It either supports authenticity and emotional expression, or it signals that our feelings are “too much,” “too inconvenient,” or “too messy.”
Our nervous system doesn’t heal in isolation, it heals through co-regulation, attunement, and permission. Permission to feel, pause, and express without fear of judgment or rejection.
That’s why somatic healing begins with creating an environment and external conditions that support internal restoration. This is not about blaming others, it’s about recognizing the power of our environment in shaping our capacity to regulate, process, and thrive.
Just like a plant won’t grow in dry soil without sun and water, humans don’t heal in spaces that lack safety, resonance, and warmth. We need to learn somatic integration skills, and we need safe environments and containers for healing.
Authenticity is medicine
When we stop pathologizing our emotions and start seeing them as intelligent, necessary messengers, we no longer fear them. We partner with them, and we learn to allow waves of emotion to move through us instead of distracting ourselves and avoiding. We soon realize that there is far more strength and freedom in being authentic than in being stoic.
I’ve had clients report relief from chronic conditions they had spent years trying to fix, simply through embodied practices and somatic rescripting. I’ve seen pain and dysfunction disappear after rage, shame, and grief finally had a safe space to move. I’ve witnessed the return of pleasure, joy, health, empowerment, connection, and peace in bodies that had been shut down for decades.
Somatic therapy is not a band-aid approach, it provides a safe space for the root cause to reveal itself, and it’s sustainable. Authenticity becomes the compass, a higher vibration than any single emotion. To be authentic is to surrender fully to whatever arises, allowing each emotion, feeling, and sensation to be honored and integrated. Surrender is not weakness, it’s profoundly courageous and profoundly human. It’s full-spectrum living, feeling what is true and letting that truth guide us back to wholeness.
When the nervous system feels safe, authenticity becomes effortless. Emotions no longer get trapped, they move, complete, and integrate. Safety, surrender, and authenticity, together they open the doorway to deep healing, not by fighting what we feel but by allowing the body to finish its natural cycle.
Curiosity lights the way. Here’s a gentle practice to support the integration of emotions. Name the emotion. “I’m feeling scared, angry, or ashamed.” Naming it lowers intensity.
Then ask yourself. What sensation am I feeling, and where am I feeling it? What color, texture, or temperature does it have? If the sensation could speak, what would it say? What does it need? What action could I take to honor that need, now or later today?
To close, take a deep breath in and sigh loudly, making noise and shaking your body on the exhale.
When we take care of our emotional hygiene in this way, something shifts. Healing is no longer about fixing what’s broken, it becomes about uncovering what’s true. Presence replaces panic, integration replaces avoidance, and here a new paradigm of health and authentic living begins, courageous, embodied, and whole.
When emotions are allowed to move and integrate, emotional freedom opens the door to clarity, presence, emotional intelligence, and energetic mastery.
A new paradigm of healing
We need a new model of health that acknowledges the body’s emotional landscape as deeply interwoven with its physical state. A new model that values healing and prevention through regulation and emotional expression, not just intervention through medication.
There is a place for prescription medication, but true liberation, health, and the return to our power require addressing the root cause through a holistic approach.
Suppressed emotions aren’t signs of failure, they’re signs that a part of you did what it had to do to survive. That part of you deserves acknowledgment, space, breath, and compassion.
If you’re noticing pain, illness, or recurring patterns that seem unexplainable, instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” ask, “What have I not yet been able to feel?”
There’s wisdom inside your body that already knows the way home, and the moment you begin to listen, that’s when healing begins.
Here’s the bigger truth, this isn’t just about longevity, it’s about how fully we live. It’s about radiance, full-spectrum aliveness, and the capacity to feel and express the whole of life moving through us.
I didn’t come here to survive a numbed-out life. I came here to burn bright, to feel deeply, to live fiercely, courageously, and to feel fully alive. What about you?
I invite you to pause for a moment and imagine the level of life-force energy that could be buzzing through your body, and now imagine the impact this would have on your life and the people around you.
If you’re curious about experiencing this level of aliveness, and you know there’s more to life than what you’re currently experiencing, reach out. I would love to support you and walk this path with you.
We can create a world where we are free to thrive without the burden of suppressed emotions. A world where intergenerational healing is passed down instead of intergenerational trauma. This shift requires courage to unlearn, to question, to be curious, and to embrace true change.
Thank you for sharing this article. You’re helping more people feel, regulate, liberate, and thrive.
Kate Alderman, Somatic Sexologist
Kate Alderman is a Somatic Sexologist, Intimacy & Relationships Coach, Psychedelic Integration Coach, EFT Practitioner, and the founder of: You’re A Strong Woman Foundation – Domestic Violence Prevention and Recovery. With over a decade of experience in plant medicine and extensive expertise in sexual empowerment, Kate supports individuals and couples in reclaiming their power, healing, and thriving through embodied practices and transformative coaching. She offers a safe, judgment-free, compassionate space for deep healing and integration, using somatic therapy, EFT, and a trauma-informed, body-based approach. As a survivor of intimate partner violence, Kate is committed to supporting others on their recovery journey and raising awareness about domestic violence. She excels at bridging the gap between science and spirituality, delivering her wisdom in a practical context that inspires, motivates, and offers new perspectives.
