How Talking Helps with Heart Palpitations
Recently, a client approached me very sceptically, on the advice of one of his family members for psychotherapy. I went through my usual spiel about wanting to work with people who were ready to address deeper issues which could empower him to really change his life. He appeared to agree in principle to the concept of talking to help inspire him and clear out some stuckness.
However, more than 8 difficult and challenging sessions into our work he stated: “I’ve never seen the point of talking to a therapist about my problems. *I* know what happened. Why should I talk to anyone else about it? All it does is remind me how terrible it was.” Though I’d heard him say this before, it was exactly the right moment to explain why he had new and exacerbated physical symptoms of palpitations, shortness of breath and dizziness. I explained that because he had stored all this stuff away in his body somewhere, without any sharing nor outlet, and imposed such a strict stoicism on himself, he had effectively dulled and numbed his whole experience. No highs, no lows. No hope, no grief. Whilst meanwhile, all those locked away emotions, bubbling just under the surface, were causing all these physical symptoms that, he himself reported, were getting worse and worse.
All I could share with him was how misguided we have become as a society, that we have placed so much faith in our intellect to regulate ALL of our body’s functions and experiences. This same faith in our scientific world has made us regard our deeper, more gutsy and intuitive humanity as unsanitary and embarrassing. This can often be particularly the case among the men in our society who are taught not to express extremes of emotion – that’s for girls! So sadly, what they are often left with is a backlog of forbidden feelings, creating in their hearts and minds, the very thing they have disowned and clamped down on. For example, fear of showing anger, creating outbursts of anger. It’s fairly par for the course.
If I could do one thing, not only for him but for the world, it would be for people to reconnect with their emotional intuition and really live in their own bodies, not measuring themselves against some idea or prescription of how things should be. I have personally worked very deeply to re-discover my own gem of beauty and as I have worked with more and more people over 16 years, I have realised how easily society erodes our deeper relationship with ourselves. Make sure you book in if you really want to discover an indestructible happiness that is waiting for you in your own heart and mind.
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