The Surprising Link Between Pain, Illness, And Not Loving Yourself

by Gay Hendricks

Are you turning an emotional problem into a body problem?

When there is something you're not allowing yourself to feel, admit, or acknowledge, it can become a form of energy that is stored in the body. This energy causes tense muscles, less blood flow to certain organs, and eventually, illness or pain.

This hidden process of stuffing down emotions into your body is also called “somaticizing.” “Soma” means body in Latin. When you somaticize, you are transferring your emotional and mental state into your body, and it manifests as physical symptoms. Because you don’t face and feel your emotions directly and consciously, your body starts to speak for you through symptoms.

Many people somaticize and they don’t even know it.

It starts when an emotion arises in them that they don’t want or are scared to experience fully. But instead of allowing themselves to feel those emotions, they’ll ignore them.

Or they’ll distract themselves with busywork, social media, or TV.

Or deny that there’s anything wrong.

Or “buck up” and tell themselves they’re above all that.

And then, months or years later, they develop inexplicable backaches, headaches, weakness, fatigue, or even a chronic illness.

What about you?

Are you not feeling 100% well lately? Do you sometimes get a tightness in your body somewhere, particularly around your neck, shoulders, or back…

Or suffer with headaches after particularly stressful times…

Or have general feelings of dis-ease that can’t be explained medically?

If so, it’s possible that there’s some truth you’re not facing or accepting about yourself.

In other words, your physical issues could be a sign there’s something you don’t love about yourself.

Let me tell you a personal story from my own life that exemplifies this issue.

When I was growing up, the emotion that was most hidden in my household was anger.

I didn’t see it that way at the time. It was only after a lot of work on myself later in life that I had any accurate view of what was going on in my family when I was a kid.

Anger would come up a lot, and different members of my family dealt with it in different ways. My mother would light up a cigarette. My brother would go to sleep.

I overate.

In fact, I overate so much that by the time I was in the eighth grade I weighed close to three hundred pounds!

I used huge doses of ice cream, chips, and cola to silence all the anguish I was feeling inside.

Yes, I was angry, but at the time I had no idea I was angry. But I did know that I was fat, and that’s pretty much all I focused on. I overate without realizing I was overeating, then I spent the rest of the time chastising myself for being fat and trying to figure out how to fix that.

All of this took the attention away from the real underlying issue, which were my un-experienced and unexpressed emotions.

My fatness was on my mind and was on my family’s mind, too. By focusing on my fat, my family and I got to avoid all that was seething underneath.

I also somaticized through my eyes. I wore big thick Buddy Holly glasses to correct my 20/400 vision.

When I was well into my 20s, I had a moment of clarity that allowed me to finally get to the feelings I had been stowing away since childhood. I finally got in touch with the real issues and feelings that my weight obsession had been masking.

I brought to light everything I had been suppressing and more importantly, I found a way to love myself for everything I was feeling.

And you know what? It wasn’t overwhelming or frightful. It was liberating! So much so, I was able to tune into what my body needed and go on to lose 100 pounds and keep it off permanently. I also quit smoking.

I no longer needed junk food or cigarettes to hide from myself.

And incredibly, about that time I was able to pass my driving test without glasses. My vision had resolved itself, along with the fatness and smoking addiction.

To this day, I can’t believe how much my stuffed-down anger caused me so much physical hardship. The poor vision that required such thick glasses, the fatness that I was so ashamed of and worked so hard to lose, the compulsion to smoke…

All of it was just a way for me to avoid feeling something!

But this is exactly what happens when we somaticize our feelings.

We don’t want to suffer, so we stuff it down. We stuff it into our organs, our muscles, our nervous system. And it’s unfortunate.

It’s unfortunate because by denying our truth we end up creating all the pain and suffering we were trying to avoid in the first place. Admitting our truth doesn’t cause suffering, it ends it.

Facing our truth is freeing.

It releases the pent up energy that’s causing us to feel stiff, achy, and out of sorts, so we can feel at ease instead of diseased.

That is the miracle of learning to love yourself.

In the Learning to Love Yourself Advanced Program, I reveal a simple fact: That in order to claim our full birthright as human beings, we need to claim our full ability to BE with whatever thoughts and emotions are within us.

Otherwise we’re not human beings, we’re humans fleeing. We’re fleeing from our emotions and therefore from our authentic self. There is no unity in flight from ourselves.

And there’s no well-being in that, either.

When you repress your emotions, you increase the likelihood that they’ll show up later in your body in the form of pain, tension, illness, or under/overweight.

Doing things like taking supplements, pain relievers, exercising, doing yoga, or getting massages may make you feel better and resolve the issue temporarily, but these do not address the core problem, which is that you’re somaticizing something trying to get your attention.

Resolving those somaticized issues means learning how to love yourself and everything you’re feeling, no matter how imposing it may seem.

The Learning to Love Yourself Advanced Program shows you the exact steps to do that, and it does so in the quickest, most effective way possible. Katie and I have hand-selected the processes we know work best for learning to love yourself, based on the feedback we’ve received after years of teaching this process to thousands of people.

In the audio portion of the program, you’ll learn to identify the 3 most common barriers to loving yourself, and then practical steps to loving your emotions, your body, and your relationships.

You’ll hear stories and examples from people I’ve helped to overcome serious somatic problems. One woman actually had a hearing loss that was connected to not loving herself which completely reversed once she was able to go through our powerful process.

In the video demonstration, you’ll learn how to reframe worry so you don’t need to let it distract you from living your life and having peace of mind. You’ll also see me working in real-time with volunteers to access the hidden emotions behind physical symptoms associated with sadness, fear, and anger.

You’ll learn how to release the tension that’s causing your headaches and stiffness and soreness.

Not only will you feel better physically, but you’ll find that you’ll enjoy greater confidence and bliss as a result of loving and accepting yourself.

Like all our programs, you can test it out and see how it helps you at NO RISK for 7 full days. Click the button below, order the program and start listening and watching today. Do the exercises. Test out the meditations.

If you don’t think the process is helping you, simply let us know within that first 7 days and we’ll refund your investment in full. It’s that simple.

We look forward to showing you how you can feel your best, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

With love,