I have carried extra weight since middle school—nothing excessive—just an additional 10 to 15 pounds that I can’t seem to lose no matter what I try.
It finally occurred to me that it might be emotional—a subconscious defense mechanism to help me feel less attractive, less noticeable, and therefore safer.
In reading Amy Griffin’s new book, The Tell, about suppressed childhood sexual trauma, I recognized myself in some of her trauma response behaviors—the need to constantly stay in motion and distracted, unable to remember specific aspects of childhood, and continually seeking external validation to avoid having to experience internal feelings.
On some level, I also knew there was a reason I began to carry extra weight and try to make myself invisible after middle school. I knew something was there, but I was unsure how to process it, so I kept moving and distracting myself.
I often joke that when I don’t know what to do, I do nothing. In some ways, this might have served me well—because when it comes to intensely painful and traumatic experiences that you do not know how to process, diving in without guidance and support might actually make the situation worse, a little bit like opening Pandora’s box—which is a bit of what Amy Griffin details in the book.
Over the past few years, I have been playing with different trauma release tools—including essential oils, somatic therapy, and other frequency medicine—to help shift the energy of the trauma without the need to relive and re-experience it.
What is Emotional Weight?
Emotional weight is extra body weight that you emotionally “hold onto.”
Excess weight may be used as a physical and emotional shield to render yourself less attractive to the opposite sex, especially if you experienced trauma, abuse, or unwanted attention as a result of your physical appearance.
Carrying extra weight may help create a perceived physical barrier between you and the rest of the world, protecting you against further harm. On a deeper level, weight gain can be a subconscious way to avoid unwanted attention or sexual advances.
It may help you feel more invisible or less vulnerable. If you don’t stand out, you might not get hurt. If you experience powerlessness or shame over something related to your appearance, minimizing your appearance may feel like one of the few options you have available to protect yourself from future harm.
This is often a subconscious choice—or subconscious defense mechanism—as you may not even actively remember the abuse. After reading The Tell and overlaying some of Amy Griffin’s experiences with my own life, I can see how we simply choose to forget what is too painful to remember.
Indications of Emotional Weight
It is not uncommon to suppress traumatic memories, so even if you do not recall the trauma or abuse that might have prompted you to carry emotional weight, the physical, mental, and emotional character traits below are common among survivors of abuse.
Fear of Vulnerability or Distrust: If you experienced trauma and felt unsupported, you may struggle to trust others or feel safe being vulnerable with others. You may fear getting hurt or rejected or expect to be ‘let down,’ so you either isolate yourself or become too clingy or over-dependent.
Control: Trauma is not something most people would choose, so the experience of trauma may feel like an experience that was outside of your control or against your will. In the aftermath of this experience in which you may have felt powerless, you might go to more extraordinary lengths to attempt to control small things in your life or find it hard to say ‘no’ when necessary or assert your own needs. This may also present as behaving aggressively and trying to control others to regain control.
Sympathetic Dominance: Your sympathetic nervous system—your “fight-or-flight” response—keeps you safe and can become overactive in response to physical or emotionally stressful or dangerous situations, including those traumatic experiences you have yet to process. This can present as anxiety or hyper-vigilance—a state of feeling constantly ‘on guard’ or worried about safety and looking for potential threats—or an exaggerated fear of danger or fear that something terrible is going to happen.
Dissociation: A common coping mechanism if you have experienced trauma, Dissociation is an adaptive or unconscious response to threat and is a form of “freezing” and disconnecting from your senses, thoughts, feelings, emotions, or memories. You may feel detached from your body or surroundings. You shut down to remove yourself from a situation in your own mind when physical escape is not possible.
Pain: Pain can result from a prolonged stress response to trauma. The nervous system remains alert, leading to muscle tension, inflammation, and other pain-related conditions, including headache, back pain, or joint pain.
Gut issues: Your digestive system is susceptible to stress and emotional distress. Gastrointestinal problems, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), stomach ulcers, and chronic indigestion, may occur in adults who have experienced trauma.
Autoimmune disorders: Severe stress and trauma can trigger or worsen autoimmune conditions where your immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissues.
Difficult emotions: You may feel low, sad, anxious, angry, or irritable. You may also feel intense feelings of guilt or shame, or ‘being to blame’ especially if you were manipulated or forced to keep the abuse a secret – or tried to blame you for the abuse. These feelings of shame can affect self-esteem, contributing to feelings including ‘useless,’ ‘different,’ ‘bad,’ ‘dirty,’ ‘not good enough,’ or ‘worthless,’ and these can become core self-beliefs. You may also feel overly self-critical, expecting too much of yourself—known as ‘perfectionism’—or others experienced as criticism or judgment.
- Lack of focus: Survival brain makes it hard to concentrate. You might have trouble finishing one activity in a focused manner or how you “usually” can.
- Poor memory: You may only remember small fragments of what happened or be unable to recall whole periods of your childhood. You may have buried the memories until you are more ready to cope with them. Like dissociation, memory loss is a natural defense mechanism developed to help protect yourself from recalling distressing and overwhelming experiences.
- Fatigue: You may feel more mentally fatigued and quickly drained.
- Emotionally reactive: You may find yourself crying easily, overacting emotionally with anger or aggression, or feeling grumpy, depressed, or snippy when your survival brain is running the show.
Essential Oils to Release Emotional Weight
One of my goals in processing trauma—especially trauma that is so intense that my conscious mind has chosen to suppress it—is not to necessarily relive it but instead to gently release it.
Essential oils and other frequency medicines are gentle, natural mechanisms to support this easy, non-traumatic release of trauma from the body. It has been my experience that essential oils can, in essence, help to erase and rewrite emotional memories and the associated thought patterns.
This is partly due to how trauma and memory are stored in the brain and how your sense of smell can travel directly to the emotional center of the brain, known as the limbic system.
When you inhale essential oils, the odor molecules travel through the nasal cavity and trigger electrical impulses to the olfactory, which then transmits the impulses to the amygdala, the part of the brain where emotional memories are stored.
Your sense of smell links directly to emotional states and behaviors often stored since childhood. In fact, of the five physical senses, smell is the only one directly linked to the brain’s limbic lobe—our emotional control center. Anxiety, depression, fear, anger, and joy all physically originate from this region. All other physical senses are routed through the thalamus, which acts as the switchboard for the brain, passing stimuli onto the cerebral cortex, the conscious thought center, and other parts of the brain.
This strong connection between smell and the brain’s emotional center may explain why a particular scent can evoke powerful memories and emotions. Essential oils enable us to access stored or forgotten memories and suppressed emotions to acknowledge, integrate, or release and transmute them.
The word “emotion” can be translated as “energy in motion.” Emotion is the experience of energy moving through your body. This emotional energy works at a higher speed than thought. Thought and images can take seconds or minutes to evoke a memory, while smell can evoke a memory in milliseconds. Forgotten memories and suppressed emotions can wreak havoc in our lives, often being the unsourced causes of depression, anxiety, and fears. Essential oils can help you release and transmute these emotions wherever they are stored in the body or energy field without re-experiencing or reliving them.
Bladder Support™ Essential Oil to Release Emotional Weight
Your body intuitively knows what it needs. Just as you might crave a hamburger when you need iron or chocolate when you need magnesium, you will intuitively be drawn to specific essential oil blends when they are likely to benefit you.
Vibrant Blue Oils Bladder Support™ blend was specifically formulated to help overcome and heal emotional traumas and clear the residual emotional debris often stored in the bladder, including sexual trauma.
This blend never appealed to me personally until I began to do this work. When you are ready to release and transmute old energetic patterns, the tools that may help you with that process may smell different and significantly more desirable.
As you may know, your bladder is a pear-shaped muscular sac in the pelvis, located just above and behind the pubic bone, that stores and eliminates liquid waste.
In Chinese medicine, the bladder is also considered a storehouse for emotions, managing emotional reserves and overflow. When you feel internally empty of reserves, everything seems too much to handle, uncertain, and frightening. Similarly, when emotions are overflowing, you may feel awash in an internal torrent, drowning, out of control, and driven to desperation.
Often, these overwhelming emotions feel too much to handle in the moment, so you may store them in the bladder until you can process and move through them.
Vibrant Blue Oils Emotion Bladder Support™ blend allows you to let go of the negative past and release the emotional trauma from the body. It assists in overcoming feelings of despair and the feeling of being pushed over the edge. It contains the following supportive essential oils:
Frankincense (Boswellia carterii): May help relieve anxiety, nervous tension, and stress-related conditions. Frankincense is also known to help promote feelings of safety and help overcome fear of the future.
Geranium (Pelargonium Graveolens): Soothes anxiety and reduces stress. It helps support acute fear and overcome abuse, hurt, and the extra weight you might carry to protect yourself from future hurt.
Helichrysum italicum: Helps to heal and regenerate nerves and connective tissue. It may help support your adrenal glands to optimize stress-handling capacity.
Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia): Lifts mood and helps balance mood swings. It normalizes emotions and brings deep relaxation. It may help support irritability, moodiness, shock, fears, insecurity, restlessness, depression, nerves, and stress.
Petitgrain Bigarade (Citrus aurantium var amara): Helps ease panic, anger, and anxiety and relieves nervous exhaustion, depression, stress, and mental fatigue. It may also stimulate the conscious mind to support clear perception and focus.
Rose (Rosa Damascene): Helps to relieve stress, anxiety, apathy, depression, and indifference. It can also support energy, confidence, and a positive mood.
Sandalwood (Santalum album): Can be very grounding and stabilizing. It may help overcome low self-confidence, grief, and fear and allow you to feel safe.
Spruce (Tsuga canadensis): Supports the nervous and glandular systems. It mentally grounds, helps balance the solar plexus and promotes feelings of safety.
Valerian Root (Valeriana jatamansi): Considered the best oil for sedative and calming properties. Supports any tension, restlessness, agitation, and panic attacks. It helps calm the mind and positively redirect thoughts.
Inhalation of Bladder Support™ blend: Take a deep breath, then slowly inhale and exhale the oil for 3-7 breaths, letting your body know you are safe with every inhalation. On the exhale, focus on releasing any emotions, trauma, or other old or stuck energy that no longer serves you.
You may consider adding the following affirmation:
“I am safe. It is safe to let go of the trauma. It is safe to let go of the extra weight. It is safe for me to be seen again.”
You may shake, cough, or feel the energy shifting. If you stop smelling it, you may also know that the oil is working.
You can also add Bladder Support™ blend to bath water to help release the emotions to release past or present feelings of hurt, fear, abandonment, and abuse. I find that it helps focus on the smell and the present moment in the bath. Concentrating on your five senses—smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound can help ground you in the present moment and shift you out of past trauma or future worries.
Grounding, or mentally and physically connecting to the healing energy of nature and the Earth, can help support your clarity and perspective to release trauma triggers.
You can carry the blend with you and inhale as often as needed for as long as needed until the trauma starts to clear.
Topical Application: Topically apply 2-3 drops over the bladder (just above and behind the pubic bone), directly over any areas where you might be carrying emotional weight, or around the outside of earlobes or the bottom of the feet.
This chart shows specific application points on the ears.
This chart shows specific application points on the feet.
Topical application can be a powerful tool. Your skin is relatively permeable to fat-soluble substances like essential oils, making topical or transdermal application extremely effective. Topical application also bypasses the stomach and liver, which can chemically alter the therapeutic effects of drugs and essential oils.
It is important to note that different application points yield different results. You can significantly amplify your results by intentionally applying essential oils to specific healing points known as acupuncture points or reflexology points correlated with particular organ systems or regions of the brain.
Featured Oils:
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