An experience can be over while the emotional experience connected to it remains unprocessed.
Something happens.
You’re hurt, angry, disappointed, frightened, embarrassed or completely overwhelmed, but there isn’t the time, space or perhaps even the knowledge to know what to do with what you’re feeling.
So you keep going.
Life moves on.
Eventually you may stop thinking about what happened altogether.
But does that mean you actually processed the emotional experience?
Not necessarily.
When I talk about unprocessed emotions, I’m talking about emotions connected to experiences that weren’t fully experienced and processed at the time.
You may also hear people describe these as suppressed emotions, unresolved emotions, trapped emotions or stored emotions.
There are differences in how these terms are used, and I don’t believe we need to become overly attached to finding the perfect label.
I’m much more interested in a different question.
Is there anything from the experience that you haven’t actually processed yet?
Emotional processing is a recognised concept within psychology, although different therapeutic approaches explain and work with it differently.
Research using the Emotional Processing Scale, for example, distinguishes between emotional suppression, avoidance, difficulty experiencing emotions, unregulated emotions and signs that an emotional experience remains inadequately processed.
Within my own work, I keep the explanation very simple.
An unprocessed emotion is an emotional experience you didn’t fully experience and process.
Perhaps you suppressed what you felt.
Perhaps you expressed some of it but there was more underneath. Perhaps you understood what happened intellectually but never actually allowed yourself to experience what was there.
The event itself may be finished.
That doesn’t automatically tell us whether the emotional experience is complete.
For many people, the answer is incredibly simple.
Nobody taught you what to do with them.
Think about what was role modelled for you growing up. What happened when someone in your family was angry? How was grief handled? Were you allowed to cry? What happened when you expressed disappointment or frustration?
Perhaps you were told to stop crying, calm down, be grateful, get over it or not make such a big deal out of things.
Perhaps nothing was said at all.
You simply learned from the people around you that uncomfortable emotions were something to contain, hide, distract yourself from or push through.
Even as an adult, there are countless situations where there simply isn’t space to process what you’re feeling. You might receive difficult news and then need to collect your children from school. Something happens at work and you have another meeting ten minutes later. A relationship ends, but there are still bills to pay, meals to make and responsibilities that don’t disappear simply because you’re hurting.
Suppression can be incredibly functional in the moment.
The problem isn’t that you suppressed an emotion when you needed to keep moving.
The question is whether you ever came back to process it.
Suppression is something humans can become very skilled at.
You might keep busy, distract yourself, tell yourself it wasn’t that bad or decide there is no point being upset because you can’t change what happened.
You may also move into understanding.
Perhaps you can explain exactly why someone behaved the way they did. You understand their childhood and their limitations. You know they were doing the best they could with what they had.
That understanding can be incredibly valuable.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve processed your own emotional experience.
You can understand why someone hurt you and still feel your entire body react when you’re around them.
You can forgive someone intellectually and still become intensely triggered by something that reminds you of the original experience.
You can know exactly why you behave a particular way and still continue doing it.
This is why I make such a strong distinction between understanding an emotion and processing an emotion.
“Stored emotions” is language you’ll hear frequently in mind body, somatic and personal development spaces.
It’s also language I use.
But I think it’s important to explain what I mean by it.
When I describe an emotion as stored, I’m not suggesting that we could open up your shoulder, liver or hip and physically extract a piece of anger, grief or resentment.
Research supports the idea that emotions involve the body and that emotional processing, avoidance and suppression can have ongoing psychological and physiological consequences. That is different from establishing that a specific emotion literally resides in a particular tissue.
I use stored as a way of describing an emotional experience that hasn’t been fully experienced and processed.
The original moment may have passed, but something about the emotional experience remains relevant in the present.
For me, that is much more useful than trying to decide whether a particular emotion literally lives in a particular body part.
I don’t use a universal body map.
You may have seen charts telling you that anger is held in one organ, grief in another or fear in a particular part of the body.
Those frameworks can be interesting, but I don’t want somebody else’s interpretation to become more important than your individual experience.
Two people can move through a very similar event and experience it completely differently.
Likewise, two people can have the same physical diagnosis and completely different emotional histories, relationships, life experiences and physical presentations.
So rather than beginning with:
“What emotion is stored in this body part?”
I prefer curiosity.
What do you notice?
What was happening when this began?
What does your body do when you revisit the experience?
What emotion or sensation is actually present for you?
Listening to your body isn’t about memorising somebody else’s emotional dictionary.
It’s about learning to recognise your own experience.
There isn’t one definitive checklist that can tell you whether a particular experience is unprocessed.
Psychological research has used the term “signs of unprocessed emotion” to describe persistent or intrusive emotional experiences, and emotional processing research also considers suppression, avoidance and difficulties experiencing emotion.
In my work, I’m also interested in what happens in someone’s everyday life.
You might notice that a relatively small event creates a reaction that feels much bigger than the situation in front of you. The same type of relationship dynamic may keep repeating, or a particular person, conversation or memory may create an immediate emotional or physical response even though you thought you’d moved on.
Sometimes you know there is something there because you avoid it completely. You don’t want to talk about the person, revisit the experience or feel what comes up when you think about it.
At other times it isn’t obvious at all.
You may be highly self aware, successful and very capable of talking about your past. You may have done years of personal development and still have something you haven’t actually processed.
This is why I don’t think the most useful approach is trying to diagnose yourself from a list of “signs”.
There’s a much simpler option.
When someone tells me, “I’ve already worked on that”, my response is usually:
Let’s go and find out.
You don’t need to spend weeks analysing whether you’ve processed something.
The Release Process® can sometimes take as little as one to three minutes to explore an experience.
So let’s see what happens.
Is there anything left to say?
What happens when you return to the experience?
Is there still an emotional or physical response?
Can you receive what you needed?
Is there something you haven’t seen yet?
Rather than using your intellectual understanding to decide whether an experience is complete, the process allows you to become curious about what is actually there.
And there is another question that is particularly important within my work.
Did you get the message?
This is where my approach differs from simply trying to get an uncomfortable emotion out of your body.
Through the Release Process®, you may experience anger, sadness, disappointment, fear or something completely different.
But processing can also reveal an insight.
You might suddenly see that you’ve spent years waiting for someone to give you something you haven’t been willing to give yourself. You may recognise that you don’t ask for what you need, struggle to receive, continue abandoning yourself to keep other people comfortable, or repeatedly recreate a dynamic you thought belonged entirely to your past.
This is what I call Deciphering the Message.
The message isn’t one of the four parts of the Release Process®. It emerges as a result of the process.
And for me, it’s one of the most valuable parts.
Because the message gives you information about what needs to happen next.
Processing the emotion is the Missing Link. The message is the Key.
One of the ways I explain unprocessed emotions is through something I call the Emotional Cup.
Imagine that throughout your life, experiences occur and emotions arise. When those emotions aren’t processed, they go into the cup.
Life continues and more experiences happen. Some are enormous. Others might seem insignificant from the outside. But if they aren’t processed, more is added to the cup.
Eventually the cup becomes full.
Then something happens that appears relatively small and suddenly there is an enormous reaction.
We often judge the reaction based only on what just happened.
Why am I so upset about this?
Why did that comment affect me so much?
Why am I crying over something so small?
Why did I completely lose it?
But sometimes the final event isn’t the whole story.
It may simply be what caused an already full emotional cup to overflow.
This is why I am interested in more than simply calming the immediate reaction.
I want to know what else is in the cup.
When people hear terms such as stored emotions or unresolved emotions, they often assume we’re going to spend the next ten years digging through childhood.
That isn’t how I see this work.
Of course, childhood experiences can matter. Your earliest relationships and experiences may influence the way you interact with emotion today.
But your younger self isn’t always five years old.
It could be you at twenty five, forty five or last Tuesday.
Something can happen this morning that you don’t give yourself the space to process.
This work isn’t about assuming everything in your present is caused by childhood or endlessly searching for another old memory.
It’s about recognising that emotional experiences happen throughout life and developing the ability to process them when they arise.
We usually associate emotional processing with difficult experiences.
Anger. Grief. Fear. Shame. Hurt. Disappointment.
But the Release Process® can also be used with positive experiences.
This matters because emotional capacity isn’t only about how much difficulty you can tolerate.
Some people are incredibly capable when life is hard but become uncomfortable when things are going well. Receiving love, money, attention, praise, opportunity or success can bring its own emotional responses.
You may say you want more while another part of you finds having more deeply uncomfortable.
This is one of the reasons emotional processing eventually becomes much bigger than “healing”.
It can reveal your capacity to receive the very things you say you desire.
Emotions are not purely cognitive experiences. They involve physiological responses as well, and emotional suppression and processing have been studied in relation to both psychological and physical experiences.
There is also research examining emotional processing in people experiencing physical symptoms. For example, one preliminary study of Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy for somatic symptom disorder found that improvements in aspects of emotional processing were associated with reductions in somatic symptoms. The researchers were careful to note that further controlled research was needed to establish causation.
My own perspective, developed through years of working clinically with the body and then through emotional processing work, goes further than the evidence currently establishes.
I place enormous importance on exploring the emotional component of physical symptoms and health challenges.
That subject deserves much more nuance than a few paragraphs here, so I’ve explored it separately in Physical Symptoms and Emotions.
The goal isn’t simply to make an emotion disappear.
And I don’t believe you need to spend hours forcing yourself to feel something or endlessly reliving difficult experiences.
You need a way to actually process what is there.
My methodology for doing this is the Release Process®, a simple four part verbal process designed to move beyond identifying and understanding emotion into experiencing and processing it.
The process provides specific prompts so there is a structure to follow. This matters because humans are incredibly good at bypassing the parts that feel uncomfortable without realising we’re doing it.
Sometimes you can process an experience yourself.
At other times, having someone facilitate you changes everything because they can see the place you’re avoiding that you can’t yet see.
I don’t teach the complete Release Process® here because reading about a process and experiencing it are very different things.
Beautiful.
Let’s go and find out what’s actually there.
You may have been to therapy, journalled, meditated, cried, forgiven, understood your childhood and become incredibly self aware.
All of that can be valuable.
But I wouldn’t assume that you’ve processed everything simply because you’ve spent years working on yourself. I also wouldn’t assume that you haven’t.
I’d rather find out.
The question isn’t whether you’ve done enough personal development.
It’s whether there is anything in the experience that still needs to be processed, and whether the process reveals something you haven’t previously seen.
For me, one of the most useful measures is the message.
Have your past approaches allowed you to reach a clear insight that changes how you move forward?
Because processing isn’t about becoming an expert in your past.
It’s about changing what you do in the present.
If you’re reading this wondering whether there are emotions or experiences you haven’t processed, you don’t need to start digging through your entire life.
Start by understanding the distinction between identifying an emotion, understanding an emotion and actually processing an emotional experience.
That’s exactly what I teach inside The Missing Link Masterclass.
It’s a free evergreen introduction to my work and the place I’d recommend beginning if this way of looking at emotions is new to you.
Learn why understanding your emotions may only be the beginning, what it means to actually process an emotional experience and why the message that emerges can change what happens next.