What's wrong with 'Emotion Release'?

To heal from trauma, pent-up emotional energy needs to be felt, not just released.

If you have an interest in somatics, body-based therapy or trauma healing then you’ve probably heard the term ‘emotion release’.

Emotion release as a healing practice is based on the idea that trauma gets stored in the body. When we undergo traumatic experiences, and are unable to react to those experiences with an appropriate emotional response, e.g. extreme fear, shaking, trembling, hitting back, running away etc, then those emotions get trapped in our nervous system.

This trapped emotional energy can cause problems for the body - perhaps making us ill, or depressed, or anxious - if we are unable to release it in a healthy way. And so emotion-release techniques often involve shaking and hitting and hyperventilating and shouting to complete the stress cycle and let the stored energy out safely.

This is a logical approach and roughly accords with my thinking on the subject, which is largely informed by the work of Wilhelm Reich and the bioenergetics movement.

But I do think there are several drawbacks to making emotion release a focus of healing or self-development work, mostly to do with how emotion release is percieved and practised rather than the theory itself.

The first is that emotion release gives the impression that emotion needs to be released from the body.

There’s a confusion here between energy and structure.

At the time of a traumatic episode (or perhaps a chain of traumatic episodes which all share the same basic blueprint), a huge amount of emotional energy is generated (e.g. as fear) which needs to be suppressed to keep the person safe.

But this energy is suppressed structurally, through a pattern of muscular tension (think about clenching your jaw to avoid crying). It is this structural response of the muscles and fascia that remains in the body, not the energy itself.

This pattern of tension persists even after the threat has subsided. It is now a conditioned response to similar-seeming events which happen in the future. In other words, the body has armoured itself against certain feelings to avoid letting the expression of those feelings expose us to more danger.

I would argue that it is the inhibiting tension that needs to be released from the body to restore healthy emotional responses, not the emotional energy itself.

This leads me to my second issue with emotion release - the idea that emotional energy can have an inherently negative and destructive impact on the body.

When we speak of ‘releasing trauma’ or ‘releasing stress’ it invokes an idea that there is something bad in us that we need to get out.

But neither the energy that fuels our traumas nor the patterns of tension that keeps energy trapped in specific parts of the body, have any inherent ‘badness’. The events that led to the trauma may have been awful, but the trauma itself is a natural response. It may not serve us in our pursuit of happiness right now but somewhere along the line it was an attempt to keep us safe.

The emotional energy that underlies extreme anger, and fear, may be difficult for us to bear, but somewhere along the line it was an adaptive response to the pressures we faced from our environment and the people around us.

Similarly, the patterns of tension in the muscles and fascia that keep this emotional energy pent up were a response to further environmental pressures that kept us from expressing emotions in a way that seemed dangerous at the time.

They were attempts by the bodymind to preserve our life, our social status (which can amount to the same thing in a social species) or our psychic equilibrium (ditto).

Rather than disowning and discarding them, these strivings of the bodymind in the direction of life should be honoured and cherished. To do that, we need to approach them with curiosity and be prepared to investigate them through feeling. Merely releasing them doesn’t allow for this.

My third issue with the idea of emotion release is the notion that releasing emotions is sufficient to heal the trauma that they’re bound up with. To me, it seems that the trauma, if it can be described as existing ‘in the body’, takes the form of patterns of tension in the muscles and fascia that inhibit the free expression of emotional energy.

We can think of this tension as being like a dam. The water behind the dam is the emotion that the tension inhibits.

Often in emotion-release exercises or workshops what happens is that we charge up the emotional energy even further, through breathwork or through emotive movements, which is a bit like topping up the water behind the dam - opening the floodgates of the river say - so that the pressure builds up to such a degree that the dam must burst and the energy flows out.

This can be great for relieving pressure that was building up and for experiencing a feeling of release. There is also usually a feeling of lightness in the aftermath. But the river keeps flowing. Emotional energy keeps getting produced as we move through life. And just like a burst dam might be rebuilt with reinforcements, the muscular tensions that were created to prevent such emotional outpourings may well kick back in with added vigour after a release that didn’t feel entirely safe.

Many people, myself included, have experienced a backlash effect after going too far, too fast with emotion release.

Rather than forcing the dam to burst by raising the level of the water behind it, might it not be better to open the sluices and let a steady stream of water flow out?

Might it not be better to gradually loosen the muscular and fascial tensions that inhibit the expression of seemingly dangerous emotions, so that they don’t get overwhelmed and redouble their efforts to lock things down?

Might it not be better to take as our starting point for therapy these patterns of tension - which are the actual imprints of trauma that remain in the living tissues - and not the emotions which they suppress?

This is the approach we take in transformative bodywork.

Here we aim to identify and resolve unhelpful patterns of tension that persist in the body. We allow the body to open up to free expression of emotion on its own terms rather than forcing it with huge influxes of emotional energy.

We focus on the present, and how energy moves around the body in the here and now, rather than on the content of emotional energies and the traumatic events that led to their being bound up.

We use touch, breath, voice and movement to prepare the body for freedom and enjoyment in all aspects of daily life, not just in short, controlled bursts.

And we foster a greater depth of feeling and sensitivity to our own internal states rather than a greater amplitude of emotional expression.

If you think you’d like to work with me over six weekly sessions to positively transform your relationship to your emotions, take a look at my website for more info.