By the next day, her opinion of herself had taken a 180-degree turn. She realized she was a person who needed to constantly prove herself to be strong and capable, and saw that this was partly the result of an image instilled and accept that she was a proficient person and ease off the internal pressure. This realization, was life-changing.
Not every spontaneous emotional event is quite so clear-cut, however. Difficult and stressful breakthroughs occur most often when the release involves long-help feelings of sadness, grief, confusion, or another strong emotion that a person has carried unconsciously throughout his or her life.
Whenever something happens to us as a kid, our body is involved. This is particularly true of trauma. The body comes to the defense of the whole being. In defending it, the body does thins to stop the pain from being fully experienced.
Emotional pain is overwhelming for small children, because they don’t have the resources to deal with it. So the body shuts it off; if it didn’t, the body would die from emotional pain. But then the body keeps doing the physical protection even long after the situation has ended.
Painful experiences can range from small acute ones to increase, chronic problems. Still, the mechanism at play is unclear: we really don’t understand the body-memory thing.
ref: yogajournal
