Why Women and Mothers Need Emotional Processing or Clearing
There are moments in life that fracture us and leave us reeling:
A pregnancy ends.
A diagnosis arrives that no parent should ever hear.
A loved one dies and the world keeps spinning anyway.
A future you imagined disappears overnight.
Even in the day to day of being a woman and mother, we hold so much for our families:
Absorbing the tension of two siblings screaming at each other.
Feeling embarrassment and frustration when a toddler melts down in public.
The invisible burden of maintaining the household.
In moments like these, many women do what they’ve been taught to do since childhood: Be strong. Keep going. Hold it together for everyone around you. Think positively. Be a nice, good girl.
And while the mind might be able to rationalize what happened, the body does not speak in logic.
The body speaks in sensation:
A tight chest and shallow breath.
A nauseous stomach and aching hips.
Exhaustion that sleep doesn’t touch.
Anxiety, numbness, irritability, or despair that seems to come out of nowhere.
Emotions Are Physiological
Every emotion you experience is first a bodily event. There is research showing that the neurochemical surge of an emotion lasts about 60–90 seconds when it is allowed to move through the body without interference. This idea is most commonly attributed to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, who observed that once an emotional response is triggered, the chemicals released into the bloodstream are metabolized in roughly 90 seconds.
However, most emotions don’t end in 90 seconds because we don’t actually let them complete.
The initial physiological wave of an emotion includes stress and arousal chemicals such as adrenaline, cortisol, or norepinephrine. If a woman feels the sensation fully, stays present in the body, doesn’t suppress, analyze, judge, or story-make, and doesn’t spiral into meaning or memory, the body can process that wave in about a minute to a minute and a half.
The body knows how to complete the cycle. However, emotions often aren’t experienced this way. They extend beyond 90 seconds when the mind re-triggers the body with thoughts, old memories are layered on top of the current experience, the nervous system doesn’t feel safe enough to discharge, or the emotion is tied to unresolved trauma or attachment wounds.
In other words: The physiological experience of the emotion ends, but the loop continues.
Grief, fear, rage, and despair are not one single emotion. They are often many waves of emotions arriving back-to-back.
Especially with profound loss (miscarriage, the illness of a loved one, death or loss), the body may need to process many 90-second cycles over days, months, or years, each one releasing a layer, not the whole thing
This is why “Feel It and It Will Pass” can feel invalidating. Telling someone in deep grief that emotions “only last 90 seconds” can feel dismissive, because the experience is cumulative.
A more accurate truth is: Each wave is brief. The ocean takes time. (Especially when we’ve been shoving those waves down for years.)
What Happens When You Don’t Move Emotions Through The Body
When emotions don’t get to move through the body, they don’t disappear. They lodge themselves into your tissues, nervous system, organs, and breathing patterns.
Women’s bodies are especially sensitive, intuitive, cyclical, and relational. We are designed to feel deeply and to metabolize those feelings through sensation, sound, tears, shaking, warmth, rest, and connection.
When we bypass the body, we bypass healing. Grief, sadness, and anger that isn’t felt becomes something else:
Chronic anxiety.
Projections onto our children who feel and express whatever we cannot.
Depression that feels “chemical” but is deeply somatic.
Autoimmune symptoms, digestive issues, hormonal disruption.
Emotional reactivity with our partners and children.
Disconnection from pleasure, intimacy, intuition, and joy.
Grief, loss, and trauma are not meant to be “worked through” only by talking about them. Words matter, but they are not enough. In the communication between body and mind, only 20% of the puzzle is mind to body. 80% is body to mind - so dealing somatically with the body is much more powerful and crucial.
The body needs space to complete what was interrupted.
Avoiding Our Feelings
Many women fear that if they slow down and feel, they will drown. I felt this fear for many years which is what led me to alcoholism, overworking, and filling my mind and calendar with non-stop “doing.” However, emotions don’t overwhelm us because they’re too big. They overwhelm us when we try to hold them alone, silently, and indefinitely.
When emotions are felt with support, safety, and in small, titrated ways, the nervous system actually relaxes and allows the emotion to move through us.
With consistent practice, the body learns:
“I can feel this and survive.”
“I don’t have to brace forever.”
“I’m allowed to soften.”
This is how resilience is rebuilt: moving from pushing through and ignoring our feelings, to letting the body express and move through what it’s been holding.
Your Body Has Its Own Intelligence
Your body knows the way back to wholeness. Think about a child: they let their emotions move through their bodies and they express what they are feeling naturally. Over time, they learn to suppress what they are feeling because it isn’t deemed socially appropriate. Living in our current society, this is a necessary progression (Is it healthy? The jury’s out on that one, but for now, it is what it is). Given we’ve all learned how to suppress, repress, and avoid our feelings, it takes time to allow the body to remember its innate wisdom.
We can do that through somatic and emotional clearing practices that help the nervous system feel safe enough to allow one emotional wave at a time, complete the body’s stress response, and return to regulation more easily.
Over time, the body learns that it is safe to feel without being overwhelmed and to stop bracing and soften. This is how we feel to heal.
And when women heal, they don’t just feel better, they become more present mothers, partners, leaders, and humans. They turn into a peaceful and loving space in which others feel safe to feel and heal. They model healthy emotional intelligence so their children can learn through mirror neurons what it looks like to let their bodies process their emotional experience.
An Invitation
If you are carrying something heavy, whether it is recent or long past, you do not have to carry it alone.
There is a way to let the body participate in your healing, to move grief without rushing it, and to honor loss without being defined by it.
This is the heart of my emotional clearing work: creating a safe, grounded space where the body can do what it already knows how to do: release, regulate, and restore.
If this speaks to you, check out my Emotional Clearing Sessions. Your first session is $99 with code MOTHER.
