4 signs your pain has emotional roots, and 3 ways to solve it.
“The body never lies.” — Martha Graham
She was visiting her father at his home in California.
Due to some health issues, he asked her to help him dispose of some clutter he didn’t have the strength to get rid of himself.
They had only recently reconnected after having been estranged for decades.
Why they had been estranged hit at the heart of her pain: abandonment, betrayal, and some hurtful choices that impacted her life as a child and young adult.
She hoped things might be different now, and they were. He was loving, attentive, and regretful of the choices he made and of the impact they had.
But as she helped him dispose of the junk he’d been storing for years, something hit her.
Not a realization, but a sharp pain between her shoulder blade and her spine.
The pain was directly behind her heart.
Normally, she would take an anti-inflammatory or perform a few yoga poses to try to relieve it.
This time was different.
She and I had spoken on many occasions of the link between emotions and physical pain, so she knew her body wasn’t broken, flawed, or damaged.
Her body was speaking to her.
It was merely bringing to the surface the anger and hurt she’d been holding onto for decades – the “junk” in her closet.
The message? It was time to let it go. It was time to heal.
Gap Insight: The next time you’re sick or in pain, instead of asking what’s wrong with your body, ask what your body is trying to tell you. What’s it asking you to heal?
A Centuries-Long Debate
For centuries, the mind and the body were treated as inseparable cohorts. When one was out of balance, the other followed.
It’s a fascinating history, but for the sake of brevity, suffice to say that the day the microscope was invented, and germs were discovered, everything changed.
From that day forward, physical and emotional pain and illness were treated as two separate entities to be managed by two separate practitioners.
Visit a medical doctor for one and see a psychologist for the other.
Western medicine has been organized around this concept for over a century now.
Yet, the same science that split the two disciplines in half has now definitively reunited them.
Numerous studies have shown what we already know intuitively – that the mind and body are not two systems, but one, continuous, bidirectional conversation.
What happens in the mind happens in the body. What the body experiences influences the mind.
There is no clear separation between the two, and there never was – only the illusion they were separate entities battling for supremacy.
They are one. They are you. And they have a message for you.
Gap Insight: 55 million people suffer from chronic pain every year despite medical intervention. What if the answer wasn’t another medication or surgery, but instead, a deep dive into the emotional “pain” inside?
4 Signs Your Pain and Emotions are Connected
How do you know your pain is linked to your emotional state or to unhealed emotional energy?
These four signs developed from over 25 years of working with people in pain can help you decide.
1. You Feel Significantly Better When on Vacation
If your chronic back pain eases on the second day of a beach vacation, if your migraines disappear on the first morning of a holiday, if the tension in your neck and shoulders melts away when you’re anywhere but home or at work, there’s an emotional link.
After all, the physical structure of your hip or spine didn’t change when you boarded the plane or left work, and you didn’t get any younger.
What changed was your nervous system, your stress, and your state of mind.
When pain significantly improves with a change in environment and returns when you go back to your regular life, your body is giving you extremely clear feedback about the connection between your emotional experience and your physical symptoms.
Ask yourself:
What emotional weight, tension, or stress is temporarily removed when I go on vacation? How can I reproduce that at home?
2. The Pain Increases When You’re Stressed
This seems obvious, and yet most people treat their stress and their pain as separate problems.
Emotional stress isn’t just a psychological experience, it’s a full-body event.
It’s elevated cortisol and adrenaline, increased muscle tension, reduced blood flow to peripheral tissues, and heightened pain sensitivity.
I’ve seen hundreds of cases of stress-induced physical pain over the last few decades, so consider this:
If your back goes out during high-pressure weeks, your headaches cluster around certain people, conflict, or deadlines, or your symptoms flare when life feels out of control, there’s a distinct pattern.
Your body is not randomly generating pain, it’s responding to your emotional environment.
3. The Pain Comes and Goes
My pain clients (different than my coaching clients) always wonder why the pain comes and goes despite the presence of a herniated disc, patellar tendonitis, sciatic nerve impingement, and many other common conditions.
The answer is often the same: It often depends on the presence of emotional distress.
Emotionally connected pain often comes and goes in ways that don’t align neatly with physical activity or with the presence of a diagnosed condition.
It can be severe one day and absent the next. It can shift location. It can disappear entirely for weeks and return suddenly during a period of emotional difficulty.
The body expresses what the mind hasn’t processed, but it often does so inconsistently because the emotional trigger isn’t constant.
Ask yourself:
When pain comes, what else is happening at work, home, or in my life right now? When it goes, what changed?
4. You Can Identify an Emotional Event When the Pain Began
My friend’s pain showed up while organizing her father’s closet. That closet, and the junk inside, represented years of accumulated hurt and emotional pain.
Think back to when your pain or condition first appeared or significantly worsened.
- What was happening in your life? Were you in the middle of a life change or big decision?
- Were you in the middle of a job change, a move, a relationship ending or beginning?
- Were you dealing with a loss, a conflict, a difficult decision you couldn’t see your way through?
- Were you under sustained pressure financially, professionally, or relationally?
If you can draw a line between when the pain arrived and what was happening emotionally at the time, focus on healing the emotion or on rectifying the situation, not just the symptom.
Gap Insight: Your body can respond to change positively or negatively. Which one depends on how you FEEL about the change you’re making.
3 Ways to Solve Mind/Body Pain
Understanding that your pain may have an emotional component is the beginning. What you do with that understanding is where the real work, and the real healing, happens.
1. Speak to Your Body
Since your body is talking to you, talk back.
Find a quiet moment. Close your eyes. Place your attention on the area of pain or discomfort.
Ask it genuinely, with curiosity rather than frustration, what it’s trying to tell you.
What’s the message? What does it need you to know? What has it been trying to communicate?
Then listen. Don’t analyze. Don’t dismiss what arises.
The body communicates in images, feelings, memories, and sensations, not always in clear declarative sentences.
Let whatever comes up be present without judgment.
This practice works because the body carries information that the conscious analytical mind hasn’t processed. Asking the body directly creates an opening for that information to surface.
Many people find that the first honest answer they receive in this practice is something they already knew but had been avoiding.
2. Take ten Deep Breaths
The breath is the most direct and accessible tool available for shifting the nervous system from sympathetic stress activation — the state in which pain signals are amplified and emotional tension is stored — to parasympathetic calm.
Taking ten slow deep breaths by inhaling for four counts, holding briefly, exhaling for six to eight counts, measurably activates the vagus nerve, reduces cortisol, lowers heart rate, and shifts the body’s physiological state toward relaxation and recovery.
Do it during a pain flare-up. Do it when you notice stress accumulating. Do it as a daily practice before the pain arrives.
3. Feel the Emotion
Set a timer for three minutes. Close your eyes. Bring your attention to whatever is present emotionally — whatever is there beneath the surface of the day.
You don’t need to identify it, name it, or understand it. You don’t need to know whether it’s grief or fear or anger or sadness or a mix of emotions.
Simply feel the energy of it. Breathe into it. Let it be present without trying to fix it, explain it, or make it go away.
Stay with it until it begins to fade, even if it’s uncomfortable or intensifies briefly.
It will shift.
Emotions felt fully and without resistance move through the body. Emotions resisted and suppressed stay and accumulate, and eventually express themselves as physical symptoms.
Three minutes of genuine emotional presence can release what years of physical treatment couldn’t reach because it addresses the actual source.
Gap Insight: Your body can respond to change positively or negatively. Which one depends on how you FEEL about the change you’re making.
Final Thoughts
What pain in your body are you trying to shake?
What hasn’t healed physically or emotionally that should have long ago?
Hours after her shoulder pain surfaced, my client sat on the floor of her shower and cried. Through her tears, she released decades of accumulated hurt and sadness, and her shoulder pain disappeared.
Not because the pain wasn’t real, but because the source wasn’t structural, it was emotional, and her body no longer needed to speak through pain.
Your body is always speaking.
The symptoms, the chronic conditions, and the pain that comes and goes without clear explanation is a conversation your body is trying to have with you.
The healing begins the moment you stop trying to silence the messenger and start listening to the message.
Let it in.
And close the gap — one honest conversation with your body at a time.
Yours in health in body, mind, and heart, David
