Emotions are not problems to fix. They are the bridge to truth, carrying the intelligence that guides us back to ourselves. As the Emotion Psychologist, I help people reconnect with their emotions to find clarity, balance, and authentic direction. I see emotions not as symptoms to manage, but as messengers of energy in motion, guiding us back to ourselves.
Every feeling, from rage to joy, carries energy, information, and guidance. Emotions reveal what we need, what we believe, and how aligned we are with who we truly are. When we stop suppressing and start listening, they become our most reliable compass for healing, growth, and creation.
Through The Emotion Method™, I help people turn emotional energy into insight, presence, and life-force, reconnecting with their authentic self and reclaiming the power of feeling.
The Cost of Labeling
From childhood, my life was documented in medical files, a thick dossier filled with codes, symptoms, and survival stories. It was thicker than most children’s books, packed with hospital visits, tests, and procedures. Born prematurely and later in a coma from meningitis, I literally fought for my life before I had words to describe what I felt. My body became a case study long before I had language for my experience.
In my first years, I was almost deaf and started speaking very late, so my connection to the world was primarily through feeling. I experienced everything intensely, but had no words to express it. For many years, before I learned the language of emotions, I actually suppressed my emotions, overwhelmed by their intensity. Later in life, I gradually learned to understand and honor my inner world.
Throughout my life, I moved through countless intakes, always telling the same story to a new face. Each diagnosis brought both relief and distance. It explained something, but it also confined me. Some were assigned for practical reasons, to access insurance-covered therapy or extra time during exams. Others were given because my experience matched the criteria perfectly.
Who’s really benefitting?
Alongside these labels came medication: antidepressants, anxiolytics, sleeping pills, even antipsychotics. For years, I tried to fix myself chemically, hoping to feel normal. Instead, I felt numb, disconnected, and heavier in body and spirit. Over time, I began to question: Was I healing, or just being managed?
Labeling can be helpful, offering structure, validation, and access to care. But it also serves systems beyond the individual. The diagnostic framework is intertwined with insurance, pharmaceutical, and institutional interests. While this isn’t always malicious, it is systemic. Labels sustain industries as much as they serve healing.
Perhaps that is why so many of us stay stuck in the system: medicated, categorized, but not truly met. True healing asks for presence, not protocol. It asks for feeling, not fixing.
From Diagnosis to Discovery
During my clinical psychology master, I was fascinated by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). At the same time, during my student time, I also received several diagnoses. I became both a learner and a patient, navigating the very system I was studying. I recognized myself in so many criteria, and realized I wasn’t alone. Many of us saw ourselves reflected in multiple diagnoses. We weren’t just studying the psyche; we were trying to understand our own.
At first, I was intrigued by the DSM, its precision, language, and promise of understanding the human mind. But over time, I began to see the other side: how easily living, feeling human beings could be reduced to codes and labels. Slowly, I began to identify with them, and the labels made me feel more broken.
Feeling instead of fixing, leads to emotional healing
What I later realized was that these so-called disorders were reflections of suppressed emotions, unmet needs, and deep patterns of hiding my feelings to be accepted, loved, or safe. I wasn’t broken. The system was. What was missing wasn’t more diagnosis, but emotional care, presence, and guidance.
When we live out of alignment with our truth, our bodies and emotions signal us. First softly, then loudly, through exhaustion, tension, or overwhelm. Aversion whispers, “this is not for you.” Ignore it, and anger steps in. Not to destroy, but to protect, reclaim boundaries, and remind us of power.
I once feared anger. I thought it made me unkind, unsafe, or wrong. So I tried to stay calm, quiet, and compliant, until I lost my strength. Anxiety, fatigue, and depression followed: emotional energy turned inward. Only when I began feeling instead of fixing did everything start to shift.
Facing the Crazy Woman
For many years, I feared being seen as the crazy woman. Too intense, too different, too much. I feared being labeled insane, and I feared my own power. I was trapped in the good girl syndrome, suppressing all my strength, holding back impulses, and silencing my authentic expression. The result was anxiety and depression: a suppression of both emotion and personal power.
Many women, including me, were socialized to hide and control emotions to fit societal norms. Anger, desire, grief, and authentic voices were restrained. DSM diagnostic labels often reinforced this: being told one is “disordered” or “dysregulated” frequently reflects learned emotional suppression rather than inherent pathology.
The crazy woman archetype lived in my shadow: the one who feels everything, who won’t fit in, who dares to speak what others silence. She was never crazy. She was alive. Reclaiming her meant reclaiming feeling, intuition, truth, and the life-force locked inside.
We learned early how to suppress what was too much for others to handle. But what if healing isn’t about becoming someone new? What if it’s about remembering who you were before you learned to hide?
To face her is to free her.
To free her is to reclaim your power.
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The Hysteria History and Emotional Suppression
Historically, women’s strong emotions were pathologized as hysteria. The word hysteria comes from the Greek hystera – womb – implying that emotion itself was once considered a flaw tied to femininity. Women were sedated, institutionalized, or silenced; anger was punished, and autonomy curtailed. Feminist theory documents this as the “anger gap”: a systematic suppression of female power and expression.
But what if emotion was never the problem? What if suppression was?
When emotions are repressed, they don’t disappear, they turn inward. What society calls “disorder” is often a disconnection between what we feel and what we were taught to express.
🜂 Reclaim the anger that protects your truth
Anger, when consciously acknowledged, becomes transformative. It is fire converting fear into power, a tool to reclaim autonomy and energy lost to suppression. Fully feeling and allowing fear, shame, and anger is a radical reclaiming of personal power. Emotions should be felt fully, yet you are not your emotions. They need not be projected onto others. Integration without harm is essential.
Men and Emotional Suppression
Emotional suppression knows no gender. Men, for example, have been taught that vulnerability equals weakness, that tears mean failure, and that tenderness is a threat. Many grow up believing that showing emotion is dangerous, that power lies in control, not in feeling.
But research shows that avoidance of emotion often leads to depression, anxiety, and disconnection. To feel consciously is not weakness, it is mastery. Feeling anger, for example, is not the same as acting it out. When projected outward, it becomes aggression. When suppressed inward, it becomes illness. But when channeled with awareness, it becomes a force for us, not against others.
To feel is to reclaim choice. To witness emotion is to reclaim freedom. Only when I began feeling instead of fixing did everything start to shift. I learned to listen to the messages emotions carry, realizing they are not obstacles, they are guidance, energy in motion.
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Turning Pain into Passion
As the Emotion Psychologist, I now see every emotion as intelligent: a messenger guiding us back to what truly matters. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with you?”, I ask, “What wants to be felt?” When we allow an emotion to complete its natural movement – its e-motion – something shifts. The body exhales, the mind clears, and the self remembers its wholeness.
This insight inspired me to develop The Emotion Method™, an integrative approach combining science and soul, in which emotions serve as the bridge between mind and being. It draws on ACT, CBT, RET, Emotion-Focused and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, mindfulness, somatic practices, the Sedona Method™, Jungian insights, and Vera Helleman’s emotion expertise – combined with principles of conscious creation.
At the heart of my work are two guiding principles:
🜂 Feel it to Heal it — fully experiencing and releasing emotions through the body, restoring balance, flow, and clarity.
🜂 Feel it to Create it — consciously embodying desired emotional states and creating life from within.
This approach helps people move from emotional chaos to inner calm, from self-doubt to authentic direction. They learn not to believe everything they think, but to feel everything they feel, discovering that emotions, when met with presence, offer a pathway for healing and meaningful creation.
Clients often tell me that in just one session, they feel more seen and connected than after months of traditional therapy. Not because I do something magical, but because emotions, when met with safety and presence, know what to do.
Beyond Labels: Emotions, Unmet Needs & Trauma
Every emotion carries a message. As described in Vera Helleman’s Encyclopedia of Emotions, emotions hold movement, meaning, and direction. They are natural forces guiding us back to balance, presence, and truth.
🜂 Reclaim emotions as guidance
More than 400 emotions can move through humans, yet they all flow through just eight core emotional groups, each with its own Motion of the Emotion. Emotions are living signals, often belonging to more than one group, carrying a layered and beautiful message:
» Love opens the heart
» Joy expresses essence
» Surprise expands perspective
» Fear calls us to lead
» Sadness releases what no longer serves
» Anger recenters power
» Aversion protects boundaries
» Guilt & Shame ask for acceptance
Emotions are meant to move, that’s why it’s called e-motion: energy in motion. When we allow these natural movements, emotion flows and restores harmony. When we resist them, energy stagnates. Each emotion is an invitation to listen: to what needs are unmet, what boundaries were crossed, what truth wants to be expressed. When we meet emotions with presence, they reveal their guidance and lead us home, to authenticity, wholeness, and inner freedom.
(See also the Emotion Compass below: a visual guide showing the eight core emotion groups and their natural movements.)
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Beyond Strong Emotion(s) is an Unmet Need
The stronger the emotion, the stronger an unmet need. The Sedona Method teaches that beneath each feeling lies a longing for one or more of five universal human needs: safety, approval, control, connection, and autonomy.
When these needs go unmet, emotions arise as signals of imbalance. Anger may point to a need for autonomy or respect. Sadness may reveal a need for connection or release. Anxiety often hides a longing for safety or control. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the unmet need beneath it.
When we meet these emotions with presence and compassion, they soften. What once felt unbearable becomes understandable. Transformation happens not by fighting emotion, but by feeling it fully and listening to its wisdom.
Beyond every label is a person longing for safety, approval, control, connection, and autonomy – universal needs that, when met with care, allow real transformation.
Beyond Unmet Needs is Trauma
Trauma accumulates not only through extreme events but also through repeated moments of feeling unseen, unheard, or unsafe. These experiences lodge in the body as tension, numbness, or restlessness. Trauma can emerge from unmet needs, unprocessed pain, and suppressed emotion, not only from outward events, but from inward neglect.
As Bessel van der Kolk reminds us in “The body keeps the score”, trauma is not just in the past, it lives in the nervous system, silently shaping how we feel, think, and act. Suppressed emotion is stored as tension, numbness, or disconnection.
🜂 Reclaim the body that remembers safety
Emotional healing begins when we reclaim the body as a vessel of safety and wisdom. To feel again is to come home. To reclaim emotion is to reclaim the body. And to reclaim the body is to reclaim power.
When we reconnect with the body and allow emotions to flow, we restore balance, release pain, reclaim the parts of ourselves we once rejected or suppressed, and revitalize presence. Letting go of identification with trauma and diagnostic labels allows us to take full ownership of our inner experience and return to the wholeness of our authentic self.
Feeling as Liberation
Feeling is life. Every emotion flows through the body, connecting us to ourselves, to others, to the present moment and to the world. Fully allowing our pain expands our capacity for joy, love, and vitality.
True liberation doesn’t come from avoiding emotions, but from embracing them all, the light and the dark, the highs and the lows. When we open to the full spectrum of feeling, we discover that the same depth that allows pain to move through us also allows ecstasy, gratitude, and love to flow freely.
To feel deeply is to live deeply.
To feel fully is to be free.
When we meet our emotions with presence instead of resistance, we unlock a natural harmony within. Feeling becomes the bridge between life as it is and life as it could be, between contraction and expansion, survival and creation, separation and wholeness.
Through feeling, we return to creation itself. What once felt heavy transforms into movement, light, and clarity, the energy of life flowing freely again.
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Feel, Heal & Create
Feel it to heal it means allowing the emotion to flow fully through your body. Truly feeling it, without judgment, without labeling it good or bad. It is about emptying accumulated tension, releasing what no longer serves, and returning to emotional neutrality and inner peace. The key is to really feel it, not just think about it, not just acknowledge it. Only when the emotion is fully processed can clarity and inner freedom emerge.
Feel it to create it comes next. Now that the body and mind are free from unresolved charge, you can consciously choose which emotions you want to inhabit: gratitude, joy, love, curiosity. This is not about denying pain, but about expanding beyond it, filling yourself with the energy that aligns with your inner truth.
Creation does not begin in the mind. It begins in the subtle vibration of truly felt emotion. The more you inhabit the full spectrum of your feelings, the more your inner world reorganizes itself, and your outer world begins to mirror that alignment.
When emotion is fully felt, it transforms. Energy once trapped becomes fuel for conscious creation. The more we allow this flow, the more our choices, actions, and experiences reflect the life we are truly meant to live.
Feeling is not the end of healing — it’s the beginning of creation.
Guided Reflection
🜂 Notice the emotion present in you right now. Truly feel it.
🜂 Ask what unmet need – safety, approval, control, connection, or autonomy – or belief it might reveal. Truly feel it.
🜂 Once processed, choose the emotional state you want to embody today, and let it guide your actions. Truly feel it.
Beyond Labels
I have transformed my own pain with labels – the feeling of being broken – into my life’s work. My passion is looking beyond labels, beyond the judgments, diagnoses, and expectations that once defined me. Maybe from crazy woman to “genius,” haha — who knows? The courage doesn’t lie in fixing what feels broken, but in facing the “crazy woman” or “broken person” within, feeling every emotion, following its motion, and letting it guide you home.
Beyond labels, we remember that healing isn’t about becoming someone new, it’s about remembering who we truly are.
“Healing is the return of the memory of wholeness.” — Deepak Chopra
Presence over Protocol. When we feel fully, we free ourselves from stories, diagnoses, and expectations. Presence becomes the foundation. Emotion becomes the motion. Authenticity becomes the destination.
My journey — from patient to psychologist, from diagnosis to discovery, from medication to meditation, from suppression to sensation — taught me that the true work begins when we stop trying to fix what isn’t broken and start listening to what has always been wise.
This was my “heroine’s journey”: a return to feeling, truth, authenticity, and life. It is about facing the inner “crazy woman” or the parts of ourselves deemed broken, embracing all emotions, and allowing them to guide us toward our most authentic self.
And so, we return to ourselves:
🜂 Unlabel. Unidentify. Unshame. This is how we reclaim our wholeness.
References
🜂 Ahmed, S. (2011). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge.
🜂 Ahmed, S. (2012, 2018). The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd ed.). Routledge.
🜂 Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
🜂 Damasio, A. (2021). Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon.
🜂 Hellemans, V. Encyclopedia of Emotions.
🜂 Hicks, E. (2004). The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham. Hay House.
🜂 Horton, E. K. J. (2026). The Impact of Toxic Masculinity on Restrictive Emotionality.
🜂 Levine, P. (2015). Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past. North Atlantic Books.
🜂 Logoz, S., et al. (2023). Men’s Emotional Suppression and Mental Health: Cultural Patterns of Expression. Journal of Men’s Health.
🜂 Mandler, G. (1975, 1984). Mind and Emotion; Mind and Body: Psychology of Emotion and Stress.
🜂 Newport Institute. (2021). The Importance of Emotional Awareness for Men.
🜂 Oliffe, J. L., et al. (2023). Traditional Masculinity and Depression. American Journal of Men’s Health.
🜂 Perry, B. D., & Winfrey, O. (2024). What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. Flatiron Books.
🜂 Schwartz, A. (2024). Complex PTSD: Understanding PTSD’s Effects on Body, Brain, and Emotions.
🜂 Sedona Training Associates. (2003). The Sedona Method.
🜂 Srivastava, S., et al. (2009). The Social Costs of Emotional Suppression. Psychological Science, 20(10), 1256–1264.
🜂 Tyra, A. T., et al. (2024). Emotion Suppression and Acute Physiological Responses to Stress.
🜂 van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
🜂 Walker, P. (2024). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Press.
🜂 Heins, W. (n.d.). The Emotion Method™. Retrieved from www.emotionpsychologist.com; Instagram: @the.emotion.psychologist.
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