7 Pitfalls of Dealing with Emotional Detox Reactions

Resolving emotional trauma can be the key step to experiencing limitless energy.

However lower emotions such as resentment, grief, sadness, and anger will surface to be released during the cleansing process. 

In the West many people expect “instant healing” and believe that for something to be working there should be the immediate absence of all physical and emotional discomfort.

More often than not, this is not how real emotional or physical healing occurs.

Most of the time when we emotionally cleanse, the body goes through a type of “healing crisis” where the emotion we are hoping to clear (e.g. anxiety) will first appear to intensify and get worse rather than better. 

This is very important to understand because these lower emotions will need to be felt and accepted in order to be cleansed and released.

It’s important to understand how emotional healing occurs so you can stay on the journey and heal, rather than assuming it’s not working, and giving up. 

If you are in a process of deep emotional healing and the pain is intensifying, be sure you have a solid support system around you and work with a professional who can guide you through the process.

It is important during times of releasing negative emotions not to suppress or reject them, nor panic, or try to over-analyze them. 

Know instead that like everything; “this too shall pass.”

7 Common Pitfalls of Emotional Detoxing

1/ Emotional and energetic cleansing can be disorientating

Clearing emotions can feel strange and disorientating. Suddenly one day for no apparent reason, you just feel like crying all the time, or feel very angry or sad

Understand that once you start cleansing lower vibrating emotional energy, it will need to release through your body where you will feel it again. 

It is the only way lower energies integrate, through a release of emotion through your body.

Critical to understand here is that there is NOTHING to do about these emotions except to breathe, feel and accept them, which will hasten the process and prevent anything getting stuck. 

A big mistake is to feel these feelings, then start attaching a mental story to them, creating a “drama” and becoming upset about the emotions, or projecting the cause of them onto others in your life, or taking some unnecessary action.

Remember all emotions are just Energy – nothing more

It is key to grasp that if you truly are committed to the process of integrating and cleansing blocked emotions, be prepared that it can bring experiences into your life in order to burst bubbles of tied up lower frequency emotional energy. 

Most of the time these are fears that we may have. Scary as this may sound now, some people will have the very events they are most afraid of, actually occur so they can release a huge amount of emotion that is stuck and tied up with fear. For example:

• If you are terribly afraid of relapsing into a negative health state, it may happen so you come to realize, it really wasn’t something to be afraid of anymore, and the fear releases.
• A relationship will end, letting you feel and release the stuck emotions of abandonment stored from childhood, if you can see that this process was releasing stuck energy for you for good, you can move on quicker to a better healthier relationship.
• You may loose something, like a home or money, which releases stuck energy related to survival fear, and helps you realize there is always abundance available to recreate them again, you are free.
• Failing at something such as a career or business can help you overcome the suck energy of fear of failure, so you move on even more empowered to your next venture, this is the story of so many successful entrepreneurs for example.

So as frustrating and annoying as this may seem, these events are a great gift, they are the keys to healing and lead to long term happiness!

Events which happen to release stuck emotions are really keys to unlock stuck energy that is waiting to come become available to you!

Usually unlocking these keys contain some form of physical or emotional pain you were afraid to feel again. 

Beware, often when you make a choice to feel and experience something positive, the opposite may arrive temporarily in order the clear the path to getting the experience you really desire! 

This path is not for the fainthearted! However every experience deepens your compassion and inner strength.

2/ Being too “Mental” and Self-Judgement

One of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of this work is coming to understand when you are simply being “mental.” 

Being stuck in the analytical mind is one of the TOP reasons you will find lower emotions either won’t integrate or you just can’t seem to release them.

One way to know you are too heavily stuck in the mind is when you have a feeling of heaviness in the head, a kind of struggle, tenseness in the head, even a headache which comes about through over-thinking.

Very often, when we stop the mind from its constant chatter, this is when the unresolved emotional energies come to the surface. This is why people can often feel anxiety just before bedtime or just before waking in the morning. 

The mind has stopped all its distractions and the emotional energy body is able to come into conscious awareness.

This is also why, when you start to feel into your body daily, you can feel and connect to things you did not know you were carrying before, whether that was numbness, depression, anger, grief and so on.

Another critical part of the “mental” pitfall is judgement from the inner critic part of us. 

It will be strange to observe, but an easy trap is when you start to notice how much you generally don’t accept yourself and judge yourself, you will find yourself being judgmental on yourself for being judgmental!

Similarly, shame begets more shame. When we feel shame and self-loathing, it makes us feel even more ashamed!

Remember that core shame and chronic self criticism often comes from attachment trauma. 50% of all adults insecurely attach to their main caregiver in the first 1000 days of life. 

Trauma in the first 1000 days of life occurs BEFORE the cognitive/thinking brain develops. As a small baby, if we do not experience unconditional love, this is experienced as abandonment.

We assume, at a deep unconscious level, that something must naturally be wrong with us if we were abandoned. 

In truth, it was just a huge misunderstanding. It is not only inappropriate, but tragic when we feel shame or constant chronic self criticism.

NO baby or toddler deserves to feel core shame and defectiveness. It is your human birthright to feel unconditional self love. 

If you notice you are in core shame and feelings of defectiveness it is NOT your fault, know that this is a result of attachment trauma, and consciously choose to RELEASE the feelings. They don’t belong to you.

Nobody gave you a manual at birth on how to do it, so be like an unknowing innocent child that you should have been, open and receptive to learning a new way of being.

When you fall down and notice self-judgement and shame, be like a child learning to walk, just get up and walk again!

Self-judgement and shame tends to really come on strong when something happens we perceive we did NOT want in our reality. 

So given that this cleansing process may bring events into our lives in order to release broken and stuck energies, you will get plenty of practice at not mentally judging!

It is common to think that when something we didn’t want occurs, that naturally we did something wrong, we missed something, or made a mistake, or wrongly followed someone else’s advice.

The mind says – “Hey I’m in pain, I must have done something wrong! Or someone else did something wrong! Or I AM wrong”

In fact the event, like I said in the previous point, is a key to unlocking stuck energy and a gift. Your mind is programmed to respond the way most of mass consciousness does. 

Here are some more quick examples of why it is best to release the limited mind’s perspective and avoid judgment of self and others, because it’s all for a higher purpose in the end:

• People treat you badly – core shame and low self esteem will have attracted this type of behavior from others. This event is a message that you still need to clear low emotional energy. Take this simply as information about your progress clearing childhood emotional trauma. You’re in the process or raising your standards of acceptable behavior from others
• Someone close to us is in pain – we are learning the wisdom that this person’s experience right now could be exactly what they need to evolve their consciousness and open to greater love and well-being in their own lives. They need to resolve their own trauma, it’s not your job to absorb their pain. Clear your own trauma and be the example to them. Inspire others to heal themselves, avoid rescuing others. No need to feel guilty if you feel happy, your happiness will permit others to reach their own source of happiness. You’re learning that playing small and feeling guilty to fit around others doesn’t serve you or anyone else.
• You have an accident and others have to look after you for a while – you are learning the art of receiving and being vulnerable enough to ask and accept love and help, and that you deserve this
• Things the mind perceives as “bad” keep happening – eventually these events make you realize you may have been emotionally neglected and experienced abuse you are only partially conscious of. This caused a loss of power, consciousness and resourcefulness, to the point that you stopped choosing your reality at all and your life became prey to the default forces of mass consciousness. These events wake you up to choosing your reality again. It’s often called “hitting rock bottom.” It’s all for good in the end.

All of it is a gift, there are no mistakes, even if something happens that the mind traditionally perceives as “bad.” It’s never too late, never bad and never hopeless.

Expect to have your core beliefs challenged, and to sometimes feel confused, frustrated, overwhelmed and disorientated. It’s all part of emotional cleansing and integration!

3/ Physical Detox symptoms 

When you start to cleanse emotionally, you can get PHYSICAL detox symptoms too. One of the biggest issues is sleep disturbances. Waking up in the night or waking too early is normal when emotionally cleansing. 

Again simply going with the flow, getting sleep where you can, not worrying or trying to fix the “sleep problem” is key here.

Emotional and energetic cleansing can cause symptoms such as:

• Fatigue, the process of integration is tiring on the energetic body, never underestimate this
• Feeling hyper – like your nerves are burning. Your physical vibration is literally getting higher and your body is learning to move vast amounts of energy and higher frequencies through it, it can temporarily burnout our nervous system circuits, rest and nurturing time is very important
• Pain in various part of your body – head, neck, back etc. This is temporary and due to old stuck energy finally releasing
• Times where the body heats up – especially at night, causing sweating, this is a physical detoxing process, nothing is more biochemically detoxing than emotional integration
• Increasing intolerances of harsh chemicals in foods, and personal products, caffeine intolerance. These need to be avoided for a time
• Sometimes your mind will get very busy for no reason, it’s a kind of mind-dump/detox
• Vivid, strange and powerful dreams – it’s just detox
• Some people will even go through a week or two of feeling fluey, vomiting or diarrhea, headaches and generally feeling unwell. This is just related to the release of old toxins stored in the body

Just knowing what to expect, and understanding these are basic side effects from emotional and energetic integration (cleansing) will help you accept them and go with the flow, without worrying or “stressing” about them, or needing to “fix” them. 

Drinking plenty of water, eating a fresh unprocessed and unrefined organic diet and spending time in nature daily are all useful supports through this. 

Epsom salts baths also gently cleanse both to the energetic and physical body. Sleeping earthed is helpful. 

Any time you fully immerse your body in water helps to loosen and move stuck energies. Exercise and sweating from exercise is also very useful, as are saunas for releasing physical toxins. 

Breathing and continuing the emotional cleanse helps detox reactions to clear faster.

4/ Feeling everything and becoming more sensitive emotionally 

Many people who cleanse energetically and emotionally initially talk about not being able to feel anything, feeling numb or too mental and so on. 

Once you start to really cleanse this can transform to the opposite, you start to feel EVERYTHING and this can feel overwhelming.

Your emotional sensitivity to your own feelings and your empathy for those around you is going to increase. 

You’ll become aware of many shades and level of abuse from others. You’ll start to be aware about what energy someone is throwing at you rather than just the words they are using. 

Be aware this may be people we are physically interacting with, or it will be sent your way through TV adverts, computer games, movies, media social and news reports.

People who are actually trying to manipulate you will become increasingly intolerable to you, as well as people who are inauthentic or carry a lot of heavy, dense and negative energy. 

Many of us who are already sensitive to emotional energies of ourselves and others did not have the inner power to protect ourselves. 

Integration will increase the power of your inner authentic voice to stand up for yourself however uncomfortable this may feel in the short-term and protect yourself.

In addition, it is a normal and natural side effect to integration that you may start to experience what would be described as psychic awareness and “magical” events in your lives. Other people may call these “weird things!”

This is the natural part of our human evolutionary process and everyone, whether they know it or not will be opening to these abilities sooner or later. 

As such this is not a pitfall in itself as development of these abilities is a delightful experience, however it only becomes a pitfall if we start to create expectations and make flashing lights and experiences of Samadhi as our main goal. 

We don’t want to get side tracked by these aspects, love and 100% acceptance of ourselves and the world around us is the real aim.

5/ Loss of Identity, the Void and Impatience

A critical part on emotional and energetic cleansing journey is when old parts of yourself have finally dissolved, what comes after that can feel like a loss of identity, disorientation, overwhelm, confusion, chaos, depression or emptiness. 

You will not be going about your life in the old ways you used to.

Sometimes we hold on to lower emotions even when they know they are bad for us or make us miserable because we at least know them, they are familiar to us. 

When we release many of them, you are going to feel the void. 

It is actually a natural safe empty space inside. This space is essential for creating the new upgraded life and to let in the person you are becoming. 

However it is the MIND which can interpret this void as a feeling of loneliness, emptiness or depression.

As humans many of us are so addicted to drama and the chaos of low energies that when all the noise finally goes away, we feel lost – where’s the party?! 

This is especially the case when releasing the limiting emotions at the core of the achiever, enthusiast, anxiety, helper or perfectionist Enneagram types.

You can feel low self-esteem or useless, pointless even because you have seen through the craziness of the low self esteem or self-worth issues, and you are letting go of efforting in life so much, but then there is the void which arises after all the release!

Boredom is the withdrawal symptom from the addiction to chronic stress, eventually you learn to appreciate the existential peace of living in the present moment rather than misinterpreting this experience as boredom or depression.

At this time it is useful to remember to choose how you want to perceive this void. You can let it become a peaceful experience. 

Also the void is a temporary state, as mentioned, while you choose to create the next wonderful experiences in your life. It can be experienced as a time of rest and receptivity and also great clarity.  

Know that if you have already made conscious choices for new creations and experiences in your life, they are coming to you, trust yourself and the cleansing and integration process.

You can also expect to feel profoundly impatient during the integration phase. It is strange that for years we can have plodded along replaying broken emotional story lines over and over again. 

Or we have spent years struggling with over–efforting, planning, controlling, goal setting, taking massive action and on and on – we seem to have endless energy (or not in some cases) to carry on this way, but for some reason we suddenly feel extreme and profound impatience when you are finally stopping all the efforting and start living your life.

6/ Loss of Family and Friends

Loss of non-supportive friends and family members can be one of the most challenging aspects of emotional and energetic cleansing because, for many years these people have come to expect you to behave in a certain way, and when you genuinely begin to change, most of the time, they wont like it! 

It will bring up their insecurities and unmet needs. Expect people around you to act out of character.

Also expect that for years they may have judged and berated you for certain behaviors, and wanted you to change these aspects of yourself. As you start integrating you will start releasing these lower energetic behaviors, and then you’ll be amazed when your friends and family will infer you should also change back to the old way! You see most of them were invested in you staying the same as you were – so they will be giving you mixed messages: Change! Change Back – Change! Change Back! 

Conflict may arise, be prepared for this.

7/ Doubt/loss of trust in the cleansing process and YOU 

So your life is going to change! It makes me laugh that so many of us want to feel better and get better things in our lives, yet we also don’t want anything to change!

If you are serious about resolving core emotional trauma, a total transformation can occur where all people, things and situations that no longer serve you, that no longer reflect the highest potential of who and what you are and what you are here to experience, leave your life. 

So just as we want to experience losing an illness we don’t want, loss of destructive patterns and so on, this cleansing process can also include:

• Loss of non-supportive friends and family members from your life
• New careers and job changes
• Change in geographical location of your home
• Release of unnecessary items we were holding onto e.g. clutter at home
• Loss of interest in old hobbies or passions
• Loss of daily routines and structure

As humans we can be incredibly stubborn sometimes, and we will fight, deny and be angry about releasing things and changing, even though part of us knows it’s what is needed for us to be happier and achieve our heart’s desires! 

You may be tested to your extreme because there are so few humans who love change, we are programmed to resist it by mass consciousness!

Learn to love change, accept it and breathe it in!

In addition, and as I touched on this in some of the points above, emotional integration may involve you facing and releasing some of your worst fears and emotions and feeling a loss of identity as well as accepting change into your life.

I believe this integration process can be the most challenging thing a human can go through! 

There are times when you will just have to accept that sometimes unlocking all the keys to stuck energy is going to feel like a marathon.

This can easily cause you to doubt the entire process and whether you are really emotionally cleansing or not. 

Emotional integration is a very strange process sometimes when as mentioned before you can FEEL more than you ever felt before, and yet as your awareness and connection to yourself increases, you also realize, none of it really matters either. This is the strangeness of the emotional purification.

One side effect of raising your vibration is you become less uptight and gain a sense of humor as you observe and actually start to laugh at the quandaries of your human life.

Eventually it is possible to see the energetic integration process as a playful treasure hunt where you are unlocking keys to limitless energy.

So,  it’s ok, it really is all going to work out!

Source: Original Article
Written by: Niki