Why Emotional Processing Matters

By Carly Faye, FDN-P, NLP

WHY EMOTIONAL PROCESSING MATTERS TO ME

For a long time, I saw emotions as something to control, suppress, or shove down altogether, not something to actually experience or process in my body. I didn’t even know emotional processing was a thing. I just believed I had to push through, stay strong, and keep going.

But my body had a different story. The emotions I thought I had buried didn’t just disappear—they came back with a vengeance. What I had suppressed for years eventually manifested physically: in my nervous system, gut, muscle tension, and ultimately, Hashimoto’s.

At first, I did what I had always done: I tried to control my way through it. But instead of making me feel better, I developed an eating disorder called orthorexia (an unhealthy obsession with being healthy), snapping me back to a time in college when I had been starving myself to cope. I realized I had never truly addressed what led me to that place in the first place- the emotions that had driven the anxiety, depression, and eventual diagnoses of C-PTSD and ADHD.

This was the moment everything clicked- I hadn’t moved through my emotions. I had spent years suppressing them. And when suppression didn’t work anymore, my body made sure I had no choice but to listen.

The stress responses I had been stuck in weren’t just mental, they were physiological. The emotions I thought I had "handled" weren’t gone; they had been stored in my body, shaping my health, my behaviors, and the way I related to myself. I see this pattern all the time—especially with people who, like me, have spent years controlling their environment, their body, or even their thoughts to create safety. When suppression becomes the norm, emotional processing feels completely foreign.

I didn’t realize how much I was bypassing my emotions until I started doing deep work with nervous system regulation, subconscious reprogramming and somatic processing. I began seeing emotions not as problems to fix, but as signals to engage with. Instead of trying to outthink my feelings, I started working with them in my body.