There are many laws in physics. The Law of Conservation of Energy is one of them, and I’ve been thinking about it lately in a different context than its authors intended.
Here’s the quick version: energy in a closed system cannot be created or destroyed — it can only change form. Take fire: the chemical energy stored in wood doesn’t vanish when it burns — it transforms into heat and light. The wood is gone, but the energy isn’t. The total stays constant. Energy doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere.
What if that’s also true of emotional energy?
I want to be careful here — I’m a counselor, not a physicist, and this is wondering out loud more than a scientific claim. But the research gives this idea more traction than you might expect.
Prolonged emotional suppression has been linked to elevated cortisol levels, reduced immune function, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease including hypertension. Conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, and chronic tension headaches are frequently found in individuals who suppress emotion — particularly anger — over long periods of time. Chronic back pain and migraines also correlate with histories of suppressed trauma or chronic stress.
The body, it seems, keeps a ledger. Emotion that doesn’t get expressed doesn’t vanish — it relocates.
Bessel van der Kolk put it plainly: “When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology.”
I know this from the inside.
For years I was a highly skilled people-pleaser. I’d absorb, accommodate, smooth things over — and then carry the resentment quietly, like a stone in my pocket. The anger didn’t go anywhere. It just waited, oh so patiently.
I was also living with chronic back pain and migraines — conditions that are real, physical, and largely invisible to others. People who don’t know you’re in pain tend to assume you’re not.
Years ago I was in a case consultation group with other counselors. An older colleague — call him Rodney — made an offhand comment implying I was in better physical shape than he was, that I could easily do something he couldn’t. He had no idea. And something in me that had been held down for a very long time came up fast.
I lost it, completely snapped. Profanity, volume, the works. Not my proudest moment. There was a counselor visiting the group for the first time that day. He never came back. I don’t blame him. I can only imagine what he thought of me. Sigh.
It wasn’t really about Rodney. He was just the final straw on top of a very long accumulation of straws — the invisibility of my pain, the history of being put in a box, the years of holding things in politely. The energy had to go somewhere. That day, it went at Rodney.
This is what repression does. It doesn’t resolve anything — it defers it, with interest.
The pressure builds slowly enough that we often don’t notice until it’s too late: a migraine, a flare, an eruption in a room full of colleagues. The form changes. The energy doesn’t disappear.
The alternative isn’t to stop having hard emotions. It’s to find ways to move them through rather than hold them under. Exercise. Creative expression. Honest conversation — ideally before the pressure gets critical. Therapy, for some people, which is less about talking it out than about learning to recognize what’s building before it has to come out sideways.
The law doesn’t change. But we can get better at working with it.
If you’re living with chronic pain, migraines, IBS, or other conditions that are real, disruptive, and not fully explained by what medicine has found so far — the emotional dimension is worth exploring alongside the physical, not instead of it. You can read more about the work I do around trauma and codependency, or reach out to begin a conversation.