The Science of Suppressed Emotions and Physical Illness — and What to Do About It
Researched and written by Claude (Anthropic AI) in collaboration with Patricia Mikkelson. This article was researched and written by Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, at the request of Patricia Mikkelson — a professional organizer with over 25 years of experience serving families and households in Northwest Arkansas and beyond. Patricia came to Claude with a concern that goes beyond organizing closets and clearing clutter. Over the years, she has worked withat a lifetime — that feelings are something to manage. To push through. To keep to ourselves, especially the difficult ones: grief that has no tidy ending, anger that feels too dangerous to express, fear that lives in the body long after the event that caused it has passed.
What if that habit of suppression has a cost we never counted?
A growing body of rigorous scientific research is saying exactly that. And one of its most compelling voices belongs to Dr. Howard Schubiner — a Clinical Professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, and one of the world’s leading researchers in what he calls neuroplastic illness: physical symptoms generated and sustained by the brain in response to emotional experience.
This is not a fringe idea. It is not the same as being told your symptoms are imaginary. It is, in fact, one of the most hopeful developments in medicine in a generation.
The Brain That Creates Pain
Dr. Schubiner’s core insight begins with a simple but radical statement: all pain is created by the brain.
This does not mean pain is not real. It is profoundly real. It means that the brain — not the tissue, not the nerve ending, not the disc or the joint — is the final decision-maker about whether pain signals are amplified, sustained, or released. While the brain receives signals from the body, it assigns meaning to those signals and ultimately decides whether pain or fatigue is experienced. Emotional stress can activate the same brain regions as physical injury, producing real, severe symptoms — what Schubiner refers to as neuroplastic pain.
Think about that for a moment. The same regions of the brain light up whether you are struck physically or wounded emotionally. The body does not distinguish. When we experience grief, rejection, unresolved conflict, chronic fear, or anger we dare not express, the brain responds as if the body is under threat — and it often produces physical symptoms to match.
Trauma, relationship conflicts, and other forms of stress produce a sequence of difficult and often painful emotions, including anger, guilt, and sadness. Avoiding such emotions can lead to neuroplasticity that increases the likelihood of developing symptoms, whereas facing, processing, and releasing these emotions can lead to symptom relief.
This is the engine of psychophysiologic illness: not weakness, not imagination, but a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do — protect you — in a situation where the protective mechanism has become the problem itself.
What Is Being Suppressed?
One in six adults and 30–40% of primary care patients suffer from medically unexplained symptoms, chronic functional syndromes, or psychosocial factors linked to chronic pain. Collectively these are known as Psychophysiologic Disorders, or PPD.
The conditions that fall under this umbrella are wide-ranging: chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, chronic fatigue, pelvic pain, and many others. What they share is not a structural cause that shows up reliably on imaging — but a pattern of onset and flare that tracks closely with stress, emotional experience, and relational strain.
Schubiner developed an “affective self-awareness” program based on the theory that musculoskeletal pain arises from the mind blocking negative involuntary emotions, rather than stemming from peripheral tissue damage itself.
The emotions most commonly implicated are the ones our culture most consistently discourages: anger (especially in women, and in people raised in households where conflict was dangerous), grief that was never fully honored, fear that had to be held alone, and the particular exhaustion of people who have spent decades caring for others while minimizing their own needs.
These are not character flaws. They are adaptations — learned patterns of emotional management that once served a purpose. But the body keeps the score.
The Scientific Evidence
This is not theory. It has been tested in rigorous randomized controlled trials — the gold standard of medical research.
The Boulder Back Pain Study (JAMA Psychiatry, 2021)
A randomized controlled trial demonstrated Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) to be more effective than a placebo or usual care for chronic back pain. Approximately two-thirds of participants were pain-free or nearly pain-free after the treatment, compared to approximately 20% improvement in control groups. These were people who had, on average, lived with pain for a decade. Lead researcher Yoni Ashar called the effect sizes “very rarely observed in chronic pain treatment trials.” Even more remarkably, a five-year follow-up with the original participants revealed that more than half in the PRT group remained nearly or completely pain-free.
The Fibromyalgia Trial (Wayne State University / published in PAIN, 2017)
In a randomized clinical trial, 230 adults with fibromyalgia received one of three treatments across eight weekly sessions. Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) — co-developed by Schubiner and psychologist Mark Lumley — helps patients view their pain and other symptoms as stemming from changeable neural pathways in the brain that are strongly influenced by emotions.
Patients who received EAET had better outcomes — reduced widespread pain, physical impairment, attention and concentration problems, anxiety, and depression, and more positive emotions and life satisfaction — than patients who received the education intervention. More than twice as many people in EAET reported that they were “much better” or “very much better” than before treatment, compared to those in the education group.
EAET also outperformed Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — long considered the gold standard psychological intervention for chronic pain — on several key measures, including the percentage of patients who achieved 50% or greater pain reduction.
EAET for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Chronic Headaches, and More
The research extends well beyond back pain and fibromyalgia. Randomized trials have shown meaningful benefit from emotional awareness and expression approaches for irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pelvic pain, chronic headaches, and musculoskeletal pain in older adults. A dozen clinical trials have evaluated EAET for adults with various neuroplastic symptom presentations. The pattern is consistent: when people are supported to identify, feel, and express the emotions their bodies have been holding, symptoms often shift — sometimes dramatically.
What This Means for You and Your Family
Understanding this science does not require abandoning medicine. It requires expanding the map.
If you or someone you love carries chronic symptoms — pain that moves around, symptoms that worsen with stress, conditions that flare during emotionally difficult seasons of life, or illness that arrived on the heels of a loss or a rupture — it is worth asking honestly: what has this body been holding?
The question is not an accusation. It is an invitation.
Here are practical steps, grounded in the research and in Schubiner’s own clinical recommendations.
1. Learn to recognize suppressed emotions in yourself. Most of us don’t suppress emotions consciously. We simply learned, early and often, that certain feelings were not safe, not appropriate, or not acceptable. Begin by noticing where tension lives in your body. Tight chest, clenched jaw, shallow breathing, a knot in the stomach — these are often emotions that have not yet found language. Sitting with them, rather than pushing through them, is the beginning.
2. Practice emotional expression — written and spoken. One of the most consistently effective tools in Schubiner’s work is expressive writing: writing freely and without editing about difficult experiences, relationships, or feelings — particularly anger, grief, and fear. Research going back decades shows that regular expressive writing has measurable effects on immune function, pain levels, and overall health. You do not have to share it with anyone. You simply have to feel it as you write.
3. Work on relational honesty. EAET helps patients process emotional experiences such as disclosing important struggles, learning how to adaptively express important feelings — especially anger and sadness but also gratitude, compassion, and forgiveness — and empowering people to be more honest and direct in relationships that have been conflicted or problematic. This is not about confrontation for its own sake. It is about the cost of chronic inauthenticity — of saying “I’m fine” when you are not, of swallowing resentment, of carrying relational wounds in silence.
4. Reframe your symptoms as signals, not sentences. Many people feel hopeless when they’re told their symptoms are “all in their head.” Schubiner reframes this by highlighting that “all pain is real,” and the fact that the brain is involved is actually liberating — it means there’s potential for change. The brain’s neuroplasticity allows it to adapt and unlearn the patterns that create chronic symptoms.
5. Seek safety before you seek solutions. A nervous system locked in threat cannot heal. Before techniques, before programs, before any intervention — the most foundational thing is to create genuine experiences of safety: in your body, in your relationships, in your daily rhythms. Slow breathing, gentle movement, time in nature, honest conversation with someone trustworthy — these are not soft extras. They are the ground.
Resources to Go Deeper
Dr. Howard Schubiner’s website and books The primary hub for Schubiner’s work is unlearnyourpain.com. It includes research summaries, video resources, practitioner training, and information about his books — including Unlearn Your Pain, his core patient guide, and Unlearn Your Anxiety and Depression. He also offers telehealth consultations for patients worldwide.
Key videos to watch
“Your Brain Can Keep You Sick: How to Break Free” — Dr. Howard Schubiner interviewed by Raelan Agle. Available at raelanagle.com/dr-howard-schubiner. One of the clearest plain-language explanations of how emotional experience drives physical symptoms — and how the process can be reversed. Accessible, warm, and evidence-grounded.
“Mind-Body Syndrome & The Science of Chronic Pain & Illness” — Schubiner’s interview with re-origin. Available on YouTube (search “Howard Schubiner re-origin”). A comprehensive overview of neuroplastic illness, covering how the brain assigns meaning to symptoms, why emotional stress produces physical pain, and what recovery actually looks like.
“Dr. Howard Schubiner Explains How to Unlearn Chronic Pain & Symptoms” — A recent, thorough YouTube interview covering the full arc of Schubiner’s work. Search the title directly on YouTube.
“The Quickest Way to Get Better from Chronic Illness” — Another recent YouTube conversation, particularly useful for those early in understanding this framework. Search the title on YouTube.
Dr. Schubiner’s own YouTube channel — Found by searching “Howard Schubiner MD” on YouTube. Includes his 22-minute overview lecture “Reign of Pain Lies Mostly in the Brain,” which is an excellent starting point for sharing with skeptical family members.
Raelan Agle’s website and YouTube channel raelanagle.com — Hundreds of free videos on nervous system regulation, brain retraining, and recovery interviews with people who have healed from conditions the medical system had given up on. Her YouTube channel is searchable by symptom and topic. Her structured program, Brain Retraining 101, is available at the site for those wanting guided support.
This Might Hurt Film thismighthurtfilm.com — A documentary film and resource hub covering the science of neuroplastic illness, featuring Schubiner and other leading researchers. The resources page includes a comprehensive list of peer-reviewed studies, practitioner referrals, and condition-specific pages.
The TMS Wiki tmswiki.org — One of the largest free public libraries of mind-body illness information, including a practitioner directory, peer support forums, and research summaries. Particularly useful for those wanting community alongside their healing.
A Word for Families
If you are sharing this with people you love, go gently. The idea that emotions live in the body — that what we have not been able to feel or say has taken up residence as pain, fatigue, or illness — can feel threatening before it feels liberating. It can sound like blame. It is not blame. It is biology.
The nervous system did what nervous systems do. It tried to protect. It absorbed what could not be processed. It translated the unspoken into the physical because that is the only language it has.
The good news — and it is genuinely good news, confirmed by randomized controlled trials in prestigious medical journals — is that what was learned can be unlearned. The brain that carried the wound is the same brain that can heal it.
That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, everything.
This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice. If you are experiencing chronic symptoms, please consult a qualified healthcare provider — ideally one familiar with the mind-body connection.
