Making Friends with Our Emotions: A Traditional Chinese Medicine Perspective

As acupuncturists, we spend time with our clients not only to assess their physical symptoms but also to understand their emotional landscape. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), emotions are an essential part of the diagnostic process. Emotions impact our physical health, and in turn, our physical health influences our emotional well-being.

In TCM, each organ system is associated with a specific emotion:

• Liver – Anger and irritability

• Kidneys – Fear

• Lungs – Grief

• Heart – Joy

• Spleen – Worry or overthinking

Because we often experience multiple emotions, it’s easy to see how they can affect our health in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

It’s crucial to make friends with our emotions. Too often, we try to avoid or suppress them—through food, alcohol, drugs, work, exercise, medications, or other distractions. An informal industry has even emerged to help us not feel. But this only creates more suffering. When we suppress our emotions, we may avoid them temporarily, but they remain within us, often gaining more intensity over time.

This isn’t to say that we should eliminate the coping mechanisms we rely on—certainly not all at once. But alongside them, we can begin to explore why we feel what we feel. Emotions often contain valuable information. Understanding them can lead to integration and healing. At other times, simply naming and acknowledging an emotion reduces its power over us.

There are many tools to help us get in touch with our emotional selves:

• Acupuncture: Acupuncture helps us balance all different emotions. A visit to your acupuncturist will support you explore and manage emotions as they happen.

• Journaling: Writing can help us trace the root of an emotion, which often stems from past experiences rather than the present moment.

• Breathing: Deep, mindful breathing allows emotions to surface without overwhelming us.

• Meditation: A practice that helps us recognize that emotions are a part of us—but they are not all of us.

• Counseling: A safe space to express, reflect, and release emotions in a guided setting.

• Faith and Spirituality: Deeply personal, yet powerful ways to process and hold emotional experiences.

There is no one-size-fits-all path to emotional or physical wellness. Often, it’s a blend of techniques and a willingness to meet the parts of ourselves we’d rather avoid. Making friends with our emotions—even the uncomfortable ones—is a powerful step toward balance and healing.