Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions
Clear skin and aging beautifully conversations, trainings and challenges by Dr. Stacey Shillington ND.
Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions
Emotional Healing: The Missing Link for Clear Skin
Beneath the surface of persistent acne lies a powerful truth many skincare regimens overlook—our emotions directly influence our skin health. As a naturopathic doctor with 20 years of experience treating acne, I've witnessed firsthand how repressed emotions create physiological changes that trigger breakouts and slow healing.
This episode reveals why healing operates on three essential levels—physical, mental, and emotional—and why addressing all three creates transformative results. While most acne treatments focus solely on physical interventions (diet, supplements, topical products), emotional healing often becomes the missing link that accelerates the entire healing process. When emotions remain unexpressed, they create vibrational blockages stored within our tissues that affect cellular function and trigger inflammatory cascades.
Modern science now validates what holistic practitioners have long observed—emotions manifest physically through neuropeptides, cortisol fluctuations, and pro-inflammatory cytokines. Research from Harvard University and landmark studies have demonstrated how emotional suppression impacts hormonal regulation, immune function, and gut health—all critical factors in acne development. I share personal stories of how my own unprocessed emotions manifested as serious physical symptoms, and how learning to release emotional blockages transformed not only my health but my approach to healing others.
Discover powerful techniques for emotional release, with special emphasis on breathwork and somatic therapies that directly address stored emotions within the body's tissues. Learn to recognize the signs of emotional suppression and understand why jawline and chin acne often directly correlate with repressed anger and resentment. Ready to transform your relationship with your skin? This episode offers both the scientific foundation and practical tools to begin healing acne at its emotional source.
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Welcome to Naturopathic Beauty's Clear Skin Sessions, where we heal your acne from the inside out. Hello, beauties, and welcome to the Clear Skin Sessions. I'm Dr Stacey Shillington, naturopathic doctor. For the past 20 years I've been helping women heal their acne, and this podcast is designed specifically to help you on your clear skin journey.
Speaker 1:In this episode, we are talking about emotional healing for clear skin, and we don't always feel comfortable talking about our emotions and I've been doing this a long time helping women heal acne and I think that many of us feel uncomfortable with our emotions because we've been repressing some really important emotions for a really long time and we're going to talk more about how, when we keep emotions in, this actually harms our body at a cellular level and it deeply affects our skin, and when we can finally release these emotions that have been holding us back from optimal health and mental and skin well-being for so long, we feel so much better. So let's do a deep dive into what emotions are, where these emotions come from that we've blocked in our bodies for so long, and when we've blocked them in our bodies. What does that look like and, most importantly, how do we release blocked emotions? And sometimes people interpret talking about emotional healing as something that's kind of woo-woo, something that's not really scientifically validated, but there's a lot of scientific data that really supports the effect of emotional repression in the body and how the issues are with the tissues, because that's where unexpressed emotions actually live. So let's talk a little bit more about this, and I hope this is a really interesting discussion for you.
Speaker 1:So there are actually three different levels of healing. Actually, there's four, but we're just going to talk about three. There's physical healing, there's mental healing and there's emotional healing. So physical healing is something that we're all really comfortable with and we know about. This is when we talk about diet. This is when we talk about lifestyle, when we use supplements, when we do functional medicine testing. A lot of my business is based on physical healing. That's the work that I do with my patients. That's the work that I've been doing for many, many years. That's the work that I do with my patients. That's the work that I've been doing for many, many years.
Speaker 1:But as much as we love this level of healing and as much research that we have to back up this level of healing, there's two other levels that are equally, maybe even more important than the physical level of healing and this is mental healing. Mental healing are the thoughts that we have, sometimes on repeat, the beliefs that we have about ourselves. Sometimes they're limiting beliefs. And then the third level is emotional healing, and this is when we feel things and we express it, or sometimes we don't express how we're feeling and those feelings are trapped within the body. So when we're able to heal our body on an emotional level and a mental level, the physical healing happens very quickly and very easily, and I've seen this time and time again.
Speaker 1:Now I do have a component of my program called the Beauty Bliss Program and I always encourage patients to go through it because it addresses the mental and emotional healing. And when patients go through this program and they do the work, the physical healing is far, far easier. And I see patients that don't want to do that work. They just want to do the functional medicine testing, they want to nail the diet, they want to nail the supplements, they just want to work on that level and we can get results on that level. But it's going to take a longer period of time, it's going to be more difficult, but when we do the emotional and the mental healing, the physical healing just speeds up. It makes it seem almost effortless. Because when we do the mental and emotional healing, we're actually moving energy on a cellular level, and when we move energy we change the frequency, we change the vibration, we're automatically putting the body in a place where it's ready to heal. And when we don't do that work, it's going to be more difficult. It's going to be like we're pushing through the sludge. We're not able to move things smoothly. We're pushing through the sludge, we're not able to move things smoothly, versus when we do the healing, things just flow so much easier. So that's why we need to talk about mental healing, we need to talk about emotional healing and we need to make it an integral part of any healing protocol that we put together for ourselves.
Speaker 1:So emotions are dynamic. They are designed to move through the body. They're not static. We are meant to feel emotions, express emotions and then move on to the next thing. We're not meant to feel an emotion, have it stuck in our body and ruminate about emotions for years, sometimes even decades.
Speaker 1:I mean, I have been in that pattern personally. I have come up against situations that you know have been emotionally blocked in my body and I've thought about those situations for years and this has actually made me very, very ill a few times. I'm 50 years old, so I've had a lot of time to experience some very serious emotional repression and I'm going to share. So I've had a lot of time to experience some very serious emotional repression and I'm going to share a little something personal, but I've had situations that have made me so sick that I've actually put myself in the hospital with a heart attack four times. This is because I was unaware of how to properly deal and process my emotions and I had some emotions that were stuck in my body for decades, things that I would think about and ruminate and be angry about and be resentful about, and things that had happened to me 20 years prior that I was still holding onto.
Speaker 1:And the thing is is these emotions carry a vibrational charge and this is a physiological, biochemical and sometimes electrical shift that moves through the nervous system. And when we don't allow emotions to flow, these shifts get stuck in the body and this is where we experience an energetic blockage. It's the vibrational charge that gets stuck and it can actually affect how our cells operate on a vibrational electrical charge level. And when we don't deal with and recognize emotional blockages that may be present, we're actually allowing our bodies to work very suboptimally on a cellular level. So there are some really great pioneers in energy medicine and somatic psychology, such as Gabor Maté, peter Levine and Barbara Brennan, and they have really beautiful bodies of work and they've come to the conclusion that emotions are energetic frequencies that influence the body's electrical and magnetic fields. This means emotions dictate how cells work, and if emotions are not expressed or metabolized, they get stored in the tissues and the tissues we're talking about are the fascia, the muscles, the gut and even the skin, and our energetic frequency can be affected. Our foundational cellular health can be compromised and, like I've said, I've seen people heal their emotional and mental states and their skin heals immediately. The skin is one of the easiest things to heal when we shift our mental and emotional state. I've seen this happen again and again.
Speaker 1:So emotions are meant to be expressed. We are confronted with a situation that elicits emotions, these feelings. Emotion can be energy, and motion is something that's supposed to move through our body. We're supposed to express it and then we're supposed to allow that feeling to leave the body. And when? We don't know how to do this properly and many of us don't, because we haven't been taught how to do it properly. We sometimes leave our emotions within our body, we repress them, we block them, we don't tell people exactly how we feel, we abandon ourselves. This is self-abandonment. When we have a feeling, when we have an emotion and we don't express it. Maybe we don't like confrontation, maybe we don't want to upset the person that we need to be honest with. There's a million different reasons why we don't do this, and usually we're doing it because that is what we've been taught. But we need to reteach ourselves how to deal with emotions and we also need to take the emotions that are trapped in our tissues. And we need to reteach ourselves how to deal with emotions. And we also need to take the emotions that are trapped in our tissues and we need to learn how to release those as well.
Speaker 1:So emotional blockages are real and there's some really great research to back it up. There was a landmark study from the University of Texas and it found that emotional suppression is linked to increased physiological arousal and may worsen disease outcomes. This was a study in 1997. And a doctor from Harvard, dr Candice Pert. She coined the term molecules of emotion and she showed that emotions are stored in the body via neuropeptides, so she validated the body-mind connection. And then there's also an excellent book called the Body Keeps Score, and this is by Bessel van der Kolk, and it demonstrates how unresolved emotional trauma is stored in the body, impacting brain development, hormonal regulation, immune function and physiological symptoms. So emotional blockages are real, they do affect our physiology and they absolutely affect our skin. So what do emotional blockages look like?
Speaker 1:How do you know if you have repressed emotions that are contributing to your acne and to your health? Probably the number one sign that there's something repressed is when you have repeating negative thought patterns. So, for instance, at one point in my life I got in a really bad fight with my sister and for months the same story kept repeating in my head. I kept thinking about what she did to me, how it was so wrong, how she was a bad sister, and this just kept repeating in my brain over and over again. It was a negative thought pattern. This made me sick. It was not healthy for me, but I had this negative thought pattern because I did not express my emotion of hurt and anger when the situation occurred. Instead, I kept it within myself because I didn't want to engage in conflict and it was a blocked emotion.
Speaker 1:The other way that we can express blocked emotions are limiting beliefs. When we think we're not good at something, we think something about ourself that may not be true, feeling stuck or numb emotionally. So when something that should trigger emotions doesn't, that can be a sign that there's actually emotional blockages within your body. Other signs are anxiety, depression, irritability, chronic sadness. Even physical symptoms can show us that there's emotional blockages, like a tight chest, digestive issues or chronic tension. So if you have really tense shoulders or sore muscles or some type of stiffness that's chronic in your body, that could actually be emotional blockages and once you deal with those emotions, those physical aches and pains actually go away. Difficulty expressing emotions or connecting with others that's another sign of having an emotional blockage. Overreacting or shutting down in certain situations so if somebody confronts you and you automatically freeze you know you're engaging in that fight, flight or freeze response that's a sign there could be emotional blockages and also self-sabotage or procrastination.
Speaker 1:So where do emotional blocks come from? The most common place is from childhood trauma or unmet emotional needs. When we're children, we need to please the people around us in order to stay safe Because we are not able to function in the world on our own. So we will do what it takes to keep ourselves safe, and often that includes not expressing how we feel if we do not think that it's a safe environment, and that automatically causes a lot of emotional repression, and sometimes this is the emotional repression that we carry around for years and decades. This is the repression that we do not even know really exists, and that's something that I see so often in my patients Repressed anger, grief or shame. So if there's a situation and you didn't fully express yourself, maybe you kept your feelings hidden because you didn't want to seem overbearing, or you just didn't feel like conflict. You wanted somebody to like you.
Speaker 1:Also, societal or family conditioning I know in my family the only emotion that was really allowed was being happy, and if you weren't happy you better get happy quick. I remember that so clearly and that led to a lot of emotional repression because in my house if we were feeling angry, if we were feeling sad, we weren't encouraged to express our emotions, and I know that I had a lot of emotional repression from living in that type of environment and many of us grew up in those homes where emotions were not really accepted and they definitely weren't celebrated and encouraged. My parents just wanted me to be happy. They didn't really want to know anything else because they were operating within the capacity that they could operate. So I don't blame my parents, but it's just a fact that you know there's a lot of emotional blocks that can come from family conditioning, chronic stress, fear of vulnerability, betrayal and feeling unsafe to express true emotions. In the past and for myself I mean my gosh I have a lot of history of emotional repression, as you can tell. But I was in a marriage for many years with an alcoholic husband and I felt unsafe to express my true emotions in his presence because I didn't know what his response was going to be. I felt very vulnerable. So in that relationship I had a lot of emotions that were just kept inside and it created a lot of illness for me as I moved further into my life.
Speaker 1:So let's move into the skin and what actually happens on a physiological level when there are emotional blockages so when we're holding in anger and resentment they're perceived as threats by the body and this activates our HPA axis and this leads to an increase in cortisol. And when we have increased levels in cortisol. It's going to affect all our hormones. It's going to negatively affect insulin levels, progesterone levels, androgen levels. It's going to affect gut health and these hormonal changes can lead directly to acne. Repressed emotions also activate pro-inflammatory cytokines like interleukin-6, and more inflammation equals more acne. And anger and resentment can alter the gut microbiome through the gut-brain-skin connection, and in Chinese medicine repressed emotions such as anger are often stored in the liver, and liver sluggishness impairs detoxification and leads to skin issues.
Speaker 1:So those are the physiological mechanisms whereby repressed emotions actually do affect the skin, and in energetic and somatic circles we say the issues are in the tissues. So unfelt, unprocessed emotions are often stored in the fascia, in the jaw, in the gut and in the skin, and I especially see a lot of the acne that's on the jawline and the chin. This is specifically related to repressed anger and resentment, and this is often when skin doesn't respond to treatment, when breakouts are in the same areas repeatedly and when the skin is dull and stagnant, even though we're doing everything possible. So I can put you on the very best protocol, but if we have persistently repressed emotions that are blocking energetic movement through the body, it's going to be very difficult to heal the skin. So how do you heal emotional blockages?
Speaker 1:Probably my number one favorite way is through somatic therapies Breath work, body work. These are excellent ways to remove emotional blockages. There are a lot of different modalities to really heal emotional blockages, but I feel that breathwork is actually the modality that has gotten me the most results personally and that I'm starting to use with my patients on a more regular basis to really get amplified results in our work. So when we combine physical, mental and emotional healing, so when we combine physical, mental and emotional healing, the results are so powerful. It's far more effective than just doing the physical healing. We can do the functional medicine testing, the supplements, the diet and the lifestyle. On its own we can do that, but when we combine it with the mental and emotional healing, stacking the healing levels results in faster and more permanent results.
Speaker 1:And in my one-on-one advanced clear skin program and my perimenopausal acne reboot, we layer the healing. There's the functional medicine, testing, the personalized protocols that we put together, and then there's also my beauty bliss program and this is where I do the mental healing. We reset the limbic system and also the emotional healing. That's where we do breath work, we do EFT and I combine all these therapies in such a way that they're easy to do. It doesn't take a ton of time every day. It does take some, it does take some commitment, but this is the work that we need to do to truly heal you at the deepest level. And then, of course, six months of private support and alumni program support so that you're really not alone on your healing journey, because you are going to need some assistance and some support and some help as you start to work through a lot of these emotions.
Speaker 1:And truly I believe that acne is our great teacher and truly I believe that acne is our great teacher. When we're experiencing acne, we are experiencing redness and inflammation right on our face for the whole world to see. And if anything is going to get our attention, acne is going to get our attention. It's speaking to us very strongly. It's telling us that deeper healing needs to happen. Acne is not a superficial issue. It's a complex medical condition that involves many different layers of dysregulation that need to be balanced.
Speaker 1:So hopefully this podcast has given you an aha moment, at least one, because I know emotional healing isn't something that's talked about all the time, but it's an incredibly important part of the healing journey and I don't think that we can skip over it. And I think, as we move forward, as we know more about healing and the more, the more patients that I see and I've been doing this over 20 years I know that there has been a missing link, and it wasn't until I really started to do a deeper dive into emotional and mental healing that I realized that that's what we need to do. We cannot skip over it. If we do, it's going to be a more difficult healing journey. If we don't skip over it, if we do the work, this is when you're actually taken to the next level. This is how you truly evolve, not only in your health, not only in the clarity of your skin, but in your ability to enjoy life, in your ability to love yourself, to really find your authentic expression and be who you truly are. And this is liberating, this is evolution and this is truly the work that we need to do on your healing journey.
Speaker 1:So if you have found this podcast helpful, the next step be sure to watch my free training Clear Skin After 35. I go through the process of how I heal in more detail. There's a link to that in my show notes and if this podcast has left some type of impression on you, I would love it. If there's a link to that in my show notes and if this podcast has left some type of impression on you, I would love it if you could leave a review. This is the only way that we can reach new viewers, women who are suffering with acne, who are suffering with emotional repression. They need help and if you do leave a review, I'm more than happy to gift you the first module in my Clear Skin Transformation program. The link is in the show notes, so please check that out and, as always, I will see you in the next podcast and have a beautiful day, thank you.