Your Liver and Your Mood
The liver not only filters toxins from the body, but also plays a large role in processing emotions.
This is a topic I was requested to write about from a friend and coworker. The opening conversation was around how challenging it can be to shift away from drinking alcohol. Many people during the pandemic turned toward alcohol as a way to manage the fear and anxiety of our uncertain futures, but slowly realized it became a bigger habit than intended.
Emotions and alcohol have long been woven together within our society. But here’s the interesting part: your liver has a big role in that exact emotional relationship to alcohol (and drugs). By now most people understand that the liver does a lot of “cleaning house” for the body. But what is overlooked in Western Medicine is the emotional filtering that also occurs in this organ.
Eastern medicine has long referred to the liver as “the emotional liver”. In my practice, I’ve found the liver to be a major part of this deep pathway of emotional expression. Heavy or challenging emotions can get stored in our spleen, pancreas, or duodenum. As they surface, they must travel into the liver for processing then move past the diaphragm into the lungs for exhale and release.
If your liver is overburdened or sluggish from years of toxin exposure, a high fat diet, and the unfortunate inheritance of ancestral toxins, emotions are the least of it’s concern. A toxic liver does not have the capacity to process your grief, your shame, your anger, or your fear.
Drugs and alcohol add to this liver burden, which is why they are the perfect tools for emotional avoidance. That craving for a drink “to take the edge off” is a sign that your body is desperately trying to release a deeper pain. And alcohol only temporarily stifles this.
There is a flip side to this, however. Maybe you are someone who has already started a deep dive into your healing journey. Maybe you’ve already been going to therapy and are in the process of turning up your childhood trauma. But you still feel stuck, like things aren’t shifting for you as you’d hoped.
Here’s the thing about toxins and emotions. Our mind will strongly associate an emotion to the chemical status of our body during any particular time. If you’ve experienced a trauma, your state of health at that time leaves a chemical imprint that is matched with your emotional experience. So as your liver is able to work through those old layers of toxins, the emotions that are connected to them are allowed to surface and ultimately purge from the body. This is the kind of emotional release that I was desperately searching for after doing year’s of talk therapy, I just didn’t know it at the time.
“Stuckness” is almost always a sign of liver burden. As I slowly learned more about the liver, I began to consider my own lifestyle and how the choices I made were not in line with where I was trying to grow. I’ve been healing my liver for the past two years now, and not only have I experienced a major improvement in my acne, brain fog, bladder discomfort, ear itchiness/pain, swollen lymph nodes, restless leg syndrome, congestion, and allergies, but I’ve also grown immensely in my mental health and sense of self.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that depression, anxiety, fatigue or procrastination is from our own doing. That we’re somehow responsible for our own suffering. But we aren’t given the guidance around how our inner health is complex and interwoven. Nobody is talking about liver health. Because if our liver was identified as the problem, then people would start looking at our world differently. We’d be more concerned about the chemical use on fruits/vegetables, the frequent prescription of pharmaceuticals, the quality of the air we breath and the water we drink. The liver is responsible for cleaning our bodies of all these chemicals we come into contact with and don’t even realize it.
Your mental health is incredibly important, and it cannot be fully addressed without considering your liver.
How does one get into energy work?
My journey into a realm of healing work that continuously leaves me wondering “what is even possible?”
People don’t generally think of physical therapists as being into “energy healing” or all that woo-woo stuff. While I was in PT school, I was taught to revere evidence-based practice as the highest good. And I bought into that for awhile, that is, until I started feeling into my patients’ cranium.
In school we were taught that even experienced PTs were unable to reliably detect movement at the sacroiliac joint, a joint located at the back of the pelvis between your hip bone and sacrum. This joint has been shown to move between 2-6mm on average, which is admittedly quite a small amount of motion. Logically one would think that our hands can’t possibly feel such minute motion. As a student, I was certainly convinced.
Then, a few years after graduation, I took my first Craniosacral Therapy course. For those who are unfamiliar, Craniosacral Therapy is a hands-on technique that tunes into the rhythm of fluid dynamics around the nervous system. It requires the utmost sensitivity to develop, because it also involves being able to "decompress” the joints between the cranial bones. This is highly controversial in the realm of research, as you might imagine. But as my skillset developed, I began to feel this subtle motion between the cranial bones. And it was undoubtedly smaller than the 2-6mm of motion at the SI joint.
So this is where my questioning of “what we think we know” all began. Every day in the clinic I was tuning into my patients’ bodies through my palpation, feeling for as many subtleties as possible in hopes that it might offer insight into their pain. I began thinking 3-dimensionally, constantly practicing envisioning what tissues could be under my hands and how they might be changing based on my tactile input. Before long, I began feeling all kinds of responses in the body and was often unsure of what they were or what they meant. I slowly had to map out how muscles felt different from organs, how blood vessels felt different from nerves. What different patterns of tension indicated.
Then one day I was working with a female patient who had been experiencing chronic pain in her low back that didn’t seem to respond to the usual exercises. I remember being drawn to her hip and pelvis, again ready to investigate the different types of tensions I was surely to feel. But rather than finding the typical stiffness or spasm, it felt as if a bubble was moving under her skin. As I focused harder to steady my hands, a large wave of sadness overtook me. I looked up, and my patient was weeping. She told me that she had recently lost her sister, and was deep in grief. As she continued to express her struggles, the bubble I was feeling in her pelvis slowly dissipated and the tissues softened. She got off the table at the end of the session, and was surprised to have zero low back pain.
From that point forward, I became familiar with emotional holding in the body. I began to detect “densities” in the body that wasn’t specifically a muscle or tissue, but challenging to describe nonetheless. Then I began to notice “densities” outside of the body, like when someone might feel the weight of the world on their shoulders. Slowly, I learned that what I was picking up on was various forms of energy, and it frequently came with an emotional narrative that I was somehow able to sense as well. And patients would corroborate my findings.
It took a long time for me to trust this intuition. I didn’t want to startle anyone, but it was clear that energy had an influence on the physical body. My curiosity about the nature of our existence had never been so strongly ignited, and every day I was trying to learn as much as I could about what I was experiencing during my patient appointments.
Over the past couple years, I have gained so much insight about different energetic patterns, the chakra system, ancestral relationships, and even quantum healing for the physical tissues of the body. My brain is being constantly stimulated, and my understanding of the world is continuously challenged. My patients have taught me immensely, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to help the body heal itself. I have learned to become comfortable in the space between scientific knowledge and the impossible unknown. This gift of wonder and curiosity is unlike any other, and I can only hope to share that experience with others who have struggled amidst their own pain and suffering.