Acupuncture | Emotions in Traditional Chinese Medicine
As a holistic medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) emphasizes the totality of human experience, in addition to our physical construct, as the creator and perpetuator of disease. In contrast to Western biomedicine, TCM holds no distinction between psychological and physical disorders. The lines are so blurred, the Venn diagram so overlapped, that individuals must be treated as a whole, not via separate specialties.
Generally, emotions cause disease when they are severe and/or persistent, creating enough affect to derange the body’s balance of yin and yang (homeostasis). Some of the time, patients are aware that a particular event caused enough stress to change the way our body works, simply by its timeline. This is an example of a severe emotion causing disease. At other times, they do not know the event but realize that they are anxious or depressed and that is affecting their experience, including their experience with their body. That is an example of persistent emotion causing disease.
(There is a very common third manifestation of stress/emotionally attributed disease in the clinic, that which the patient is unaware of the connection between their physical discomfort and their emotional discomfort, or that they are even in emotional discomfort or stressed. They are surviving. They are functioning. Usually there is an external pressure on them that does not allow this internal realization, like kids, or work. This disconnect from their emotional aspect is just as common as the two examples above. My job, then, is to demonstrate this relationship to the patient, and to emphasize that re-establishing this relationship is critical to their wellbeing.)
How do emotions cause disease in Traditional Chinese Medicine?
From the Nei Jing, each emotion has a very specific effect on our qi. If we consider each individually we can actually feel how our qi shifts in response to each emotion.
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