Acupuncture for releasing emotional stress

In my recent blog on Acupuncture & Stress Relief, I wrote about the importance of managing emotional stress and I wanted to share one very powerful tool that TCM can offer, called the “Aggressive Energy Treatment”.

Even though the name sounds intense, this gentle treatment is a great way to defuse the overwhelming nature of emotional stress. Once emotions settle feel more stable you are more able to address the underlying issues contributing to the stress.

In Chinese Medicine, every organ system is associated with a particular emotion:

• The Liver with anger

• The Spleen with worry, pensiveness or ruminating thoughts

• The Kidney with fear

• The Lungs with grief

• The Heart is affected by all emotions as well as by manic states of hyper-excitement and excessive, uncontrolled expressions of hysteria. (It is the type of emotion experienced by those who struggle with bipolar or manic-depressive disorder during their manic phase.)

We can use acupuncture to help regulate these emotions by needling points that are strongly associated with the organs mentioned above. There is a group of very powerful points called the “Back Shu Points” that run down the back, each corresponding to a particular organ and thereby to a particular emotion. Using these points in a single treatment is a gentle way of releasing emotional ‘stuckness’ and you can think of them as reset buttons.

Treating these points clears out the old, stuck energy of harbored emotion thereby helping us gain some peace and possibly new perspective on the problem creating our emotional distress. It should not be thought of as a substitute for dealing with and healing the issues at the core of the problem, but as a tool that can help diffuse strong psychological or emotional stress, so this work can progress.