[00:00:00] You know that feeling when you've been holding something in for so long? Tears, anger, grief, and your body is just tight like this pressure building in your chest, your throat, your stomach, but you keep swallowing it down because you are taught that falling apart is weak. That's what it's like to live with a bathroom door locked.
The bathroom is where emotional release is supposed to happen, where you let things go, where you cleanse and detox and breathe. But most of us, we've got the door locked, we're holding it all in, and it's making us sick.
Welcome back to The Regulated Life. I'm Erica Carter Folk and this is Method Monday where we go room by room through your inner sanctuary, giving you the [00:01:00] frameworks and tools to actually heal, not just cope. Last week we worked on the living room boundaries and the end of people pleasing. This week, we're stepping into the bathroom.
This is where emotional release happens where grief, shame, guilt, and old pain are supposed to be washed away. But for most of us, this room has become a toxic holding tank instead of a place of cleaning. So let's talk about why you're holding everything in and what is costing you and how to finally give yourself permission to let go.
The bathroom is where emotional release happens. It's where you're supposed to let things go. Cry, scream, rage, grief, exhale. But here's what most of us learned. Crying is weak, falling apart [00:02:00] is failure. Showing emotion is too much. Being vulnerable is dangerous. So we locked the door, we held it in, we became really good at numbing, distracting, and pushing down what we didn't wanna feel.
You know that feeling when you're in the middle of your day and something happens. Someone says something that triggers you, or you see something that reminds you of a painful memory. And you feel the tears coming, but instead of letting them fall, you swallow hard. You blink them back. You tell yourself, not now, I don't have time for this.
I'll deal with it later. Except later never comes because you've been trained to believe that emotional release is something you do when it's convenient, when you're alone,
when it won't inconvenience Anyone else? And so the bathroom becomes [00:03:00] this place. You avoid this room where all the unfelt emotions pile up grief. You never processed anger, you never expressed, shame you never released, and your nervous system, it's exhausted from holding it all. Here's what's happening underneath the surface.
Emotions aren't just mental experiences, they're physiological. When you feel something, grief, anger, fear, shame, your body creates a physical response. Your heart rate changes, your breathing shifts, stress hormones flood your system. And if you don't complete that emotional cycle? If you don't let the tears fall, the anger move, the grief release.
These emotions get stored in your body.
This is what Bessel Vander K talks about, and the body keeps the score. Unfelt emotions don't just disappear. [00:04:00] They get lodged in your tissue, your muscle, your nervous system.
That tightness in your chest? Unexpressed grief. That knot in your stomach? Unprocessed. Fear. That tension in your shoulders? Anger you've been swallowing down for years. Your body becomes a storage unit for all the emotions you were told not to feel.
And over time, this chronic emotional holding creates anxiety because your nervous system is always braced for what you won't let yourself feel. Depression, because suppressing one emotion suppresses all the emotions, including joy, physical pain, headaches, digestive issues, chronic tension, disconnection, because you can't selectively numb.
When you numb pain, you also numb.
The bathroom is where you learn to [00:05:00] unlock the door. Where you give yourself permission to release what you've been holding. Will you remember that crying isn't weakness, it's completion. Because here's the truth, emotional release isn't falling apart. It's letting go. And you can't heal what you won't feel.
So why is it so hard to let emotions move? Because your nervous system learned early on that emotional expression wasn't safe. Maybe you grew up in a home where crying was met with "stop crying, or I give you something to cry about." Anger was punished or shamed. Vulnerability was weaponized against you.
You had to be the strong one, the calm one, the one who held it together. So your brain wired a pattern. Safety equal emotional control. And now as an [00:06:00] adult, even when you're alone, even when you wanna cry, your body won't let you.
Because your nervous system still believes that releasing emotion equals danger. This is where a hypno breath fusion comes in. Breath work is one of the most powerful tools for emotional release because it bypasses your thinking brain. It goes straight to your nervous system. When you breathe intentionally, deep connected breaths, you signal your body that it's safe to feel.
It's safe to release. It's safe to let go.
And things that have been held for years can finally move.
I've seen it happen countless times. Someone comes to a breath work session feeling numb, disconnected, like they can't access their emotions, and within 10 minutes of conscious breathing, the tears come, the [00:07:00] anger surfaces, the grief finally has permission to be felt. Not because breath work creates these emotions, but because it creates enough safety in the nervous system for those emotions to finally release.
That's the power of the bathroom. That's what happens when you stop holding and start releasing.
Let me tell you about a client. We'll call her Jessica. Jessica came to me because she felt numb. She described it as living in gray. She could function, go to work, show up for her kids, check all the boxes, but she couldn't feel anything. No joy, no sadness, just flat.
When I asked her when she last cried, she said, I don't know, maybe years. She'd been through a lot, a painful divorce, the death of her father, [00:08:00] a childhood where emotions were dangerous, but she never let herself grieve any of it. She just kept moving, kept functioning, kept holding it together, and now her body had shut down.
Because when you spend years pushing emotions down, eventually your nervous system just numbs out. It's a protective mechanism. Dorsal vagals, shut down. We started working on her bathroom and the first thing we had to do was create safety because Jessica's nervous system didn't believe it was safe to feel.
We used hypno breath fusion. Gentle connected breathing, paired with somatic awareness. At first, nothing happened. She breathed and say, I don't feel anything. But I told her, that's okay. We're just teaching your body that it's safe to be here. And slowly over weeks, things started to shift. One [00:09:00] session about a month in she was breathing and suddenly she gasped.
And then the tears came. Not gentle tears, deep guttural sobs. Years of grief moving through her all at once. She cried for her father, she cried for her marriage. She cried for the little girl who was never allowed to be sad. And when it was over, when the wave passed, she looked at me and said, I feel lighter.
I didn't know I could feel this light. That's what happens when you unlock the bathroom, when you give yourself permission to release what you've been holding. When you stop numbing and start feeling, Jessica didn't fall apart, she let go and in letting go, she found herself again. Okay, here's your practice for this week.
I'm giving you three tools. Start with the one that feels the [00:10:00] most accessible tool. Number one, the completion practice. This is for when you feel emotions rising, but you keep pushing them down. Find a private space, set a timer for 10 minutes and give yourself permission to feel whatever wants to come up.
If tears wanna fall, let them. If anger wants to move, punch a pillow.
If your body wants to shake or scream into a pillow, let it. This isn't about being dramatic. This is about completion, about letting your nervous system finish what it started. After the timer. Do five deep breaths and come back to center. That's it. That's the practice.
The tool number two, the emotional inventory. Get out your journal and answer these questions. What [00:11:00] emotion have I been avoiding the most?
Grief, anger, fear, shame.
When did I learn that this emotion wasn't safe to feel?
What would it cost me to keep holding this in for another year?
What might open up if I gave myself permission to release?
Just write. No judgment, just awareness.
Tool number three, the bathroom breath release. This is a simple breath work practice to help your nervous system feel safe enough to release.
Sit or lie down. Place one hand on your heart and one on your belly. Breathe in deeply through [00:12:00] your nose for four counts. Fill in your belly. Hold for four. Exhale through your mouth for six, making the audible sigh or ah, sound.
Repeat that for five to 10 minutes. As you breathe, say this silently or aloud.
It's safe to feel. Breathe.
It's safe to release. Breathe.
I don't have to hold this anymore. Breathe.
Let your body soften. Let your emotions surface, let tears come if they want to. This is your permission slip.
Here's what I want you to know. You are not too much. Your emotions are not a burden. Your [00:13:00] tears are not weakness. Crying is how your nervous system completes the stress cycle. Anger is how your body protects your boundaries. Grief is how you honor what you've lost. And when you lock the bathroom door, when you hold it all in, you're not being strong.
You're just delaying the inevitable because what you don't release, you carry. And eventually it becomes too heavy.
The bathroom is where you learn to let go, where you give yourself permission to feel without apologizing. Where you remember that emotional release isn't falling apart, it's coming back together, room by room, breath by breath.
This is how you come home to yourself. Tomorrow, we'll continue this work with your daily raw regulation practice.
What if you let yourself cry? [00:14:00] And if this episode resonated, share it with someone who needs permission to feel. I'll see you back here tomorrow. Until then, keep breathing, keep releasing, keep regulating.
