There are some powerful and tragic statistics coming out of medical research today.

Almost 80% of autoimmune cases are women.

Health outcomes are far worse for Black, brown and indigenous women because the systems of oppression in our culture only exacerbate health outcomes.

Genetic and hormonal factors alone cannot account for these numbers, and so we have to look at the role of psychosocial factors in women’s health outcomes.

Medical research and studies have shown that when women push their feelings down and their needs away, their health suffers.

How does this happen?

It’s important to remember that your emotions, and your experience of them, cannot be separated from your physical body.

We often talk about things as if they are separate – mind, body, feelings. But they are not and cannot be separated from each other. They are always acting  and experienced together.

This means that when you suppress your feelings, you also suppress your physiology.

The immune system also gets suppressed, and the body starts operating under a constant and steady state of stress.

Just imagine the experience in your body of trying to push down anger, or sadness, or grief. To do so requires a tremendous amount of energy, and it deeply impacts the physical body to do so.

But there is little awareness in medicine, and in our culture at large, about emotional repression, and how it impacts the body.

We are in the midst of a paradigm shift when it comes to our health and wellbeing.

For decades we’ve been focusing almost exclusively on taking care of the physical body. We’ve been taught to make sure we’re getting enough sleep, eating the “right” foods, and moving our bodies regularly. We’ve been taught to believe this is what we need to do to be “healthy”.

But it turns out these things are only the tip of the iceberg.

I believe we have to look beyond the current limited scope of medicine for the answers women need right now.

Most women have been conditioned to believe that our emotions are things we have to push down because they’re inconvenient and annoying.

Our culture likes to promote the belief that “feelings” are problematic and weak.

I believe we can teach ourselves to see them as powerful forms of information and insight. It’s time that all of us raised our emotional IQs so we can discern between feelings that are helpful, and feelings that are old wounds, crying for our attention and care.

I believe women need to be able to name what we’re feeling when we’re feeling it, and to speak up for ourselves when we are being hurt.

Women need to understand the basics of how our bodies work, as well – what our bodies need, and how to care for ourselves so that we don’t have to suppress our feelings.

Women have been taught to tolerate far too many individuals and circumstances that are toxic, abusive, and misogynistic. We get to start saying clear and emphatic NOs to toxic behaviors that come from an age where treating women like doormats was the norm.

I also believe we need to recognize that toxic relationships, work environments, and not saying what we actually feel and want and need CAN MAKE US SICK.

And that it’s okay for us to take up space with our messy, difficult and sometimes inconvenient feelings – especially if they are in response to something or someone that is hurting us and degrading our wellbeing.

It’s time for a new normal to emerge – one where women are honoring themselves fully – including their emotions, and their bodies.

Women’s health and very lives depend on it.