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Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) talks about external and internal factors in the health or illness of a
person. The current emotional state of the patient is one internal factor that traditional Chinese medicine
considers to be very important.
Emotions are believed to have a direct connection to specific organs and their states of being. TCM divides
the body - and the universe - in five elements or phases: Earth, Wood, Fire, Water, and Metal. Each element
corresponds to a specific organ as well as a specific emotion. The emotions are not believed to always be
the direct cause of an ailment or condition, but have an undeniable connection with the progress and
characteristics of the problem. It is not the intensity, as much as the prolonged duration or an extreme
emotion, which causes imbalance.
Emotions, as everything else, should be balanced if we want to be healthy.
It is as bad to repress the emotions as to let them run wild.
In TCM, the excess is considered as bad as the deficiency.
TCM recognises seven emotions or internal causes of disease: Joy, Anger, Worry, Sadness, Grief, Fear
and Fright.
Grief is considered extreme sadness and Fright extreme fear, so they correspond to Metal and Water
respectively.
In the image below, we find the conditions in which an emotion is said to be unbalanced, to what element
or phase it belongs to, and which acupressure points are important to press so as to tonify or disperse
depending on whether that particular phase or element is full or empty - jitsu and kyo in Japanese.
Although from the Western perspective it seems that four out of these five emotions are negative, from the perspective of TCM, neither sadness nor fear or the others, are negative emotions. From this point of view, sadness or fear are normal when the situation is considered to produce these reactions. For TCM, one type of imbalance occurs when the person should feel these emotions - even if he or she overcomes them in order to act - and doesn't feel them.
The other type of imbalance occurs when the person feels fear, sadness or any of the other emotions, when the situation is not sad, threatening, etc.
In TCM these imbalances are not thought of as isolated, but are connected to physical health. Whether the physical symptoms or the emotional symptoms appeared first, is not really important, what matters is the overall (physical, psychological, emotional) health of the individual.
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