Click any emotion to see all conditions associated with it.

The foundation

You have two minds operating simultaneously, and they are almost nothing alike. Understanding the difference between them is the key to understanding why you are the way you are, why symptoms persist despite your best intentions, and why simply deciding to think differently so rarely changes anything for long.

The Conscious Mind: 5%

The part you identify as "you." It thinks, reasons, sets goals, reads this sentence, and holds your current intentions and preferences. It is creative, analytical, and future-oriented.

• ▸ Processes ~40 bits of information per second
• ▸ Analytical: evaluates, judges, plans
• ▸ Language-based: thinks in words and logic
• ▸ Present and future oriented
• ▸ Can hold one thought at a time
• ▸ Easily overridden by subconscious stress signals

The Subconscious Mind: 95%

The operating system beneath awareness. It runs the body, stores every experience you have ever had, and executes the programs written in childhood, whether those programs serve you or not.

• ▸ Processes ~40 million bits per second
• ▸ Habitual: pattern-matching, not evaluating
• ▸ Image and emotion-based: not logical
• ▸ Past-oriented: running recorded programs
• ▸ Controls all body systems: heart, hormones, immune, digestion
• ▸ Cannot tell the difference between real and vividly imagined

The subconscious was your primary mind from conception through approximately age seven. During that window, before the prefrontal cortex was developed enough to evaluate and reason, every experience was recorded as a survival instruction. Fear, love withheld, abandonment, shame, being told you were too much or not enough: all of it was encoded not as a memory you can choose to revisit, but as a program that runs automatically, beneath your awareness, for the rest of your life, unless it is specifically addressed.

The subconscious does not evaluate whether a belief is true. It only executes what it holds. And it runs those programs on repeat, shaping your biology, your relationships, your stress response, and your immune function: all without your conscious permission.

This is why people who intellectually know they are worthy still feel they are not. Why someone who has read every healing book cannot stop the same loop from running. The conscious mind's decisions are being constantly overridden by a program it cannot see and was not taught to access.

The mechanism

The limbic system, the brain's emotional processing center, cannot distinguish between a physical threat in front of you and a subconscious program firing from thirty years ago. When the trigger fires, the full biochemical cascade fires with it: cortisol, adrenaline, inflammatory cytokines, suppressed immune function, elevated blood glucose, altered gut motility. A body running a chronic fear or unworthiness program runs this cascade at low but continuous levels: all day, every day, for years.

When an emotion cannot be expressed: because it was unsafe, because there was no one to express it to, or because the person learned early that survival required suppression. It does not disappear. The body holds what the mind cannot process. And the storage location is not random.

The body organizes unresolved emotion according to function and meaning. The heart carries unexpressed grief and withheld love. The lower back holds fear about survival and financial security. The throat stores the words that were never allowed to be spoken. The gut holds what cannot be stomached. The joints hold the flexibility that was never allowed. These correspondences have been observed independently across cultures, across centuries, and are increasingly confirmed by somatic research.

When a pattern is chronic and unaddressed, the tissue in the region of storage eventually begins to malfunction. The organ or system that holds the emotional charge begins to express it physically, not as punishment, but as the body's last available attempt to get the message through.

The research behind this is not fringe.

• Psychoneuroimmunology : the documented field showing psychological states directly alter immune function, inflammatory response, and disease susceptibility. Founded by Robert Ader & Nicholas Cohen (1975); now a recognized branch of medicine.
• ACE Study : 17,000+ participants; every additional Adverse Childhood Experience score increased measurable risk of heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disease, diabetes, depression, and early death.
• Bessel van der Kolk , The Body Keeps the Score (2014): trauma is stored in the body's fascia, musculature, and nervous system posture, not just in memory. Somatic intervention changes measurable neurobiology.
• Epigenetics , emotional states alter gene expression without changing DNA sequence. Fear, chronic stress, and unresolved grief switch disease-promoting genes on and health-promoting genes off. These changes can be passed to offspring.
• Bruce Lipton , The Biology of Belief (2005): documents how subconscious beliefs alter cell membrane receptor behavior and effectively determine which genetic programs express.

Why affirmations alone don't work

Louise Hay's work, foundational to this database, gave the world a powerful tool: the affirmation. The idea that you can consciously speak a new belief into existence, that repeating "I am safe" enough times will eventually make the body believe it. And for some people, some of the time, this works. Especially when the conscious and subconscious are not in direct conflict.

But here is the problem: an affirmation is a conscious mind activity. You are reading words, in language, using the analytical left hemisphere, the 5%. If the subconscious holds the opposite belief, "I am not safe", at the level where the body's physiology is controlled, repeating the affirmation simply creates an argument between the two minds. The subconscious wins almost every time, because it is running 40 million bits of processing power to the conscious mind's 40.

This is why you can know something is not true and still feel it completely. Why you can intend to respond differently and still find yourself in the same pattern. The subconscious is not impressed by what you consciously believe. It only responds to what it has recorded, and to experiences that reach it in its own language: imagery, emotion, somatic sensation, and bilateral brain activation.

Affirmations are not useless. They are an invitation, a new story being offered to a mind that needs more than an offer to change. The affirmations in this database are starting points for inquiry and intention. They become most powerful when paired with a tool that can actually carry them into the subconscious and install them at the level where the body is being governed.

The tool that bridges the gap

The left hemisphere of the brain processes language, logic, sequence, and analysis. The right hemisphere processes emotion, imagery, pattern, and somatic experience. The subconscious programs that are running your body, the ones that were installed before you could reason, live primarily in the right hemisphere and limbic system. Most therapeutic conversation, most journaling, most affirmation work, operates almost entirely through the left hemisphere. It is, quite literally, talking to the wrong half.

Whole Brain work, bilateral hemisphere integration, creates conditions in which both hemispheres are simultaneously active and communicating. In this state, the brain becomes briefly open to installing new programs at the subconscious level, rather than simply adding new information to the conscious layer. The old belief can be updated. The new one can be received, not just intellectually acknowledged, but actually installed where the body can use it.

This is not metaphor. The neuroscience of bilateral processing, the measurable brainwave shifts associated with deep suggestion states, and the documented outcomes of somatic and whole-brain techniques are all supported in the research literature. These are not fringe modalities. They are underused because they are not patentable, not pharmaceutical, and require a different kind of practitioner.

Techniques that reach the subconscious

PSYCH-K®

Developed by Rob Williams. Uses muscle testing (kinesiology) to identify subconscious beliefs and bilateral physical postures to create whole-brain states, making the subconscious temporarily accessible to specific reprogramming. Practitioner reports and preliminary studies suggest measurable change in stress response and belief patterns within a single session.

Hypnosis

Deliberately guides the brain into the theta brainwave state (4–8 Hz), the state naturally present in children aged 0–7 while their subconscious was being programmed. In this state, the critical conscious filter is quieted and the subconscious is directly accessible to new suggestion and imagery.

EMDR & Bilateral Processing

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing uses bilateral stimulation to engage both hemispheres simultaneously, creating a window in which the brain can reprocess charged memories and beliefs without having to relive or verbally narrate them.

NLP & Brain Gym

Neuro-Linguistic Programming works with the language structures and sensory representations that encode subconscious patterns. Brain Gym uses specific physical movements to activate cross-lateral brain integration, preparing the nervous system to receive and install new programming.

The Whole Brain Intensive: with Rev. Allie Johnson

Through 20 years of practice (first as a coach, later as a Doctor of Natural Medicine) Allie trained across modalities: PSYCH-K, Hypnosis, NLP, EMDR, Brain Gym, Quantum Touch, Quantum Techniques, Mace Energy, Cranial Release, BEST, and many others, and synthesized what she learned into her own integrated process. The distinguishing feature: it does not require talking through the story, analyzing the past, or reliving what happened. The subconscious is reached and updated directly, without reopening what has already been endured.

The Whole Brain Intensive is available for individuals ready to address their own patterns and for practitioners who want to bring this kind of work into their practice. Use this database as your starting point: find the pattern, name the emotional root, and notice what comes up when you read the affirmation. That gap between what you want to believe and what the body actually holds is exactly where this work begins.

Go deeper: find your style

The sources behind this database each take a different approach to the same truth. Find the one that matches how you process.

If you want the original: where it all started

Alice Steadman: Who's the Matter with Me?

Published in 1966, before Louise Hay, before the word "affirmation" entered the mainstream. Steadman was one of the first to articulate the idea that the body expresses what the self cannot say, and that physical symptoms are a form of communication from within. A short, direct read. Best for those who want the foundation before the framework, or who find modern mind-body books overproduced.

If you want quick, direct affirmations

Louise Hay: Heal Your Body

Short entries. One probable cause, one affirmation. This is the original. It doesn't explain the psychology in depth, it gives you the new statement to practice. Best for those who prefer to work with language and repetition, or who want a fast reference to bring into daily practice.

If you want the full story and psychological depth

Jacques Martel: The Complete Dictionary of Ailments and Diseases

The most comprehensive source in this tradition. Each entry reads like a psychological portrait: the inner landscape, the relational dynamics, the childhood wound that often underlies the pattern. This is for people who want to understand what was happening, not just what to say about it. Dense, thorough, and often startlingly accurate.

If you want prayer-style scripts for buried feelings

Karol Truman: Feelings Buried Alive Never Die

Built around a specific "script", a spoken prayer-like process for surfacing and resolving trapped feelings. Spiritually framed, emotionally precise. This is for people who want something to say, something to move through, something that feels like a release rather than an analysis. The script itself is the tool.

If you want the neuroscience and research

Bessel van der Kolk: The Body Keeps the Score

The scientific foundation. Documents how trauma is stored in the body's fascia, musculature, and nervous system, not just in memory. For those who need the research before they can trust the framework, or who want to understand the biology of why emotional patterns become physical symptoms. Recommended for practitioners.

If you want to understand the brain's capacity to change

Norman Doidge: The Brain's Way of Healing

Documents remarkable cases of neuroplastic healing: people recovering from conditions once considered permanent through movement, thought, and sensory reprogramming. The science of why the brain is not fixed, why patterns can be rewritten, and what kinds of inputs drive real structural change. For those who need to understand the mechanism before they believe the method is possible.

If you want the biological conflict framework

German New Medicine: Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer

Hamer's framework maps specific types of biological conflict shocks (unexpected, isolating, dramatic experiences) to specific organ responses. More precise and more controversial than the others. This is for those who want to trace a condition to a specific originating event and understand why a particular organ or tissue was involved. Search GNM online; his work is widely documented by practitioners in Europe.

Sources behind this database

• Alice Steadman : Who's the Matter with Me? (1966). One of the earliest texts in the mind-body tradition, predates Louise Hay. Steadman articulated that the body expresses what the self cannot say, and that physical symptoms carry a message from within. Foundational reading.
• Louise Hay , Heal Your Body (1984). The foundational alphabetical reference of probable emotional causes and affirmations, drawn from her own experience and decades of practice.
• Jacques Martel , The Complete Dictionary of Ailments and Diseases (2011). The most comprehensive mind-body dictionary, drawn from thousands of clinical observations. Detailed psychological portraits of each condition.
• Karol Truman , Feelings Buried Alive Never Die . Emotional roots of disease with a focus on resolving trapped feelings and the physiology of suppression.
• Bessel van der Kolk , The Body Keeps the Score . Neuroscience and trauma research; documents somatic storage of trauma and its measurable physiological effects.
• Norman Doidge , The Brain's Way of Healing . Neuroplasticity research documenting the brain's capacity to restructure and heal through targeted input, movement, and reprogramming. Foundational for understanding why mind-body work produces lasting physical change.
• German New Medicine (GNM) / 5 Biological Laws , Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer's framework linking specific biological conflict shocks to specific organ responses. Controversial within conventional medicine; influential in European natural medicine.
• Robert Ader & Nicholas Cohen , Psychoneuroimmunology founding research (1975); demonstrated that the immune system learns and responds to conditioned psychological signals.
• Vincent Felitti & Robert Anda , The ACE Study (1998). 17,000-participant study documenting dose-response relationship between childhood adversity and adult chronic disease.

Important Note

The entries in this database are invitations to inquiry, not diagnoses, not treatments, and not claims that every disease has a single emotional cause. These are patterns observed across large numbers of people. Individual experience is unique. Use this as a starting point for self-reflection, not a final answer. Physical symptoms require physical assessment. Emotional work complements, it does not replace, appropriate clinical evaluation.