27/11/2025
Many of you will deeply relate to the emotions shared by my fellow Radical Remission teacher in the USA, whose story has touched so many of our groups. In his latest blog post, he speaks so beautifully to the courage it takes to feel, to heal, and to release what we’ve been carrying — reminding us that the emotions we avoid are often heavier than the work of letting them go. This is also at the forefront of what Jenny and I teach, and something we’ll be diving into even more deeply next year through our Radical Remission groups and our intimate Healing Cancer Beyond Medicine small-group coaching.
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The Tears That Saved My Life: Why Releasing Suppressed Emotions Was Key to My Recovery
I should have been dead.
On Halloween Day 2016, I was diagnosed with stage 3 inoperable pancreatic cancer. Seven out of ten people who are diagnosed are dead within one year. Chemotherapy was the only option I was given—and after several infusions over four months, my scans got worse. I felt like I was dying faster on treatment than off it.
So I quit chemo, and fired my oncologist.
It's 2025 now, nine years later. I'm cancer-free, thriving, and working as a Radical Remission Health Coach and a Metabolic Terrain Advocate. When people ask me what made the difference, I tell them the truth: I tried several different modalities. A key one? I finally let myself feel everything I'd been holding back. And now I know that those suppressed emotions were almost certainly contributing to my cancer diagnosis in the first place.
The Weight I Was Carrying
When I look back at the six years before my diagnosis, I see someone carrying two massive emotional loads he refused to set down.
In 2010, my business lost millions of dollars in the recession. I felt shame, failure, and a deep terror that I wasn't enough—that I'd let everyone down. But I was a father, an employer, and a man who had to keep it together. So I buried it.
Then my marriage fell apart. More grief. More shame. More feelings of inadequacy. I was failing at the two things that defined me: providing and partnering. But again, I had kids to raise, a life to manage. A business to rebuild. No time to fall apart.
So I didn't. I just kept moving. Suppressing. Performing.
By October 2016, my body seemingly had had enough. Looking back now, the pancreatic cancer diagnosis felt like a physical manifestation of everything I'd been refusing to digest—emotionally and literally. I'd spent six years swallowing pain, and now my body was shutting down.
The Gift I Didn't Know I Had
As a kid, my parents nicknamed me "Crabby Appleton"—not because I was crabby, but because I cried at the drop of a hat. A scraped knee, a disappointment, a sharp word from a teacher or one of my parents. I'd tear up. It embarrassed me. It made me feel weak. After all, boys don’t cry.
But when the cancer diagnosis came in 2016, something ancient kicked in. The tears returned—immediate, overwhelming, unavoidable.
I cried the day I heard "inoperable." I cried imagining my sons growing up without me. I cried almost every day, usually in the shower where the water could hide my sobs. Some days I cried about dying. Some days I cried about regrets. Some days I just cried.
At first, I thought I was breaking. But slowly, I began to realize: I was finally opening.
The childhood gift I'd spent decades suppressing—the ability to feel and release emotions quickly—was coming back online. And my body was grateful.
Building a Container for the Tears
Crying alone wasn't enough. I needed support to do this work safely. I deepened my work with my therapist, Pamela. In our sessions, we excavated the emotional wreckage I'd been avoiding: the business failure, the marriage collapse, the shame, the fear, the grief. She helped me name what I'd been carrying and taught me that feelings aren't enemies, they're messengers. Week by week, she created a sanctuary where I could finally let myself be seen in my pain.
I also started using Headspace for daily meditation—five-minute sessions of breathwork and body scans that helped me notice emotions without being consumed by them. To take a breath. To ride the wave instead of drowning in it.
Together, these supports—therapy and meditation---—created a container strong enough to hold the release work I needed to do.
What I Was Actually Releasing
This wasn't just crying to feel better. This was excavation. With Pamela's guidance, I began to identify and release the specific emotions I'd been suppressing:
Shame: The deep, visceral belief that I was a failure—as a businessman, as a husband, as a provider. That I wasn't enough and never would be.
Fear: Terror of abandonment, of not being there for my sons, of dying before I'd made things right. Fear that everything I touched would crumble.
Grief: Mourning the life I thought I'd have. The marriage I couldn't save. The business I'd built and lost. The future that cancer was threatening to steal.
Anger: At myself for not being stronger.
These weren't abstract concepts. They were dense, physical sensations stored in my body—tension in my chest, knots in my stomach, tightness in my throat. And as I cried, as I talked, as I breathed, I could feel them loosening. Moving. Leaving.
The Healing Timeline
Within months of starting this emotional release work—combined with an integrative metabolic approach with Dr. Melanie Giesler—I began to improve.
My energy returned. My indigestion stabilized. The sense of being trapped in a dying body began to lift.
I won't claim that crying alone cured my cancer. I was doing many things: nutritional changes, exercise, IV therapies, coffee enemas, metabolic interventions, spiritual practices. But I knew—in my bones—that the emotional work was foundational. Without releasing what I'd been holding, none of the other interventions would have had ground to work on.
The body can't heal when it's in a constant state of suppression and defense. Releasing the emotional blockages allowed my system to realign—to shift from survival mode to healing mode.
Year by year, I got stronger. The cancer retreated. My scans improved. Eventually, they were clear.
I haven't seen an oncologist in almost four years. I'm thriving. Alive in ways I wasn't even before the diagnosis.
What the Radical Remission Research Taught Me
Years after my diagnosis, I trained to become a Radical Remission Health Coach and studied Dr. Kelly Turner's groundbreaking research on the key factors present in radical remission cases.
One of those ten factors: releasing suppressed emotions.
Turner's work documents what I lived: that many radical survivors view illness as blockage—emotional, energetic, spiritual—and that healing involves releasing those blockages to allow the body-mind-spirit system to realign.
In Dr. Turner’s interviews with hundreds of survivors and healers worldwide, she found that facing suppressed emotions—especially fear—was consistently identified as a turning point. Not comfortable. Not easy. But transformative.
Turner emphasizes that emotional release isn't about positive thinking or "good vibes only." It's about excavation. It's about bringing what's been buried into the light, feeling it fully, and letting it move through you rather than staying lodged in your tissues.
Reading her research felt like validation: I wasn't crazy. The tears weren't weakness. They were healing medicine.
What I Know Now
I don't say that crying cures cancer. That would be irresponsible and untrue.
But I do say this: suppressed emotions drain life force. They create internal terrain where disease can thrive. And for me, releasing what I'd been suppressing for years—with courage, support, and healing practices—freed energy, freed my body, freed my spirit.
The tears loosened the bars. Therapy helped me walk through. The container of support kept me safe while I did the hardest work of my life.
Today, I still cry. But now I see each tear as proof: that I'm alive, that I'm healing, that I'm refusing to hold back again.
I'm not the person I was in 2016. I'm freer. More awake. Much more grateful. More honest with myself and others. Cancer broke me open—and the emotional release work let me rebuild from the inside out.
An Invitation
If you're facing a serious diagnosis, or if you've been carrying emotional weight for years, know this: those feelings you've been avoiding aren't burdens. They're invitations.
You don't need to start with dramatic breakthroughs. You can start small:
Step into a quiet place and allow yourself to cry for 60 seconds. No judgment. Just release.
Ask yourself: "What's the one thing I've been holding back?" Write down the first word that comes.
Find a therapist who can create a safe container for this work. You don't have to do this alone.
Consider meditation or breathwork practices to help you ride emotions instead of being flattened by them.
Healing is hard work. It's not passive. You get out what you put in.
But I can tell you this: the emotions you're carrying are heavier than the work of releasing them. And on the other side of that release is a life more vibrant, more present, more yours than you can imagine.
I should be dead. But I'm not. And I believe these tears—this willingness to finally feel everything I'd been avoiding—are a major reason why.
Chris Joseph is a certified Radical Remission Coach, Certified Terrain Advocate with the Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health, and Thriving with 3rd Stage Pancreatic Cancer since 2016.
