Hide your emotions: that silent quota of suffering
You do it often: hide your emotions. Now, this is really a custom of ours, that of silencing what hurts, that of bottling anxiety, fears and even anger. Little by little this concealment ceases to be functional to generate blockages, and with them, place barbed wire to one's own health, to spontaneity and to our personal growth.
Now, far from assuming this behavior as a personal characteristic, let us reflect. We have been educated for several centuries under the prism that in our world the most important thing is reason. What Descartes told us about "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), orchestrates all stages, where emotions are conceived as a stigma or as something that in some way distances us from what is civilized.
Walk like the lion, talk like doves, live like elephants and love like a small child
Perhaps, for this reason, children are educated in the idea that crying is synonymous with immaturity, and that it will always be better to swallow sadness. We tell them that who gets angry and responds to what they do not like or do not see right, has no education. We often tell them to laugh softly, because whoever laughs out loud is taken for crazy. We explain that emotions, and especially their manifestation, are synonymous with weakness and not a potential to know how to understand and take advantage of.
We feel because we exist, that is the simple reality. A feeling, an emotion gives us life and repressing it takes away little by little. Hide your emotions is a way to hurt yourself, because in reality those internal universes are those that address your desires, steps to your needs so that in each situation values how to react.
Emotions and their purposes
We could say now that we all come to this world with an incredible potential to be happy. This idea is not false, however, it has delicate nuances that it is important to crumble. Our genetics, as well as our social and family environment predisposes us. In many cases, it even establishes the basis of our potential to move more easily in that balance inhabited by emotions such as optimism, resilience, joy ...
Thus, a good part of the emotional suffering that sometimes we drag almost without knowing why it comes from that psychic and emotional structuring, originated in very early phases of our life cycle. They educate us in norms and knowledge, we know it, but they also instruct us in emotions. And it is precisely this last aspect, the emotional one, that largely determines our quality of life, our human potential.
This emotional mismanagement often leads us to misrepresent many internal realities. Sometimes we think, for example, that an emotion is like an option present in a menu that one can choose or discard as it pleases and suits him (-> today I am disappointed but I choose to show happiness). These internal dynamics do not work in this way: because emotions can not be postponed; they do not die, but they do change: in psychosomatic illnesses and in malaise.
Emotions are impulses, they are instincts with a purpose and a determined purpose. Leaving them aside is closing the door to an internal reality that well understood, managed and oriented would allow us to invest in well-being. To hide it permanently, on the contrary, is to give shape to an imprint of discomfort capable of laying the foundations of various mental disorders.
Hide your emotions is not healthy, learn to work on your well-being
Hiding your emotions has a huge cost. You may think that things will go better. Better because nobody senses your concern, because you integrate without attracting attention, because nothing changes, because you can remain productive. However ... how long will you be able to hold that mask?
Think that an emotion is energy, it is an internal impulse that needs expression and movement. If you choose to hide your emotions that energy is channeled inward. And what is the result? Muscle tension, gastrointestinal problems, headaches ...
He also understands that the stronger a repression is, the stronger the emotional expression will be sooner or later. After all repressed emotion seeks a means of resolution, a channel of exit. And sometimes, it arises in the worst possible way. We often see it when we shut up an anger, a disappointment. In the end we overturn that tension in the wrong person or we react disproportionately: with violence. It is not adequate.
How can I handle my emotions?
- We already know that the solution is not to suppress, it is not to hide or act as if that emotion is not there. That emotional energy is there, it survives and it stays. The key therefore is to let it flow. To better understand how to handle our emotions we can make use of three simple metaphors.
- The hole. If you choose to leave your emotions in a well, you will get sick. All stagnant water for a long time ends up spoiling, smells bad, gets corrupted. Avoid therefore this image, the classic strategy of hiding those internal realities.
- The tsunami. If you choose this strategy, you will end up harming others. Emotions can sometimes be like a cyclone, like a tsunami. They throw themselves on others with so much anger and disdain that we all lose out.
Therefore, it would be a matter of knowing how to properly channel each of our emotions. To move with them, to say what bothers us when it bothers us, to react when the moment requires it, to be assertive and agile in the face of daily pressures. In essence, make our emotions a perfect engine of harmony for our lives and not that piece that traps us and stops us.
Really interesting blog here. Will read more posts.
great blog