#020 - You’re Not Serving Anyone By Making Yourself Small: Emotional Suppression
If you have a pattern of people pleasing or being ”highly empathic” (often two sides of the same coin) you might be prone to subconsciously sacrifice of yourself, for the (perceived) benefit of others.
The thing is - you are most likely not even responding to what is the ”benefit” of those around you.
You are most likely responding to the ”benefit” of someone in your past, that you are now projecting onto those around you.
Say, as a child you learnt you had to be ”needless” and ”easy going” - never getting upset, for the adults around you at the time lacked the emotional bandwith to deal with such expression (which is not uncommon for generations who grew up during or immediately after periods of war, for example).
You may have developed an ingrained belief that your emotions, your sadness or
”negative feelings” are too much, and will lead to the withdrawal of connection and love.
So you bottle them up, or you avoid them, you distract yourself… turning into an emotional pressure cooker, which in turn might be expressed as:
Anxiety, anger, internal frustrations
Irritability with others, getting upset about trivial things that have nothing to do with the original cause
Stonewalling, ”freezing up” - essentially ”not feeling”either the negative or the positive emotions
Disconnection in relationships, blocks to intimacy (which can manifest emotionally or physically)
Through bottling up your emotions - they end up inflated and inflamed. Therefore, when you *finally* do let them out, they can come out with such intensity that the way they are expressed actually does end up being activating for others (because they are sensing your activation).
And you end up having the narrative reinforced that ”i am too much - others can’t hold my emotions - if I express how i feel, I end up getting abandoned”.
The problem isn’t that you expressed your emotions - it’s that you gave them power through all that avoidance, rejection and self-criticism.
Emotion = Energy in Motion
If your emotions are not flowing through healthy expression, you create stuck-ness in your energetic system. Your fear of your emotions, expressing them and exposing yourself in this way is making monsters of innocent little forest creatures.
Your emotions are not your enemy, expressing them in a healthy and mature way demonstrates courage rather than weakness - and most importantly, your emotions are transient, if you allow them to be!
Not feeling your emotions (and expressing them in a healthy way) is going to make them stick around for longer, making them fester and become charged with all sorts of additional stories attached to them. Perhaps you create stories about what it means that you are feeling this particular feeling, perhaps you subconsciously create stories where you hold others responsible for either making you feel these feelings, or not alleviating these feelings for you (whether or not they even know you feel this way?).
Think of a dam forming along a freshly flowing river. When the water gets stuck and becomes stationary - all sorts of things start growing in it. The water can get dirty and smelly. Then, when the water finally breaks through the wall, it’s so extreme and all that dirt goes everywhere and you might mistake the ‘flowing of the river’ as a bad thing to cause such destruction. However, if the river is allowed to flow freely at a natural level.
Healing this pattern looks like little steps towards communicating how you feel - more often and sooner than you are accustomed to. It looks like becoming more intimate with your feelings and needs, so that you are able to communicate them to others - as well as meet them yourself. You will discover new and different ways to meet your needs - to have fun, experience closeness, sense of connection, meet your physical needs, creativity…
It looks like one day being able to express your emotions without getting activated as you are doing it - not giving them so much power. ”Today i feel like this, and i know it will change with time, but i am also okay to express this to those around me, without expecting them to fix it or take responsibility for my feelings”.
It looks like unblocking the dam whenever you notice one building up and remembering the free flow of the river.
Work in progress. We are all learning this stuff together.
Cover photo: Engin Akyurt on unsplash
