Emotional Suppression Betrays The Need For Authentic Expression
by Zian Harrington
Our cultural paradigm avows the deeply visceral need for authenticity, yet this felt sense is often cast into the shadow of emotional repression by maladaptive aspects of the human experience & socialization.
What is so troubling about our current sociocultural dynamic is this: practically every level of education fails to enlighten our children about emotions, the need to master them, and the importance of our emotional lives. The only time we encourage our children to be remotely curious about the highly intuitive or psychoanalytical nature of our emotions is when it's available as an elective in high school.
The average person isn't aware how much of their emotional world they are suppressing on a very frequent basis - quite literally daily in fact. We tend to spend so much time in our daily lives just surviving, racing from point A to point B, or fulfilling an often unconscious demand to be a productive member of society.
There is a constantly shifting list of tasks and/or chores that needs to be managed and checked off: the laundry going through several stages of gathering - washing, drying, and folding before it's completed; maybe the car needs an oil change or the grass needs to be cut; and don't even get me started on the groceries, taking the kids to soccer practice, working overtime to satisfy your boss even if you don't want to, and/or helping out with family while still making time for personal space and needs.
In between the chaos of minimizing stress, maximizing time, and the action-planning of priorities, how can the average person be expected to have time or intuitive knowledge of how to process and integrate emotions?
As individuals who crave authenticity and any variety of self expression, suppressing emotions will never support our health or nature. While so many of us are avoiding our inner experience, we're simultaneously espousing the need for authenticity. Maybe not in a verbal manner. Maybe we're doing so through the outlet of personal choice, manner of communication, and social constructs like clothing and style. Regardless of how we, as individuals, cultivate this practice of authentic expression, we all have a need to make some kind of statement and let our voice be heard.
But the connection between authenticity and emotional suppression is not well understood by many. As Gabor Mate has said, authenticity is your connection to self. You can't be authentic, and have a kick ass relationship with yourself if your brain unconsciously internalizes suppression to survive and protect your Central Nervous System (CNS) from neural overload.
On the spectrum of authenticity vs emotional suppression, one is clearly anathema to the other. These two faces of what it means to be deeply and unwaveringly human will always oppose each other.
You can't embody authenticity if you suppress what you feel. Authenticity requires you to feel sensations and emotions unique to your experience, even uncomfortable ones. Authenticity demands that we embrace our sensitivity, our edges and that we see the whole of what makes us magical and powerful. Our scars and wounds are part of that same alchemical magic through which the best and most brilliant self blossoms.
Most importantly, authenticity demands that we give deliberate voice to these precious and beautiful aspects of personality. This is what it means to be immersed in the journey of personal development.
Imagine, if you will, a huge dam holding back a few hundred thousand gallons of water. All of that water is trapped behind a wall with nowhere to go. That's what emotions are. Emotions are like water, and they need to flow and have an outlet. It is critical that we have a release for the primal energies and deeply personal impulses we circulate within our bodies.
While the human body, like any dam, holds an immense reservoir of energy, the human body is, however, not meant to hold such large reservoirs of emotional energy for lengthy periods of time.
We have pathways in our body through which a variety of information travels. We are full of energy that needs to be processed on a daily basis, and suppressing any ounce of it will put a damper on the multifaceted dimensions of personal growth. Tuning into our personal feelings will give shape and definition to the flavor of authenticity we carry with us. Cultivating authentic expression is a central theme in carrying out the practice of making decisions that support our emotional well-being.
A few sentences earlier I mentioned that while a dam and the human body are similar, the human body is dissimilar in the way that it's not meant to hold oceans of emotion for long periods of time. In each one of us flows a river full of emotion, and each section of the river has it's own temperament - some parts are calm, some flow much slower than others, other parts are raging rapids not to be taken lightly. Let's go back to that image of the dam holding water for its designated purpose…
Each time we push down an emotion or a complex and ongoing dialogue of feelings we store them in our dam of emotional energy. They don't just go away because we refuse to deal with them head on and surrender to their wisdom. That energy has its own corner of our body where it stays until it's honored and held with love. So, when the affective energy that needed an outlet for expression instead gets suppressed, then that emotion now needs a new outlet through which a release or recognition can be facilitated.
This dysfunctional habit has become a tool that some of us rely on as a result of being raised in environments where it wasn't safe to feel and give voice to those feelings. Or maybe the neuro-emotional shock unfolding within the body - associated with a traumatic experience - is too great, and suppression was the only tool available to protect the CNS from further damage and reaching critical overload.
Emotional suppression so many years later has become a crutch which hinders so much more where it once was an ally in a fragile moment or period of our lives. Any dam will burst under too much stress. This is one sequence in a chain of psychosomatic phenomena when we don't process what we feel.
We're storing too much. Cracks are slowly forming in the foundation of the dam where leaks of emotion spring forth. Soon a larger crack begins to reveal itself, indicating that the stress level is significantly threatening the integrity of the structure. Every time we suppress an emotion the action of suppression itself causes the affect to leak out elsewhere. And our affective states often show up when we don't expect them to.
The delayed expression of suppressed energy might seem bizarre or be seen as a cry for help if observed by a third party. Many of us cast these emotions into the shadows, and they end up ruling our behavior from those same shadows. We believe that we've left it behind when in reality we have simply dismissed and dishonored an essential part of ourselves in order to maintain the status quo.
It is high time that each one of us answers the call to feel ourselves - the deepest parts especially. Emotions will guide us - tuning into them provides unique feedback, which in turn gets synthesized into an abstract road map as to how the individual can navigate the external and internal world. When we understand how to flow with them, they can give valuable direction.
Here are three ways to make space for your emotions
1. Tolerance
Part of what makes emotional repression so damaging to the psyche and essence of the person in the long run is that repression manufactures dysregulation. The more commonly known term for dysregulation is “emotionally unstable”. But there are levels and degrees of emotional instability. Please keep that in mind as you read on.
In my experience, whether interacting with people over social media or face to face, emotional instability takes the shape of being overtly triggered without even knowing why. Not only do people tend to not know why they're triggered, they fail to understand that they ARE triggered. In this person's eyes, their triggers are rational and coherent. They don't even recognize that flight/flight/freeze response as a trigger.
In their reality, mental illness, psychiatric issues, internal suffering, and unresolved trauma acted out through behavior are completely normal and warrant no further investigation about the impact of their behavior upon their own state of wellness. And that's the thing about mental illness, people with personality disorders tend not to see their behavior as problematic.
But I digress, if only slightly, that's just one of many ways that emotional instability expresses itself. You need to be able to have tolerance for your emotions in order to feel, appreciate, and ultimately process them. Lack of tolerance for affective states breeds repression and repression will give way to dysregulation.
To create tolerance to anything that we have developed a strong aversion to, we need to expose ourselves to an external stimulus for short periods of time, gradually increasing the length of exposure. What that looks like is just feeling the emotion to begin with.
This is crucial, but you may also be stopped from doing so by the fear of being swallowed whole by your emotions, as if your emotions will transform into a raging vortex and devour everything around you. And that's fair because you will most likely experience something similar when you begin truly feeling emotions for possibly the very first time in your life.
When you give yourself permission to truly validate an emotion, without judgment or criticism, it will suddenly flood your system. But instead of a vortex, picture a wave of energy or water(whichever you prefer). Rather than swallowing you, this wave will wash over you.
This powerful surge of energy will move through you, all of you, and facilitate a connection to your awareness. You will feel the weight of the emotion and realize what a burden you have been carrying by dismissing the aspect of you that holds it. You won't feel the force of that emotion all at once. As you deepen your connection to that emotion, it will gradually become a bit more intense before you finally release or integrate the emotion.
2. Be open
For some, staying open will be the toughest part of the process. You may have stuffed down some really powerful emotions when you were younger. It may have helped you get through a perilous childhood. Shutting down made the unbearable bearable. It worked for a period and now if you're ready for a new way to do things, staying open must be consciously practiced as much as possible.
It's okay to shut down when an experience becomes overwhelming no matter how brief or long that period may be. Dissociation and repression have their own special intelligence in the way of protecting us, but the key here is to rely on shutting down less and less often. You don't have to be perfect! That is the opposite of being human because being human means being messy.
Remember to take it easy, healing doesn't happen in a straight line. You can help yourself avoid entirely unnecessary strain by not judging or reacting to your emotions. Judgment will shut you down and impede your somatic journey.
Think of how hurtful criticism or rejection from another person can be, especially when they don't know you. It might make you feel the need to go somewhere and hide or become invisible. The same thing happens inside of you when you judge yourself.
Stay with the emotion. Flow with that which resides in you, and it won't be long at all before you can carry that emotion with you and transform it. There are powerful tools inside of you that you may have never known about or understood how to access.
3. Ask your emotions what they need
Feelings are not for losers. I promise. They make you human. Only people who never learned to embrace the tenderness and vulnerability of the heart actually believe that. But even they don't abide by that belief because the statement “feelings are for losers" is in itself loaded with emotional content.
The purpose of listening to emotions and not dismissing them is so that you have a deeper relationship with yourself. Seeing your wholeness is a beginning step to showing up authentically in the world. Embracing and loving your emotions and who you are is the cornerstone of authenticity. None of that happens when you suppress - there is no way to appreciate how unique you are when you suppress pieces of yourself because you believe you're safer that way.
To appreciate anything means to experience it in its fullness, and you cannot experience emotional sensations when they are being repressed. This is why asking yourself what can be done to fulfill the needs of a particular emotion is so life affirming and indicative of self reliance. When you show these aspects of your psyche that you care for the individual parts that make you as a person, you reinforce deep levels of trust in yourself and your decisions.
This measure of self reliance becomes deeply satisfying over time and is another great tool for regulating your nervous system. There are so many factors involved in cultivating authenticity, and self reliance is not to be overlooked, it goes hand in hand with trust. Practicing the art of self reliance will facilitate trust in yourself which will in turn contribute to anchoring into your authenticity.
To build this trust, tap into your emotions, talk to them; the nervous system has a voice and that means every single one of your feelings has a voice too. So, you want to get in touch with that voice and ask what it needs from you. Your job in this way is to listen to your emotions when they speak to you. They will guide you and direct you to the medicine you may be seeking.
Final Thoughts
All of your emotions are beautiful. Complexity and depth are faces of our sentient nature. When we discard our emotions, we also eliminate the beauty inherent in complexity and depth. Life can be tough, and every so often we need to assess whether the current tool set is working for us and getting the results we desire.
Again, I would like to reiterate that healing doesn't happen in a straight line, nor will it ever. The goal is to loosen the grip of emotional repression upon you gradually so that it is no longer a default coping mechanism to fall back on. You don't have to go cold turkey on suppression. Remember, I mentioned the value of emotional suppression as a prematurely developed coping mechanism when no other resources are available.
Don't set a goal to completely stop shutting down all at once, suddenly. That could yield negative consequences at the cost of your well-being. You don't need to overwhelm yourself by feeling more than you're ready to feel. Build your capacity for what you can handle and carry with you. Be gentle and make an effort to stay open.
If you're feeling a lot of resistance starting out or the emotions are overwhelming when they come to the surface, consider seeing a licensed therapist to guide you through that process. I find that somatic therapists are often very effective in the wisdom and training they employ to help their clients take charge of their struggles.
If you feel like you and your therapist aren't a match, then don't be afraid to say so. Work with someone who you feel good about. Mental wellness is all about making informed decisions that support you as an individual.
Additional Resources:
