There are all sorts of people in the world; in a lifetime, you’ll get a chance to interact with a myriad of personalities, outgoing, pleasant, disturbing and so on and so forth. Some say that being an outgoing person that expresses one’s feeling is the best thing there is. True? Who knows?
I am quite the opposite. I find it hard to interact with people I don’t know; it takes a lot out of me to befriend someone new. But that’s not all. I also belong to the category of people who don’t express their feelings. You know, the ones that are prone to emotional repression.
To be quite honest, it has done its damage over the years, but there is nothing I can do. It’s just the way I am. If something is bothering me, I’m not the kind of person that will outright say what it is that troubles me.
It’s not something my parents taught me or something I acquired along the way; I was born that way. Even as a child, I remember people, relatives and friends, commenting on my “reserved” personality.
Are you the same type? Do you tend to repress your feelings until they burst out like an erupting volcano?
Here’s how we unconsciously deal with our unexpressed feelings:
1.Dealing with someone else’s emotions is way easier than dealing with your own. Do you do this? I sure do. I often try to help my friends with their issues and rarely speak of my own.
Probably because I’m afraid to confront my emotions and confronting someone else’s emotions is no “biggie”. I’m usually the “shoulder to cry on” and people often refer to me as “strong” and “brave”. Not true. I have plenty of fears but rarely do I express what’s on my mind.
2. Ditching friends and disappearing for a while. Whenever someone doesn’t act or react the way I expect them to, I find that I am disappointed in that particular person and I always take some time off. Meaning, I don’t call, I don’t ask them out…
I basically disappear from their lives until the uneasiness settles. It usually does and those who know me, don’t take it to heart. I’ve had the same friends for decades and they do admit that it bothers them, but they know that I’m an introvert and that something provoked that reaction on my part, so there’s never any hard feelings. Still, not a good way to deal with a situation.
3. The best way to avoid facing your feelings and fears: keep busy! I’m basically a workaholic. I love working, love chores, love tidiness. If I’m busy, I don’t have time to think or to deal with my emotions.
4. Irrational anxieties pop up all over the place. Repressed emotions will surface one way or the other. You can’t hide from them, you can’t erase them, so developing a number of irrational fears and anxieties is the side-effect. I’m scared of all sorts of things, I think about things a normal person doesn’t – a plane crash, my parents dying of cancer and so on. It never ends.
5. I’m fine. Remember when Ross constantly claimed he was fine with Rachel dating Joey? That’s what happens when you repress your emotions. You keep on saying “I’m fine” even when you’re not.
6. Every cloud has a silver lining – that’s what you cling onto when you try to deal with a negative situation that has prompted negative feelings. You try to put a positive spin on everything and you think it works. It doesn’t. It will come back to bite you in the ass.
7. Being a control freak – trying to control everything, all the time, trying to plan every single future step you take. That’s another thing that keeps you “safe”.
8. Always picking the wrong guy/girl – why? Because that way you feel emotionally protected, you think… scratch that, you know that you won’t get emotionally attached or too intimate.
9. It’s all just a big joke you – you keep turning every grim situation into a joke, trying to laugh it off and keep the pain at bay. That’s another way of dealing with your emotions.
10.Nothing can touch you, you are rock solid. You always present yourself as a strong person, nothing can touch you, but there is no such thing as a person without emotions, so hard as you might try to portray yourself as strong, people know better than to judge a book by its “rock” solid cover.
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A professional writer with over a decade of incessant writing skills. Her topics of interest and expertise range from health, nutrition and psychology.
