Are you bottling up your feelings?
Are you in emotional pain? Do you avoid that pain at all costs? How do you manage that pain? Do you find that the issues keep coming up time and time again? Are you “bottling up” your feelings?
Things happen to us in life that can be very hurtful and emotionally painful. We can suffer traumatic experiences that we do not want to talk about and want to bury in the hope that we can forget them. We can even bottle up feelings when we lose a loved one, which can cause a lot of problems. Grief, following a bereavement is a natural process that cannot and should not be suppressed.
I have a metaphor that I use and I would like to share it with you:
Imagine you have a nasty wound on you knee. It is very painful to touch and you are too afraid to let anyone see it or touch it. You find that if you take painkillers, they can control the pain and if you avoid touching it you can manage it okay.
However, every now and then you knock it or somebody else knocks it by accident and it hurts just as much as when you first wounded your knee. Eventually you decide I must deal with this. So, you get it treated. At first when the nurse starts to clean and treat the wound it is painful. But over time it starts to heal. Eventually it is just a scar on your knee. It does not hurt every day anymore. It may ache a little every now and then but the pain you felt before you got it treated has gone.
This metaphor of the wounded knee represents how I see emotional pain. Of course, if in reality we had an open wound on a part of our body we would get it treated immediately. So why do people bury emotions? Some people bury the pain as they see being emotional as a weakness. They may come from a background where the message had been “be strong”. They may come from a background where emotions are seen as indulgent and have been told to “snap out of it”. Or they maybe just trying to avoid the pain.
Avoidance is a popular coping mechanism. We can avoid touching the wound by burying it and never talking about it or we can self-medicate with substances such as alcohol, food or shopping in order to distract from or numb the pain, which in itself can then create another problem.
Bottling up our feelings does not make them go away. Just as the wound on the knee would not heal on its own and without treatment, could lead to infection and other problems, so can bottling up our emotions. They will eventually emerge and probably in an unconstructive way.
Talking to a counsellor or somebody you trust about something that is causing you emotional pain can help it lose its power. Saying the words can bring the emotion into focus and feel painful at first, but once you start to talk about it you are starting to treat the wound. Your emotions are communicating to you that something is wrong. Just like the metaphor of the wounded knee. Physical pain tells us something needs treating and emotional pain is doing the same. So, letting those emotions out in a safe environment is the first step to feeling better and moving forward.