Avoiding Your Feelings? Here Are 4 Things To Do About It
Self-preservation is at the core of a person’s mental health. Brains like to protect their bodies, and your psyche wants nothing more than for you to be happy. Funny, right? Yeah, it tends to get stuck along the way.
This happens because signals often get lost in translation. While every message our brain sends us is very important, it doesn’t mean that they’re always correct. Most of the time, past experiences cause your psyche to misinterpret messages and overreact, jumping into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn to protect you.
For example, think of the last stressful situation you encountered. How did you react? See which of the options below seems most familiar to you:
Fight: Anger, irritability, insulting, blaming, dominating others
Flight: Fear, panicking, running away, denying, sabotaging
Freeze: Feeling stuck, dissociating, shutting down, emptiness, numbness
Fawn: People pleasing, keeping loose boundaries, avoiding conflict, allergic to saying no, being indecisive and codependent
Our brains love patterns, and they love feeling control. That’s why it becomes really easy for them to create shortcuts and misinterpret events when they believe you’ll be threatened.
If a person experienced negative responses to emotions in the past, their brains may have taught them that honesty = isolation. For example, if a child is told to “get over it,” that they need to “man up,” or that they should “just be grateful and not complain,” they learn to believe that their negative feelings aren’t valid.
When the whole spectrum of their emotions is dismissed, children learn to associate affection (or safety) with being “easy to handle” and complacent.
Can you see how sequential it can be to think that repressing thoughts and feelings will be protective?
The reality of it is that suppressing your thoughts isn’t healthy! It not only teaches you that you don’t deserve the space to feel what you feel, but it lets these thoughts and feelings fester, building up and up and up until they’re so big that they become even harder to control.
In fact, it’s common for people who repress their feelings to have even higher levels of mental distress and experience conflict in their relationships. It’s even easier to invite unhealthy coping mechanisms like violence, substance use, and volatile relationships with food, sex, and money into the picture.
If you’re fed up with feeling like you don’t have a voice in your friendships, of thinking that you’re really upset and can’t say anything about it in fear that others will think, or if you’ve been through a really intense situation and just don’t feel affected by it at all, you may be repressing your feelings.
Try these tips on how to practice feeling your emotions:
ACKNOWLEDGE WHAT YOU’RE FEELING
Take a moment to question how you’re feeling. How are you sitting right now? Do you feel tension anywhere? Does your left knee hurt a little? What about your lower back? Does your face feel hot or cold? Are you feeling any butterflies?
Try using mindfulness exercises like deep breaths or a body scan. This helps you stop and realize what’s truly happening in your body and gain more insight onto what you may be feeling right now.
NAME THE EMOTIONS
Once you’ve started to pinpoint these feelings, name them appropriately. Use tools like The Feelings Wheel to distinguish what you’re feeling.
What’s at the core of it? Are you angry? How can you tell? Do you think you may actually be feeling sadness or rejection? Does this line up with what your body is telling you?
PUT IT ON PAPER
Practice journaling about these findings. It helps to explore why you think you feel this way and where you think it might come from.
Ask yourself: Have you felt this way before? What do these reactions remind you of? Are you upset about how you’re feeling? Ashamed?
Your journal will never judge you! It helps to move these thoughts, and the act of writing feels like releasing them. You can even throw the paper away or delete the document when you’re finished.
PRACTICE
It takes time, vulnerability, and lots of effort to undo the rules your brain has set for so long. Make sure to practice stopping yourself and identifying your emotions. This is especially helpful when you’re feeling the pull to jump into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
You can also talk to a therapist about how you’re feeling – they won’t judge you either! Therapy can help you identify these feelings and where they might be coming from, as well as give you insight on what healthy reactions and emotions might look like.
If you’re feeling stuck or like you’ve been holding onto the mask for so long, don’t lose hope! This isn’t the end, and help is just one click away.