What Happens When We Push Emotions Down? |
Modern life is challenging, fraught with unrelenting pressures and volatility. Our culture, and often our upbringing, teaches us that emotional strength equals control; rather than working through or processing difficult emotions, like anger, grief, shame, and fear, we learn to push feelings aside and ‘get over it’. Don’t dwell. Don’t fall apart. Be positive. Get a grip. We learn to project an image of unrealistic stability and strength, while ignoring our actual mental state. When these directives are internalized, we must manage ourselves in ways that can negatively affect health, both physical and mental. Avoiding, intellectualizing, suppressing, and repressing feelings may get us through the day, but unexpressed emotions do not spontaneously dissipate.
When emotions are chronically ignored or inhibited, the unprocessed feelings can remain stuck, buried outside a person’s awareness, affecting the body and the mind. When suppression is used as a primary, habitual response, the body is more stressed state and reactive (Tyra, Fergus, and Ginty, 2023). The nervous system holds those things that have never been fully processed. In daily life, this can translate into physiological and psychological distress, including irritability, hyper-vigilance, rumination, depression, emptiness, somatic distress, exhaustion, difficulty identifying emotions, compulsive productivity, substance use, and relationship problems (Patel and Patel, 2019). Interestingly, somatic symptoms are often misread as being purely physical problems. Research suggests that people with unprocessed emotions, especially related to