Bottled Up Emotions

At certain times in our lives, we may feel emotionally blocked and unsure of how to express what we are feeling. We may not even be able to identify our mood, but merely perceive it as a shadow whose contours we cannot make out.

The point is that for various reasons, at certain points in our lives, our emotions get bottled up. As if they are locked in a cage and resisting escape while continuing to create a great turmoil in us and affect both our bodies and our relationships with others.

Has this ever happened to you?

Think about it for a minute…

You may have walked around with sadness for a few months without being able to cry, express it, or share it. Perhaps you have felt powerless in a situation that you felt was unfair, but remained silent, did not know how to identify your anger because of disappointment, did not show how happy you were for fear that you could feelings hurt or did you just feel like you didn’t know how you felt, what you wanted or where you were going in life…

You kept it to yourself, you held on tight to poison, like a person who guards his treasure.

Whatever the situation or experience, you didn’t know how or you weren’t able to fully express yourself; you suppressed your emotions. Eventually they got bottled up, that is, blocked and growing inside you.

If you bottle up your emotions, it continues to create a burden, a dangerous emotional weight, which is difficult to bear and which sometimes has repercussions on our bodies.

We need to dig deeper

When we stop knowing and experiencing what we feel, consciously or unconsciously, we stop being connected to ourselves.

Emotions are necessary and it is useful to feel them. It is very important to allow yourself to have them; to show them is a privilege, because they are the bridge to knowing ourselves and to knowing what we need.

What happens is that we have usually learned from our early years to suppress them, view them as dangerous and thus see it as normal to deny or control them. Thus we learn from an early age to stop experiencing them and to send them to the unconscious part of our mind. But emotions cannot be overcome if they are not expressed,  so they remain in us, in our bodies in a way and invade us.

The problem is that pent up emotions can eventually become a way of being or coping with life; that  leaves an adult feeling that it is perfectly normal to use an emotional block as a form of protection from feeling so much pain.

So we continue to carry heavy burdens with a great deal of unrecognized pain that is never taken away, we block our real needs and replace them with false needs and do not allow ourselves to grow or evolve and thus limit ourselves .

We disconnect from what we feel and we take no responsibility for it, our inner voice falls on deaf ears, we live on autopilot, superficially…

And while it may be that feeling scares us, that it is difficult for us to express what is happening to us emotionally or that we do not want to feel pain, the ability to do this is ultimately fundamental to our healing. .

The problem comes, as we have said, when we bottle up or suppress what we feel, when we don’t recognize our wounds, we go through life numb, as if we were asleep; because feelings, our emotions, are energy and if we don’t express them, we eventually don’t have them anymore.

It’s not bad to occasionally ask ourselves, especially in situations that are particularly important to us, what we’re feeling and take a few minutes to think about ourselves in a completely honest way. 

It is necessary for us to accept our full range of emotions in order to have a fulfilled life, but also be careful not to express them in an extreme way. The secret is balance, the middle ground. Because it’s not so much about how much we feel them, but about realizing that our emotions act as indicators and alarms for what’s happening inside.