is it possible to suppress your emotions? i think it is because i havent felt anything in a long time. every time i feel something stirring in me i push it down and think of something else. im so empty. nothing means anything anymore. -givinup
Yes it’s definitely possible to suppress your emotions! Having said that, it isn’t really healthy. You see, by suppressing those emotions, you’re keeping them bottled up. This means that they’re staying inside you. And because every time you experience an emotion you push it down there, at some point it’s going to get too much. And let me tell you, that isn’t fun to go through.
I often look at suppressing your emotions through a metaphor. When I was a kid and on a holiday, I’d also go swimming in the pool and often me and my brother would play with a ball in the water or something. It was always super fun to push the ball under the water and then have it bounce out of the water, do you know what I mean? I think this represents suppressing your emotions really well though. The ball stands for your emotions, and keeping the ball under water thus stands for suppressing your emotions. But there’s going to be a point where that ball bounces out of the water. You might have used all your strength keeping it under water, or there’s a split second where you lose control and then the ball jolts upwards. This can happen for your emotions too. What you see at the ball is that it gets out of the water with a lot of strength and speed. This represent the intensity of the emotions that you experience once you’ve been suppressing them too long and it gets too much.
When you’ve been suppressing your emotions for such a long time already, it can be really difficult to do things differently. You might want to look into mindfulness, we have a page explaining it here. It can help to take a break and focus on what is going on, around you but also within you. How are you feeling? That’s a difficult question to answer, especially at first, but you can get better at answering!
You might also want to consider keeping a journal, so that you get more in touch with the things that are happening in your life. Besides that, you’ll want to look into why you’re suppressing those emotions. Do you have any idea? It might be because you never learned how to manage your emotions, or because you were taught to hide them as a kid. Or because you find emotions really scary and you’re too afraid to deal with them. I personally struggle a lot with the latter, also because I don’t always have the trust in myself that I’ll able to manage my emotions. I always think it’s going to be too overwhelming and difficult. But a really good friend of mine sent me a card with a really really good mantra on it and I’d like to share it with you.
“Feelings are just visitors, let them come and go.”
So while I definitely agree with you that feelings are really scary, at the same time they’re also just visitors. They won’t last forever, there will be a time that they go. Repeating this for yourself can make it seem more possible to start letting those feelings in. I do also think it’d be really beneficial for you to see a professional about this though! Suppressing your emotions isn’t easy to just stop doing, and you deserve all the help you can get! You can read more about getting professional help here. I hope this was at least a little bit helpful, let us know if there’s anything else we can do!
Sometimes what seems impossible, is just hard.
Keep fighting beautiful <3
