What happens when we suppress some of our emotions.

Man for me is a great miracle, which is able internally to accommodate a myriad of information, create relations to that information and at the same time to protect himself from the painful experience. It happens that I see in front of me a people who are like music boxes: some are dusty, scary even to touch, some are nice and so sweet packed, that I want to roll out them. But most probably I want to hear their melody created by their emotions.

People often ask what the difference between emotions and feelings is. From the neurophysiologic side, it is different things. Emotions are reaction of our sub cortical brain structures that operate unconsciously to the environmental change. This is a strong unconscious reaction caused automatically by the nervous system to any situation. Feelings are the only emotions that reach the cortex from the sub cortical and get the name. From that moment when we perceive our emotion and name it, it becomes a feeling.

It sometimes happens that emotions remain not perceived, as if they settle on the “bottom”, and the man looks like he does not feel anything. However, they are not disappearing anywhere and accumulated send signals to the body. Then people complain experiencing muscular tension, periodically recurring headache or stomach pain, strange sensations in the chest area, and so on. They are going to health institutions, anxiously looking for the reasons of experienced discomfort, but when they hear the diagnosis “healthy” or a strange “psychosomatic” diagnosis, they get even more anxious.

People create their own present based on past emotional experiences. Since the first months of life the baby is facing an environment that accepts or not his emotions. Mom helps a child to develop a connection with his inner experience, reflecting and naming what it is. When the child gets the support and understanding that all his experienced feelings are normal, he feels safe and accepted. He is not afraid to feel the feelings and learn ways of expression. But it happens in the family that negative feelings are undesirable and child attempts to suppress them as undesirable and bad. In most cases, it is anger, sadness, feelings of helplessness and the like.

If the mother does not take a child’s anger, he learns not to be angry; if to feel sadness is not manly -boys learn not to cry and so on.  Are those feelings disappearing somewhere? Unfortunately, not. It reveals itself by other forms of expression, usually the opposite. One who never is angry becomes passively aggressive.

It is becoming popular in our culture the belief, that get a positive attitude and everything will be solved. However, only joyful slogans are not suitable for life to develop. Supporters of positive thinking argue that with the “right” thinking can be constructed own world and achieved everything you want. Sometimes people so strong begin to believe that “negative” thoughts and feelings are completely unproductive, even harmful. The person begins to be afraid of his feelings and begins to deny part of them.

No matter how we would like to feel only the “good feelings”, but it is impossible. There is a whole package.

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