What The Feelings You Most Suppress Are Trying To Tell You

Sadness will not kill you. Depression won’t either. But fighting it will.

By Brianna Wiest

Emotional intelligence is not how infrequently you feel anything “bad” because you’ve developed the discipline and wisdom “not to.” It’s not how easily you choose what you think, how you let it affect you, or how placidly you react to any given situation.

Real emotional maturity is how thoroughly you let yourself feel anything. Everything. Whatever comes. It is simply the knowing that the worst thing that could ever happen… is just a feeling at the end of the day.

That’s it! A feeling. Imagine the very worst, the only thing bad about it is… how you would feel about it. What you would make it out to be, what you’d assume the repercussions mean, and how those would ultimately affect… how you feel.

A sense of fear, a pinch or throb or sting. A hunger pang or ego kick. The sense of worthlessness, the idea of not belonging. (Interesting how physical feelings are always quick and transient, but the ideas we hold of pain always seem to stick around…)

But we avoid feeling anything because we have more or less been taught that our feelings have lives of their own. That they’ll carry on forever if we give them even a moment of our awareness.

Have you ever felt joy for more than a few minutes? What about anger? No? How about tension, depression and sadness? Those have lasted longer, haven’t they? Weeks and months and years at a time, right?

That’s because those aren’t feelings. They are symptoms. But we’ll get to their causes in a minute.

What you have to know is that suffering is just the refusal to accept what is. That’s it. Etymologically, it comes from the Latin word to “from below to bear.” Or, to “resist, endure, put under.”

So healing is really just letting yourself feel.

It is unearthing your traumas and embarrassments and losses and allowing yourself the emotions that you could not have in the moment that you were having those experiences. It’s letting yourself filter and process what you had to suppress at the time to keep going, maybe…

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