7 Signs of Unresolved Emotional Suffering
It’s a mistake to think that difficult situations, ones that have caused you a lot of unresolved emotional suffering, get better just by letting time go by. Not being impulsive, or thinking about something else, usually isn’t enough.
The problem, or the trauma, might close up instead of improving. That’ll make it even harder to get the suffering to stop, even though each X on the calendar might make the pain a little duller.
In general, wallowing in your pain forever or avoiding it aren’t good solutions. You have to really make an effort to digest your painful experiences. In other words, you need to truly understand them and change the mark they make on your life.
Most of the time, when you have some kind of unresolved emotional suffering, life starts to get complicated. You have a chronic bad temper, your immune system gets weaker, and it’s really hard to focus on things.
You feel bad, but you can’t figure out exactly where the problem is coming from. These are just some of the signs that you need to work through something in your past.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
-Viktor Frankl-
1. Trouble controlling your anger
This is one of the most common signs of unresolved emotional suffering. It enters your life in the form of constant irritation. You get angry over just about anything, and you start arguing or having conflicts with other people a lot. You’re constantly in a bad mood, and there’s nothing anyone can do or say to get you out of it.
It’s like there’s a deep rage inside you that just won’t go away. The way you express your anger starts to get way over the top. You have violent explosions of rage more and more often. You might even start to try and change your behavior, but can’t pull it off in the end.
You go through your days asking for forgiveness and get angry with yourself too. On top of that, you constantly look for things to justify your anger. The truth is that deep down you might be dealing with unresolved emotional suffering.
2. Instability in your social relationships
It’s not always easy to notice, but your relationships with other people change. Suddenly everyone seems boring, not worth your attention, or honestly just unbearable. It’s hard for you to see the good side in anyone around you. Instead, you end up finding all their faults.
You might feel like going out and meeting up with someone, but right before you leave, you change your mind and get into bed. You make up excuses so that you don’t have to share things you used to. You feel like you prefer to be alone, but you’re not comfortable then either.
3. Personal neglect
People who love themselves and value who they are and what they have to take care of themselves and everything else. We’re not just talking about your external appearance, though. It also has to do with just about anything related to your routine. For example, your eating schedule might start to become completely random.
It happens with sleep too: you either do it too much or too little. Your regular habits basically just go out of control. Some people even start to put themselves into situations that are dangerous for their physical health or their integrity.
4. Hopelessness, another sign of unresolved emotional suffering
Hopelessness is like the feeling of having a compass that doesn’t work, where you can’t find north. It has to do with the kind of thought that nothing will ever change in the future.
You think you’re in a bad situation and everything is going to stay that way no matter what you do. When you look ahead all you see is an endless repetition of all the same things. You feel no interest or enthusiasm at all about what’s ahead for you.
This feeling of hopelessness might just come around every once in a while, or it could even be permanent. If it last a long time you might feel like you’re about to lose your mind or put an end to it all. If you get to that point, it means you need help.
5. Compulsions and obsessive thoughts
When you have unresolved emotional suffering, your head fills up with really irrational, unlikely fears and worries. They might even start to be obsessive. For example, you might start to think there’s going to be a fire in your house.
So day after day, over and over again, you try to find all the causes for this imaginary fire that’s entirely in your head, which is exactly why you’re so scared of it. Every. Single. Day.
Compulsive behaviors generally start as a kind of instant (but not long-lasting) remedy for your obsessions. But they end up making your a prisoner to your obsessions. It might seem like the best way to deal with them at first, but in the long run all you’re doing is feeding them.
6. Fatigue
A lot of people with unresolved emotional suffering start to feel tired all the time. It happens on both a mental and a physical level. It’s like you don’t have the energy for anything like what used to be a nice, gentle hill has turned into a steep rock wall.
This lack of energy also leads you to live a more sedentary life. When you have free time you spend it in bed watching TV or taking a nap. You don’t feel like you have the strength to do anything besides saving your energy to climb the walls that have just shown up in your life.
7. Lack of desire
A deeply set emotional suffering can also bring down your levels of sexual desire. But it goes beyond not wanting to have sex, it also means losing interest in caressing and being caressed, in seducing and being seduced.
Losing that sense of desire also means losing a source of pleasure. It was an activity that used to give life some color and strengthened your bonds with your partner too. So it’s also not uncommon for your intimacy with that other person to be threatened without these moments.
The worst part is that it happens right when you need their support the most. Getting their empathy becomes harder at just the wrong time.
All these things can be signs that you have unresolved emotional suffering. It’s somewhere in your past. You might be able to figure out where the pain is coming from sometimes, but other times no.
Either way, you’re in a situation that cries out for help from a trained professional. It might surprise you just how much they can assist you.
