Bottled-Up Emotions

At certain times in our lives, we may find ourselves blocked on an emotional level and unsure of how to express what we are feeling. We may not even be able to identify our mood but rather only perceive it as a phantom whose outline we are unable to make out.

The fact of the matter is that for different reasons, at some points in our lives, our emotions  become bottled up. As if they were locked up in a cage, resisting escape while they keep on creating a great uneasiness inside of us, influencing both our bodies as well as our relationships with others.

Has this ever happened to you?

Think about it for a minute…

Maybe you spent a few months wandering around in sadness without being able to cry, to externalize or share it. Maybe you felt powerless in the face of a situation that you found to be unfair, but you stayed quiet, you did not know how to identify your anger because of some letdown, you did not show how happy you were for fear that you would hurt someone’s feelings, or you simply had the sensation that you did not know how you felt, what you wanted, or where you were going in life…

You kept it to yourself, you held tight to poison just like a person who is guarding his treasure.

Whatever the situation or experience may be, you did not know how or were not able to express yourself fully; you repressed your emotions. They ended up being bottled up, that is to say, blocked and accumulating inside you.

Bottling your emotions keeps creating a burden, forming a dangerous emotional weight that is difficult to bear, sometimes having repercussions on our bodies.

We need to dig deeper

If we stop knowing and experiencing what we feel, be this 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; showing them is a privilege, as they are the bridge towards knowing ourselves and knowing what we need.

What happens is that most of the time, we have been taught since we were young to repress them, considering them dangerous and thus seeing it as normal to deny or control them. So, we learn from childhood to stop experiencing them and to send them into the unconscious part of our mind.

But emotions cannot be overcome if they are not expressed, thus remaining in some way inside of us, in our body, invading us.

The problem is that bottled-up emotions can end up becoming a way of being or of dealing with life, making an adult feel that it is completely normal to use emotional blockage as a form of protection against feeling so much pain.

So, we go on bearing burdens with a great amount of unrecognized pain that is never taken away, blocking our real needs and substituting them with false needs, not allowing ourselves to grow or evolve, and therefore limiting ourselves.

We disconnect from what we are feeling and we take no responsibility for it, letting our inner voice fall on deaf ears, living on autopilot, superficially…

And although it may be that feeling scares us, that it is difficult for us to express what is happening to us on the emotional level, or that we do not want to go through pain, being able to do this winds up being fundamental to our healing.

The problem comes, like we have already said, when we bottle up or repress what we are feeling, when we do not recognize our wounds, we go through life numb, as if we were asleep, because feelings, our emotions are energy, and if we do not express them, we end up no longer having it.

It is not bad to ask ourselves once in a while, especially before situations that are particularly important to us, what we are feeling and take a few minutes to reflect on ourselves in a completely honest way.

It is necessary for us to accept our whole range of emotions in order to have a fulfilled live, but also be careful not to express them in an extreme way. The secret is balance, middle ground.

For it is not so much about the degree to which we feel them, but being aware that our emotions work as indicators or alarms for what is happening inside of us.