How suffering in silence reduces our ability to enjoy our future.

This is a fairly quick post related to some thoughts and observations that I have about people in emotional pain.

I am seeing many clients who are struggling with emotional regulation because they have been trying to ignore their emotional pain. It totally makes sense, I should add, if our emotional pain makes it difficult for one to function then why don’t we do everything in our power to ‘switch the pain off’ so that we can get stuff done throughout the day. Sadly it doesn’t work like that. In fact, I believe that what happens is that in ignoring, distracting from or self-medicating for emotions, we are in effect kicking the can down the road and ultimately leaving ourselves open to breaking when further emotional turmoil takes place.

I have had many clients who experienced a bereavement that was so intense emotionally that it made it difficult to function and whilst grief can absolutely have this effect, it is made worse if one has had a bunch of bereavements that the emotional impact was not allowed to be expressed for. It is almost like all of the grief from previous bereavements finally get to land on the latest bereavement when one simply doesn’t have the strength to push it down and out of sight.

Every time we do that we expend energy and that process is subtractive. We lose something of ourselves unnecessarily. It is hard to process difficult feelings, but if we are not processing those feelings because of fear (for whatever reason) then we are essentially becoming an emotional ticking time bomb. No one deserves that.