The Damage of Avoiding Painful Emotions
Stuffing, minimizing, or ignoring difficult feelings seems more convenient in the moment, but long term wreaks havoc.
By Audrey Hardin, MS LPC
Do you find yourself or someone you love struggling to feel painful emotions? Even as a therapist, I can find myself right there with you!
I have seen first-hand what happens when feelings get stuffed to avoid hurting someone else or hurting myself, and I’m here to tell you that it wreaks havoc on every area of your life -socially, physically, and spiritually for starters.
Social Damage:
No matter what the social setting, whether at work, with family, or friends, if you cannot face the painful emotions, you inevitably will live a really shallow existence in your relationships.
Life is painful! We experience hurt and losses every day. If we avoid or stuff our emotions when hurts come, we quit sharing our real selves. Relationships where we are never our real selves isn’t fulfilling for ourselves or others, and they will usually drift apart.
Physical Damage:
Stuffing and avoiding our pain leads to significant health issues. Harvard Medical School reported bottling up emotions can cause a variety of gastrointestinal issues, increases your risk of heart attacks, kidney failure, migraines, and autoimmune diseases. Not to mention the Bible links our emotional pain with physical ailments throughout.
Psalm 38:3-8
“Because of your anger, my whole body is sick; my health is broken because of my sins. My guilt overwhelms me –it is a burden too heavy to bear…I am bent over and racked with pain.
All day long I walk around filled with grief. A raging fever burns within me, and my health is broken. I am exhausted and completely crushed. My groans come from an anguished heart.
Spiritual Damage:
When we hold our pain inside, seeking to cover it up or pretend everything is fine, we naturally develop a “false” or “presentational” self. This false self affects both our relationships with people and with God. We will never experience real comfort and connection to God if we are not honest about our true feelings.
This presentational self keeps us from receiving God’s acceptance and comfort. Instead, we grow further away from Him. stuck in shame and isolation much like Adam and Eve did.
Maybe, like them, you hold God responsible for your suffering, blaming him and resenting him for not giving you the life you imagined for yourself, so you hold onto your pain -allowing it to justify why you don’t have a deep relationship with Him.
This choice to stuff and hide your emotions keeps you stuck and wreaks havoc on your purpose and hope… setting you up for more suffering, just a different kind.
Where we got off track…
Just to validate you, I have yet to meet someone who had a great model of how to express emotions in a healthy way. Even having therapists as parents didn’t spare me!
Either we saw it modeled or were taught, to stuff, minimize, dismiss, or fix our emotions…especially the “bad” ones like anger or sadness.
Take a moment to consider what you saw growing up.
Maybe you were told that your feelings were hurting someone else, so don’t feel that way… “Stop crying, you’ll make your mom feel bad.”
Maybe you were labeled for any emotional expression “You’re such a [monster] or [crybaby] or [needy]”
Maybe only certain emotions were allowed like “happy” and “disappointed” but even feeling disappointment could only last a few minutes, then you needed to get busy being happy again.
Maybe you saw no emotional expression at all and shut down your emotions on your own because it appeared there was no place for them.
Maybe you saw an over dramatized view of emotions …emotions that ran the show and were used to manipulate your/your family’s behavior and you vowed never to be like that.
Looking at this list, it is easy to see why we don’t know how to handle emotions and why we need a new frame on them.
So, why are our feelings so important?
Feelings are a part of who we are as human beings. We aren’t just “thinking” and “doing” beings -we also feel.
First, feelings alert us to our reality.
For example, if we have lost something or someone and expressed zero sadness over the loss, we will inadvertently ignore, minimize, or invalidate our reality.
Second, paying attention to our emotions helps us face reality with maturity and authenticity.
Third, feelings reveal what we may need, like an indicator on your car.
If you feel anxious, you many need more information or comfort. If you feel overwhelmed, you learn you need to take something off your plate or ask for help.
Without acknowledging and actually feeling our feelings, we live shut down and disconnected lives …the opposite of God’s original design.
We were designed to be completely present and to be fully connected to self, God, and others
In the words of Dan Allender:
“To feel is human, to minimize or deny what we feel is a distortion of what it means to be image bearers of God. To the degree that we are unable to express our emotions, we remain impaired in our ability to love God, others and ourselves well” (Dan Allender, City of the Soul)
How do we face painful emotions in a healthy way?
1. Acknowledge Your Feelings
Take time to tune-in and name your feelings. “I feel agitated; humiliated; angry; afraid; deprived; abandoned; jealous; ashamed” etc. (Use a feelings word chart to help you target the most accurate feeling in the moment.) Check out this one.
We tend to minimize our feelings or project them onto others when we don’t accurately name them.
Spare yourself and others the grief and commit to checking in with yourself throughout the week.
When you notice your body getting tense or that knot in your stomach, stop, take a few deep breaths, and ask yourself what you’re feeling. It will be hard to come up with an answer if you’re out of practice, but it will get easier the more familiar you become.
2. Grieve the Pain
“Feelings are the antithesis of pain. The more pain one feels, the less pain one suffers.” -Arthur Janov
Our minds and bodies are designed to move through our pain by grieving it.
When we acknowledge the hurt or what we lost, feel the pain of that hurt or loss (sadness, anger, abandonment, etc.) and grieve it, we can move through it to the other side.
To grieve our losses and hurts is to reinforce our dignity as human beings. We have value as do others, and to breeze through or avoid this process is to say what happened to you didn’t matter because you don’t matter.
Imagine a death with no funeral. Take time to grieve and honor what you lost.
Learn more about grieving here:
https://www.hardinlife.com/blog/2021/11/6/could-grief-be-the-reason-you-struggle-with-self-confidence-or-anxiety
https://www.hardinlife.com/blog/2021/10/31/5-guides-to-grieve-well-with-cs-lewis
https://www.hardinlife.com/blog/2020/8/2/covid-19-how-to-grieve-and-resolve
3. Express Your Pain
We were never meant to go through life alone…especially not through our pain. We are to bear one another’s burdens. There is something so healing when we can express our heartache to someone else and have them comfort and validate our emotional experience.
Healthy expression of pain begins with you being willing to acknowledge your own feelings. Journaling is a great way to tune in. Not everyone is worthy or willing to hear your pain, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Find a trusted confidant or counselor to get out loud, validate you, comfort you, and encourage you.
Choosing to express our pain in a healthy way grows us to move forward to greater maturity and capacity but failing to do so results in emotional stuck-ness and stunted-ness.
When we express our emotional pain, it changes our relationships from shallow to deep, heals our body, and fosters intimacy with God.
Our goal should always be to respond to life embracing both the suffering and the joys as we see modeled throughout Scripture …to hold flowers and weeds in the same hand and trust that the Gardener has a plan for both.
Consider your next step to greater authenticity and healing today!
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Audrey Hardin is a Therapist, Speaker, and Workshop Leader at Hardin Life Resources in Dallas and McKinney, TX.
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