Unpacking your emotions: Why bottling things up doesn’t work
Keeping emotions bottled up can lead to stress, anxiety, and exhaustion.
Learn why repression isn’t the answer and how therapy provides a safe space to unpack, heal, and move forward with more ease and self-compassion.
Ignorance is bliss?
Wouldn’t it be easy if we could just pack up our troubles and box them away in a dusty old loft! I come across this metaphor quite often. Clients may say, “I can’t keep the lid on things anymore”, “I just kept putting it in the box and closing the lid”, “there’s a box I haven’t opened yet.”
Sometimes, in order for survival and self-protection or just as a means to function on a day-to-day basis, we might need to ignore difficult emotions, memories or experiences. Who wouldn’t want to pack that stuff away and box it up? However, in this case, ignorance isn’t bliss. We don’t know how these feelings and experiences may be affecting us and it isn’t sustainable to keep pushing them away.
No more room
At some point, we may start to struggle and become forced to recognise that the box has no more room in it. We become more aware that the mental effort and energy keeping a lid on things is draining us and affecting how we’re living, and more importantly, how we’re able to enjoy life.
In therapeutic terms, this can be known as repression (the act of suppressing a thought or desire so that it becomes or remains unconscious). We may not really know we’re doing it. The brain is a clever thing.
Someone who is constantly trying to “keep a lid” on their difficulties is probably not functioning in a relaxed or particularly healthy way. The box may be bulging and barely holding together so there will be lots of pent up energy, anxiety, avoidance, and denial. Thoughts such as, “I’ll just keep going”, “I need to keep busy all the time, then I’ll feel ok”, or even OCD tendencies, “If I keep my house meticulously clean then the thoughts won’t be able to affect me”, are all ways around dealing with the problem. We need to stop and work on the core issue.
Lifting the lid
One of the aims of some types of therapy is to make the unconscious conscious. Your therapist, as an objective other person unrelated to you and those in your life, can work out the ways you deal with difficulties. While it’s painful to think about “lifting the lid” on your box of potentially traumatic experiences and emotions to peek inside, you are in a safe space with your therapist to do so. He/she/they will be taking care of you and helping you to take care of yourself when those difficult emotions gradually become more conscious.
“It’s so hard to say out loud”
One of the more gentle ways of getting to those difficult feelings is to talk about the ‘box’ more often. Rather than starting with what’s in the box, we might describe the box or think about what it would mean to peek inside. There may be some things you’ve never shared with anyone, ever. How scary would it be to actually bring those ‘secrets’ into reality? There’s no better place to do this than in the safe room with your therapist. Your therapist will not judge you. Your therapist will accept you for all that you are, even with the new information you share. Your therapist will hear you and ultimately have a better understanding of you - how you function and how those experiences and emotions have shaped you as a person and your life.
Relief
It may take some time for us to ‘clear out’ the box. This requires courage and giving yourself permission to be vulnerable. It is not weak, but quite the opposite. It is very brave to make a start on working through your ‘stuff’. It is also an overwhelming relief and release to ‘offload’ those very dark things that you’ve been afraid of thinking about or acknowledging. I’ve heard clients say many times, “I feel so much lighter”, “it’s like a weight has been lifted”.