Remember how easily your emotions came when you were a child?
You rolled around on the floor when you laughed and you never worried about whether you looked silly.
When you fell and skinned your knee, you wailed loudly and cried hot tears. You screamed in anger when your brother threw your favorite doll in the mud.
Most of the time, you never questioned whether these emotions made sense–you just expressed what you felt. Then you began to grow up. Little by little, you became more proper and changed how you showed your feelings.
Where did your emotions go?
Think about how you express your emotions now. Perhaps you rarely show anger and you certainly never cry. Instead of reacting when you feel sad or disappointed, you quietly push your thoughts aside and go on. In your mind, you believe you are in control of your feelings.
But emotions don’t exist in isolation–they are all connected to each other.
Picture a long cord with uncomfortable emotions such as anger, sadness, loneliness and boredom listed on the left end. The right end of the cord holds positive feelings such as love, happiness, sexuality and peacefulness.
Negative emotions ****** YOU ****** Positive emotions
When you pull in one side of the cord, the other side pulls in too. So as you train yourself to never feel negative emotions such as anger or sadness, you also decrease your ability to feel positive ones such as true joy, peace or connection.
The emotional box
If you block your emotions long enough, you can become so good at it that you stop feeling much of anything. You gradually build an invisible wall, sort of an “emotional box” around yourself to keep your feelings inside at all times.
In this protected box, you continue to function as you always have. You go to work, you raise your children, you visit your mother. To the world, you look fine, but in truth, you’ve buried your authentic self.
Inside the box, you live in a neutral zone where you are emotionally dull. Without the ability to feel and express emotions, you disconnect yourself from life. Eventually, your zest for living slips away and intimate relationships become a chore.
Eating instead of feeling
If you seem to be getting along fine without your emotions, why bother uncovering them? After all, you know your feelings can be very painful, and you’d rather not experience that discomfort. What you don’t realize is that your emotions come out in some different way such as overeating.
When I was using food to deal with my grief issues, my counselor told me, “You’re eating instead of crying.” Of course, I didn’t want to cry. I hated crying, and I was trying to avoid it at all costs. But my depression as well as my weight struggles were clear signs that I had to change how I dealt with my feelings.
Maybe in the past, talking about your feelings made things worse. Since it won’t change anything, you may believe that it’s futile to drag out your emotions and feel the pain again.
Unfortunately, living in the emotional box isn’t great either. To keep your feelings from creeping in, you have to constantly insulate the walls, usually by stuffing yourself with food.
At the same time, you may be afraid to ever crawl out of the box. Once you allow yourself to start feeling again, you’ll probably have to deal with some emotional pain, which doesn’t appeal to you either.
Be willing to feel
In all likelihood, most of your emotions aren’t really gone; they’ve just become dormant. Reviving them might be as simple as adjusting the way you think about life. Once you bring your emotions out into the open, you may even feel relieved.
Facing your emotions doesn’t have to destroy you. When you take your feelings out of the dark, it makes them less scary. You may discover that your grief, anger, and even bitterness aren’t as intense as you remembered.
You also will get a fresh view of how they connect to your eating. Knowing exactly which ones are driving you toward food can boost your confidence around coping with your feelings.