How Avoiding Your Feelings As You Grow Up Can Affect You.

Being taught how to regulate your emotions is a massively underrated skill.

One that's crucial for creating and maintaining the relationships in our lives — both personal and professional.

Unfortunately, our education system only focuses on math, science, and history topics, not giving much attention to life skills — if you live in the USA.

Knowing how to process your feelings and make sense of them is something we need to learn.

This skill is essential as adults so we can have healthy and thriving relationships.

Avoiding your feelings creates a disconnect between you and your emotions — you feel like a sociopath.

When I started counseling, I felt like a shell of a person.

I remember sitting across the computer, meeting my counselor for the first time over Zoom, and her asking me questions about how I felt.

That was the funny part. I couldn't tell her.

Growing up, I remember multiple occasions when showcasing feelings of sadness or being upset resulted in rejection and even anger.

This led to feeling unworthy of support and comfort.

This also taught me that I was better off shoving those feelings aside and not showing them — not crying in front of anyone.

This led to not sharing my problems.

Most of the time, I shared good news, never the bad. I remember feeling a ball in my throat and a sinking feeling in my stomach anytime there was bad news to share.

I began to expect the worst, leading to a people-pleasing mentality.

The only way I would be okay was by ensuring everyone around me was happy.

This created a huge disconnect between myself and my feelings and very low self-esteem in the long term.

I remember when I was older, between nineteen and twenty-two, when I questioned whether my feelings were real.

There were times when I felt like I couldn't feel anything.

When situations happened, like getting bad news or something not going according to plan, I thought, 'I'm supposed to feel this way about this situation, but I feel nothing right now.'

Ignoring my feelings made me feel so lost.

You become unpredictable, even to yourself, because you don't know why you're reacting or not reacting a certain way.

This is emotional immaturity to a T.

When you're disconnected and disassociated from your emotions, you don't know how you'll react if your emotions boil to the surface.

Or, from the example above, when things happen, you don't react as you think you're supposed to.

You don't know yourself, so why would you suddenly be able to deal with an emotional outburst or lack thereof?

More importantly, you'll feel completely out of control when your feelings and emotions do show.

I remember this absence of feeling and emotion and direction or guidance.

I would also experience the opposite — I remember feeling perplexed and overwhelmed by the different voices and opinions in my head.

This makes you think something must be wrong with you because you can't get a handle on it.

You also feel something is deeply wrong with you because you can't feel excited, happy, or joyful.

This is the other side that’s rarely heard of — leading to my next point and perhaps the worst consequence of not learning to feel your emotions.

Not feeling your emotions robs you of the ability to feel JOY.

Soon after I started counseling, I came across the works of Brene Brown.

I'm sure many of you know about her or have heard her name.

I started reading some of her books and listening to her TED talks and podcasts.

I remember one thing she said that has stuck with me to this day — you can only feel joy to the degree you can feel sadness and disappointment.

After hearing this, it finally clicked.

I was unable to feel excited, happy, and joyous due to spending so much energy and time making sure I didn't feel uncomfortable emotions like sadness and disappointment.

I wasn't taught how to handle these uncomfortable emotions. The only thing I knew to do was shove them deep down.

What I didn't know is in that process, I was taking away my ability to feel other, more comfortable emotions like excitement and happiness.

Most of us don't realize this is happening until we're adults, or we don't realize it at all, and we spend our lives wondering why we're such a mess in our minds.

If you feel like you’re a mess and you’re all over the place, and it must be because something is deeply wrong, it may be this — you haven’t learned to process your emotions and understand what they’re telling you.

The key to making sense of them is getting to know yourself and learning to become self-aware.

Here’s a blog I wrote that might be a starting point:

I hope this is eye-opening and informative and can help you on your healing journey.