LIFE SKILLS | MENTAL WELLBEING | EMOTIONS
How Your Unchecked Emotions Make You A Ticking Time Bomb
This is what is keeping you stuck and you can learn how to get unstuck.
Sally works 60 grueling hours a week moving from ward to ward, providing medication to patients, making sure the pharmacy at the hospital is stocked up and well-organized, besides inputting bar codes to their newly updated pharmacy and training her team of newbies. She has no time to sit down and have a peaceful lunch. She sleeps from 1am to 5am everyday, reports to a boss who buys presents for everyone except her, refuses to acknowledge her presence, barks orders at her and questions everything she does. Half the staff has left the hospital because of the toxic work environment and added work pressure, which increases Sally’s work load. Thus, Sally ends up shouting at the newbies for being irresponsible and not sharing the work load.
Once Sally’s home, she gets calls and messages from her mean boss asking if she did “this” job or “that” job. In the remaining part of her evening, she’s often scrolling through Instagram watching images of beautiful couples posing at beaches, or having romantic dinners or in their wedding outfits in order to avoid the pain of her day, even playing Netflix in the background to drown out the mental nonsense.
Sally is an average looking bespectacled good-natured 36 year old single woman. She loves to have dinners with her group of friends whom she’s known since her University days. One by one she sees them getting married. She hates being the only one who isn’t married yet.
She has dreams of her wedding day. Maybe even having a baby. A husband. A family of her own. She lives in a shared apartment, away from distant aunts who love to comment on what outfit she should wear, how she should do her hair and take better care of herself. She’s swiping left and right on dating apps, chatting up guys, looking to find someone to click with.
Sally is my client. During most coaching calls we’ve had together, fifty percent of the time she is explaining herself away. She has no one. Absolutely no one. No one understands her. No one listens to her. No one can openly share her troubles, her intimate affairs, desires, hopes, dreams. Except with me. And I’m out of fingers to count the number of times she’s cried her heart out on our calls.
She’s torn apart on the inside. Confused. Lost. She puts up a brave front with a fake smile, which I recognize. She, like a lot of working women who value their careers, doesn’t know her value. Even though she was promoted after 5 long years of toiling away in the corridors and wards of the hospital, she lacks peace within. She loves her career. But her career doesn’t love her back.
She’s investing with men who don’t love her back either.
Sally is a walking time bomb. Each call I’m diffusing a ticking time bomb just a little bit.
Stop! Or You’ll Explode
Your unchecked emotions make you a ticking time bomb. Are you willing to explore before you explode?
You’re doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t. People who express themselves openly are often condemned by society because that’s probably the only way society has known how to deal with them. Doesn’t mean that’s right.
You stay and abide by the ‘rules’ and ‘social norms’ which will tear you apart on the inside, keep you stuck and further traumatize you. This is why many people find it hard to leave abusive relationships — because that’s familiar. That’s the only thing they know, and it feeds the illusion that they ‘have’ someone, even if that someone is detrimental to their emotional wellbeing.
There’s either that, or be gone — shut, condemned and called names by society for choosing your own path. Most people are afraid of being alone, because they don’t know how to manage their thoughts and emotions. That’s why the food, alcohol, caffeine, cigarette, drugs and smartphone industry is benefiting — because people are addicted. They’re slaves to their addictions. It’s good for their business. People’s addictions serve the providers of addictions that people use to distract themselves from their pain instead of being present to it for them to be able to deal with it. So this is what most people who distract themselves do — avoid their emotions.
Let’s ignore the elephant in the room.
Ignoring the elephant in the room has negative consequences on your overall wellbeing such as stress, confusion, loss of drive, resulting in a lower level of happiness or satisfaction in life. How many people do you think live such lives?
Society doesn’t really care about you. Your toxic relatives don’t want better for you. They want to keep things as they were so that nothing feels uncomfortable for them — never mind what happens to you or how you feel.
For instance, divorced Indian women are treated as outcasts. I can relate to these experiences on many personal levels.
Which explains why women find it hard to leave abusive relationships. It gives them the illusion that they are not alone. Well, they’re not alone. But they couldn’t be lonelier and miserable.
You can’t heal that which you refuse to feel.
It takes a lot of courage to step back, step away and if possible stay away from the mess in order to feel everything that you have been through. And believe me, and the lawyer Indian lady, it is well-worth the effort to choose yourself.
Healing Starts At You. Are You Ready To Get Unstuck?
Do you want to learn to get unstuck from society so that you can understand yourself? In order for this to work, you have to be willing to talk about the very parts of you that you feel shameful about. You’ll have to be willing to be uncomfortable.
Reading some of my posts may trigger you, making you react. I write for a reason — I’m here to help you feel, so that you can heal. You will learn a great deal about yourself from being present to what you are reacting to. You are reacting because there is an emotional charge.
And unless that emotional charge is witnessed and studied until it is diffused, it will keep you triggered and stuck until it makes you a ticking time bomb.
There are several reasons why people are stuck:
- Because they’re in their mind.
- Because that’s become their comfort zone (from which they do not want to be pulled out). Easy.
- Because they have to deal with emotions, and they don’t know how to manage their emotions. So let’s keep it easy.
- Because it’s easier to talk. Example: Talking about the research on meditation helps them to be perceived as “cool” and “knowledgeable” . Never mind the understanding from cultivating the practice/discipline itself. Let’s keep things easy.
- Because people love gathering statistics and information. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Here’s the thing.
Healing helps you get unstuck.
Unless you get out of your mind and get into your body where you will be fully present, you will not experience the wisdom that inspires and motivates you to be, to do and have more. You will remain stuck in your old “easy” ways.
Emotions are live wires which people have been trained to be afraid of, aka ignore. Anger is the bad guy, you know. And if you show anger, you’re a cuckoo. So let’s stuff that guy together with all other emotions that want to surface. Welcome to mental illness.
Institutes of all varieties mostly love to keep people in fear than to help them get to know themselves by understanding their emotions.
Because once you understand yourselves, you become powerful. You have mastery over yourself. You won’t need those institutes. Their earnings will suffer. So it has been serving them to keep people in fear.
Why Most Workplace Wellness Is BS
You cannot talk about mental health without talking about emotions. It’s not possible. They are not separate. It’s like trying to do surgery without cutting the person open! It’s a completely daft idea.
It doesn’t work because there is no room for feeling. You can’t heal what you refuse to feel.
Moreover, the reason you want to talk about your feelings is to take ownership of them, yourself and stop the blame and victimhood cycle.
If there’s no room for emotions in organizations, employees don’t feel the psychological safety they need. They also feel less motivated due to a lack of acknowledgement by their higher-ups, as in the case of Sally. They work out of fear.
There is no room for emotions if people are predominantly trapped due to focusing on research, data and statistics. Doing research is important up to a certain point, beyond which it gives them the illusion of progress, which they clearly haven’t made.
In the process, emotions are completely ignored, which is why employees don’t feel heard/seen/cared for. It’s plain poor leadership.
Taking personal responsibility is a leadership skill. If the (team) leader or higher-ups don’t have a culture of acknowledging their people, the lack of communication or miscommunication dismisses people. People don’t leave jobs, they leave bad managers who fail to recognize that emotions are a part of being human!
Emotions Are Your Gateway To Getting Unstuck
If you’re interested in doing the simple (not easy) work of understanding yourself through your emotions by being present with them, read my book Wired For Self-Love. Don’t just read it, do the transformational exercises if you want to benefit greatly from the book.
You can’t ‘think’ your emotions; you have to ‘feel’ them. The mind has been given way too much authority. Yes, it is powerful, but only once it is trained. Meditation is a tool that can help you train your thoughts so that they stop controlling you.
You can’t talk about mental well-being in a workplace where emotions are dismissed or swept under the rug.
Learning to deal with emotions is a life skill most people are not equipped with.
For instance not knowing how to manage anger leads to either suppressing it or passive aggression, bottling up and then exploding, taking it out on those who have nothing to do with it in the first place.
Instead of going to either extreme, learning to sit with emotions (through meditation) helps to understand not only that anger is a surface emotion, but also to allow space for what lies under the anger: loss, fear, grief, and sadness that has had no healthy outlet.
Having present moment awareness helps you process emotions.
In conclusion
I will say that understanding your emotions has many advantages.
- You learn a great deal about yourself, such as why you care.
- You know what you value in yourself, others as well as how you can be of value.
- You will have better boundaries and an improved relationship with yourself.
- You then bring your newfound values to workplaces and relationships where you will feel loved, honored, valued and respected. (Isn’t that what we want? 😀)
- Your new environment will facilitate your growth and potential.
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” — Alexander Den Heijer
Thank you for your time. Self-love Advocate and Relationship Mentor Neha Sonney helps you understand why you don’t like yourself, discover why you feel unworthy and shows you how to finally and fully love yourself. Visit NehaSonney.com. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
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