It’s Time To Let Out Your Secret Feelings

Sometimes you want to roam around like a wolf and climb the highest mountains so that you can howl and scream everything that you have been silent about so far. You want to let out all the feelings that you have hidden within yourself and that you have never talked about. Because then all the uncertainty, the masks and the fears of what other people will say disappear in the fog in the valley.

We live in a society that refuses to feel. Such is the effect that children develop mechanisms of oppression even before they even go to school: they hold back their tears, pay attention to the words they utter, and control their expressions. You are fulfilling one of the regulations that apply in the adult world: do not cry, do not speak, and do not express yourself too openly.

“Half the world is made up of people who have something to say but cannot. The other half consists of people who have nothing to say but do it all the time. “

Robert Frost

There are a number of consequences to becoming part of a culture at such a young age that puts emotions in an inner prison. You don’t just grow up in it as a slave to silence. The children raised to bury their feelings end up finding other channels for expressing what they have been hiding. Often then aggression, anger and defiance come to light.

Sigmund Freud said that the mind is like an iceberg. Only a small part is visible above the surface of the water, the rest is below the surface. It is surrounded by an icy universe that contains everything that has not been said, everything that has been suppressed, and all the words that are preferred to be kept secret for fear of the consequences they would have in public.

If people you know ask you if everything is okay because they have the impression that something is wrong, then you are probably forced to answer: “No, no, I’m fine, everything is okay.”   And you probably do that on more than one occasion. When we say things like this, we withdraw using a formality that we learned to use early on: we put on a mask. Because we assume that nobody cares that what has broken in us is only hanging by a thread, because we think that emotional wounds only belong in private.

The real problem, however, often comes from our inability to show our real state in front of people who are not close to us. We do not do it because we think that there is a loss of control mean, if we pain, anger or anxiety show in front of them.

On the other hand, when we reveal our sadness about a certain event to our partners or family, it can lead to some kind of codependency. This means that we feel responsible for how they will react to our circumstances. The fact that we value their reactions more than the actual problem leads us to leave things as they are. We remain silent for so long that in the end we don’t mind if we have to endure a little more suffering.

We normalize the suffering like someone taking a pain reliever or offering water to someone who is drowning. That is not the right way to deal with the problem. Nobody can dance on a rope forever, because sooner or later this rope will break and you will fall off. It is only logical that after a fall, the more painful the higher you climb, the more painful it is.

You deserve to be free

This is an interesting fact to keep in mind: when something upsets you, hurts you, or worries you, like a sharp insult, it only takes the brain 100 milliseconds to respond emotionally. And this feeling is registered in the cerebral cortex in just 600 milliseconds.

When you say things to yourself like, “I don’t mind what they say. I just react like I don’t mind. ” then it is already too late because your brain has already reacted. If you still try to assign other feelings to the event, then you are deceiving yourself and wasting useless energy and resources.

We have been taught for a long time that it is bad to let our true feelings out and that people who tell the truth are aggressive. We have been taught that it is always better to use subliminal lies rather than speak the bitter truth out loud. But that’s not true. You can be assertive without being aggressive. And it would be a good start to rethink the traditional notion that feeling is the opposite of reason, because that’s not true either.

Allowing yourself to fully experience your feelings will help you better understand your own needs. It sheds light on the thought spaces that we often fill with misconceptions, such as, “If I can take a little longer, things will change for the better.” It is an essential need to fully understand one’s feelings, to listen to them and to feel them. We have to practice this every day.

We should practice the art of assertiveness, realize this healthy exercise of expressing what we feel and what we deserve. We should howl at the moon, shout out into the night and day about who we are, what we need and what we are worth. It is enough for us to put other people’s feelings above our own. It is time to live without fear.