Anxiety as Displaced or Suppressed Emotion
Part two of my anxiety series is to explore the role that displaced or suppressed emotion contributes to feelings of anxiety. A therapist I was seeing about a decade ago once gave me a quote that he loosely attributed to Freud: “Anxiety is unnamed emotion.” This one is a big deal in our society where we don’t take the time to metabolize the emotions we experience in response to every-day living. We’re often too busy, stressed or scared to look under the hood at the things going on underneath. Layered on top of this is the false cultural messaging common to our society that emotional people are weak people. We can be so isolated from sensations in our bodies related to our emotions that we no longer know how to interpret the various nuances and instead lump them together as “anxiety.” I’ve had more than one client come to me because they’ve started experiencing tears at odd intervals in the day with no idea of what was driving them. For people in these situations, learning how to reconnect to their felt emotions can usher in profound insight, helping them to better interpret their experiences to take more value congruent action.
While ignoring emotions may be appropriate situationally, as a long term strategy it has a cost. Cultural or family related values of stoicism can hamper someone’s emotional development and maturity. Anxiety, anger and depression can all be signs that emotions are being suppressed. People that suppress awareness of emotions may also develop self-soothing behaviors that at times can become problematic. Substance abuse, compulsive overeating and/or purging, internet binges, pornography use, risk taking, shopping sprees and dissociation can all sometimes be utilized as strategies to numb certain emotions.
Suppressed emotion is a feature of many other types of mental health concerns as well. OCD sufferers are often causing themselves paralyzing anxiety by trying to suppress both thoughts and uncomfortable emotions (hint, the harder you try not to have certain thoughts or emotions, the more persistent they often become). A huge part of treatment for OCD involves learning how to tolerate uncomfortable emotions or thoughts that come up without trying to neutralize them with rituals or compulsions. The same can be said for PTSD, as the avoidance of feelings and memories hinders the nervous system’s ability to discharge survival related hormones that are connected to our fight/flight/freeze responses.
Experiencing your emotions doesn’t mean that you’ll turn into a puddle on the floor and be unable to function in life forever. Rather developing the ability to sit with and experience your emotions will help you to grow as a human and make better, wiser decisions. If you’ve been suppressing emotions for a long time and are being cued by either paralyzing anxiety or compulsive behaviors you may need to check in to counseling for support as you start to build the capacity to experience the full array of your emotions. Also enlist professional help if you feel that you are losing control or start to experience suicidal thoughts. While it can be painful at first, I promise that building the capacity to be with your emotions more fully will be like transitioning from seeing in black and white to living in full color. You don’t have to digest all the emotions at once and a good therapist will teach you how to regulate your emotions so that you have a sense of control. If this is something that you would like to talk about with me further feel free to schedule a free consultation by hitting the link below.
