How to learn to express emotions if you were told to suppress them as a child
Miscellaneous / / August 01, 2021
The main thing is to understand your needs and not be shy about asking for help.
Unconditional motherly love is a very important source of happiness and tranquility. People who did not feel it in childhood often face psychological problems. For example, low self-esteem or an inability to show your feelings.
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Psychotherapist Jasmine Lee Corey works with adults who were neglected as children. In the book “Mom's Dislike. How to Heal Hidden Wounds from an Unhappy Childhood ”she explains how to cope with the consequences of such behavior of the mother. Or at least soften them. With permission from Bombora, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from Chapter 13.
Place in the fabric of life
Most of those who have not experienced a strong bond with their mother also feel a lack of connection with other family members or the family in general. This leaves a gap and a feeling that something is missing. We rely on
familyso that it connects us to the world in the broadest sense of the word, giving us a range of things: a safe haven in the storm, a sense of belonging to a group, self-identification, support. We expect that the family will give us a place where we are known and cherished.If you now have a life partner, children, it can help compensate for the old disconnection, but what if you only have a family your parentsto whom you have such weak attachment? What if you don't have a home in terms of clan or family?
I see that some people feel completely lost without feeling like they are with their family.
While family and partner are certainly considered important parts of the security system, they are not as essential as we might think.
Our security and sense of community can change over time. We need to understand that people can constantly enter and disappear from this system and, most importantly, even a stranger or almost an outsider can come to our aid.
I heard a touching story from one of my friends. A woman my friend recently met contacted her and asked for help. This woman had recently moved to the area and was due for surgery. She wrote to eight women to see if any of them could help her. She did not know any of them intimately, and she was embarrassed to ask, but she had no one else to turn to. All eight said yes.
People who seem to be constantly busy and not as attentive as we would like them to often respond to specific needs. In general, people enjoy being helpful. True, when the period of need stretches over months, they can be eliminated, but this is not necessarily because they do not care. This is because they have other concerns as well.
The fears I see in those of us who feel so vulnerable, so insecure, so defenseless without parents or siblings to rely on are mainly our children's parts. We are not in danger just because there is no security system around us in the form of a family, if we have there is an opportunity to turn to people and ask for help, as a woman did in a new place residence. The more we take root in our adult self, the less restless we feel without being surrounded by relatives.
Nuclear Nuclear family - a family consisting of parents (parent)
and children, or only from spouses. family has become disproportionately significant since the broader understanding of the family as a tribe or community has been lost in Western culture. In some cultures, the entire village takes on the role of the family, but here we are talking about a very limited number of individuals. Instead of being tied by tens or hundreds of threads, we are held by only half a dozen or only one or two.
This is not enough to maintain a healthy sense of connection and belonging.
The solution is to build additional links and ownership. We do this in the following main ways:
- Circle of loved ones friends can serve as a family of choice, helping us through difficult times and celebrating important moments in our lives with us.
- Connections with groups give us a place in the fabric of life. These can be interest groups, health groups, social groups, or any other. For some, their community is people from the Internet. While the virtual community may be missing some important aspects, it does provide a sense of connection that is valuable to many.
- Meaningful work (volunteer or paid) gives us a place and purpose in life.
- Connections to places physically attach us to the planet, so we are not just wanderers or "lost in space." It can be a sense of connection with your home or the area around your home. Many people feel a strong connection to the land around them.
Navigate the world of emotions
Human beings live in a world filled with emotions, but for many deprived of good motherhood, this world is a rather uncomfortable place. The ability to navigate in these waters is an important component of successful functioning in this world and all-round human development.
John Bradshaw American educator, author of the bestselling book Coming Home: Rebirth and Protection of Your Inner Child explains Bradshaw, Homecoming, p. 71 how many are detached from this world: “Children growing up in dysfunctional families are taught to suppress expressing emotions in three ways: firstly, they are not responded to and are not mirrored, they literally are not see; second, they lack healthy models for labeling and expressing emotions; and third, they are shamed or punished for expressing their emotions. ” He continues Bradshaw, Homecoming, p. 72 : "The sooner emotions begin to be suppressed, the deeper the harm done."
When emotions are cut off in this way, it takes a lot of training to become part of the world of emotions. We will have to break the spell of our own "dead face" and become readable. It can be more difficult to achieve this with some emotions than with others. Feelings that our parents had a hard time, usually, and we will be hard to endure.
Expanding the spectrum of your emotions (exercise)
- Which of the following emotions is the most difficult for you to accept or express?
pain | a wish |
sadness | love |
joy | awe |
anger | disappointment |
fear | repentance |
vulnerability | envy |
pride | jealousy |
confusion | confidence |
hatred | happiness |
- Which one was the hardest for each of your parenting figures?
- Using this list as a starting point, make a list of the emotions you want to add to your emotional palette.
- Add to the written emotions what will help you develop it.
Just as we can be active with the other omissions described in this chapter, we can be active in gaining or returning emotions that we find it difficult to express. For example, in your family, you have been unable to demonstrate disappointment, and you have noticed that you are still embarrassed to express it. It may be helpful to choose a reliable person, share your disappointment with them, and ask them to rate them. Let him mirror it and bring your frustration back to normal. An example of normalization would be: “Of course it will be difficult! I would be disappointed too! " If as a child you were ashamed for demonstration of frustrationthis can be a powerful corrective experience for you.
Emotional style and caring patterns
Remember that many unattended people will need to work to connect with their feelings. When the mother is oblivious or unresponsive to feelings, we often do not have a strong bond with them ourselves. Perhaps we even learned how to turn them off in order to maintain the connecting thread that we felt with our mother.
Our individual style (whether we suppress our feelings or exaggerate them in order to gain attention) usually develops in response to the style of our caregiver. It seems perfectly legitimate why children learn to suppress their feelings: guardians consistently take no interest in the child's feelings or punish the child for expressing feelings. Studies show that if caregivers are sometimes sensitive and at other times they simply do not pay attention, in order to call for help, children are more likely to exaggerate their feelings. Gerhardt, Why Love Matters, p. 26. .
Take time to think about the following.
- You are more likely to hide your feelings from fear of rejection or wind them up when you want to get something from another person?
- If you do both, what feelings (or under what circumstances) do you tend to hide, and when do you actually intensify them? What do you think will happen if you give your feelings free rein?
Accept your needs
As far as our needs are concerned, we tend (at least at first) to adopt the same attitude towards them that our parents had. So, for example, if your mother was intolerant or disregarded your needs, chances are you will also have a hard time tolerating them. I remember one moment when I took the course myself psychotherapy, and suddenly spoke quite clearly about what I wanted, and suddenly I felt very ashamed. I ended up rolling my eyes, as if to say, “Well, this is too much!“Fortunately, I caught myself doing this and saw it as something that I got from my parents. “I'm glad you understood that,” my psychoanalyst told me, “because that's not how I feel about it.”
For many of those whose early needs were not met, they are perceived as humiliating and dangerous. Clare One of the patients of the author of the book. told me that for her to be dependent on another person is like giving him a knife to cut her throat. She associated feelings of dependence with vulnerability and insecurity on the brink of destruction.
It is not easy to get over it. We need to understand that this is no longer dangerous and that there are people willing satisfy our needs! But understanding this does not come without a certain amount of risk, because we do not know until we try. Taking these risks can be difficult.
Beliefs won't change without new data.
If our needs were ignored in childhood, we often blame ourselves for having them. This can lead to the belief that we demand a lot or that our needs will scare off other people. This belief is eradicated when we openly report them and are satisfied.
It will be nice if you start reaching out for small people with whom you feel safe. In this case, the risk will be less, and you can gradually begin to be more tolerant of vulnerability, as well as accumulate positive experiences.
For people with a self-sufficient attachment style, this will go a long way from "I'll do it myself" to "I'm so happy you helped me." You have to understand that your needs can really be the place where other people are sensitive to you.
Knowing your needs and being able to express them is an important developmental achievement that supports intimacy, as Jett Psaris and Marlene Ph.D., asserted in their book Unprotected Love Lyons. And yet this is only one side of the coin. We have to be fine, even if our needs are not met by partners. As noted Jett Psaris, PhD, and Marlena S. Lyons, PhD, Undefended Love (Oak land, CA: New Harbinger, 2000), p. 1 Psaris and Lyons: “The earlier our unmet needs originate, the less we are in in adulthood are able to maintain a sense of well-being if this need is not met by others man. " If in infancy our addiction needs were not met, our consciousness at that moment was often shattered into pieces. We had neither the resources nor the maturity to “stay sane,” which means being in control.
Unbearable soreness and sensitivity to needs can be traced back to these early traumas.
Flaunting these rough parts of yourself can be difficult, but it's part of the process. We bring into our close relationships everything that we did not work through or completed in childhood. From the point of view of those who are considering relationship as a path of growth, it is a gift of fate.
To understand how far you have come along the path of healing, consider the following questions.
- How do you feel about having needs? Do you see parallels with the way your early caregivers treated and responded to your needs?
- Do you tend to expect others to respond when you need them, or do you feel disadvantaged in this regard?
- Which of your needs is the most difficult for you to express?
- If you talked about your need, but only partially met it, can you take it calmly? Simply put, are you able to "own" your needs, and not throw them around like a hot potato, or completely suppress them?
Form the ability to intimacy
Intimacy requires emotional openness, a drive to see and be seen, and allow other people to meet your needs. It will be difficult if you have not worked through the injuries. insensitive parentingbut it's worth striving for. Despite the pain of disappointment that you have carried in yourself over the years, in you too, rather of all, there is a yearning, the power of which is worth using to help you move forward when you rest against.
The key is to understand what you are doing to maintain intimacy. Which “attachment behavior” patterns are part of your repertoire, and how can you enhance them? Think about the following.
- Are you able to accept comfort in threatening situations or in moments of stress? (This is "attachment behavior".)
- How do you react when someone asks you for help? Can you let the person need you?
- Are you capable of touching with love? Maintain intimate eye contact?
- Do you maintain emotional contact during lovemaking?
- What fears and defenses come up when you get really close to your partner?
One psychotherapist reports that if a couple is able to strengthen their bond of attachment, it promotes self-regulation of each partner and solves individual personal problems. For people with a self-sufficient style, the challenge will be to awaken the attachment system, which can then function more normally, as nature intended. Think about what you can do to develop the potential for intimacy.
"Mom's Dislike" will teach you how to satisfy the needs of your inner child and tell you how to better understand your own feelings and improve your relationship with your mother. And also the advice of a psychotherapist will help you avoid mistakes in communicating with your own children.
To buy a bookRead also🧐
- Why we increasingly blame our parents for our troubles and what to do about it
- Why we become like our parents and how to change it
- What if my parents and I have different views on life?
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