Emotions

Ever thought about how your emotions impact those around you? A book I'm reading, What You Feel You Can Heal, compared emotional expression to the physics of a see-saw, and it got me thinking.

When you suppress your feelings, someone close to you might unknowingly pick up on them and express those emotions instead. Picture it: you’re sitting on one end of the see-saw, holding down your feelings, and the person on the other end gets pulled up, reflecting what you’ve been trying to push down.

I can’t help but remember how, as a child, I would worry(I guess I still do) when my mom seemed uneasy, even though she'd always say, "Everything's fine." The more I worried, the more she tried to calm me, which only made me feel more anxious. This is exactly the phenomenon the book describes: “The people close to you will act like mirrors, reflecting back to you a perfect image of yourself, including the parts of yourself you would rather not look at or deal with.”

This isn’t just about anxiety. Anger, doubt, need, love,... all the emotions we push down can be mirrored by those around us, from partners to kids to friends. So, when you find yourself frustrated by someone else’s mood swings, take a step back and think! Are you subconsciously passing on your own unexpressed feelings?

We often think that keeping emotions like anger or fear inside is the right thing to do, that it’s better to hold them back than let them show. But the truth is, those suppressed emotions don’t just disappear! Instead, they tend to surface through the people closest to us. The anger you suppress might manifest as irritability in others, the doubts you hide could show up in their uncertainty, and the need you’re unwilling to express may come through as clinginess or dependence in someone else.

We always question why people around us have certain reactions, why they seem overly emotional or stressed. But often, those feelings are a reflection of what we’ve kept inside, they are the amplified versions of what we have bottled in.
Not to excuse every behavior and emotional reaction in others, we all carry our own bag of feelings, but more often than we realize, the emotions we try to suppress leak into the space we share with those we love.

How we process and express emotions can shape our relationships. Let’s learn to express our emotions openly, mindfully, and in all honesty. This way, we can avoid passing on the emotional burden to the people we care about, and live fully.

                                                                           ~Divine