If they know you aren’t telling the truth, they might feel hurt by your lack of trust and begin losing trust in you. Insisting “I’m fine” and “Nothing’s wrong” can confuse and frustrate them when the opposite is clearly true. You might think you can hide your feelings fairly well, but people who know you can usually recognize when something’s bothering you. Eventually, when you can’t hold it back any longer, you might blow up - and not necessarily at the person who made you mad. Many people believe it’s better to tamp down anger than express it.īut suppressing your anger means you don’t address it, so it continues to build and seethe under your mask of calm. In fact, holding back your emotions can actually intensify them.Ī classic example of this involves anger. Pretending you don’t have certain feelings might help you avoid expressing them publicly, but it doesn’t make them go away. You could also start avoiding people who provoke certain emotions, possibly losing relationships you value.Įmotional suppression can become so much of a habit that it begins to happen unconsciously, so you might also notice you begin to lose touch with your own feelings. You might eventually become angry and resentful, and these feelings could trigger the conflict you wanted to avoid. When you can’t work through problems, they’ll probably keep happening. This lack of communication makes it tough to navigate conflict. Disrupted communicationīy hiding your emotions, you prevent clear communication with the people in your life. Masking emotions can have some pretty significant effects on physical and emotional health. Eventually, you may no longer feel safe expressing your opinions and feelings, so you hide them to prevent further criticism.Ĭaregivers who mask their own emotions can also reinforce the idea that you should do the same. Some restrictive caregivers reprimand children for any outburst, negative or positive. This judgment isn’t limited to negative emotions, either. This often happens when parents and caregivers judge or criticize you for expressing your emotions. If you grow up receiving the message that your opinions and feelings don’t matter, you’ll likely learn to hide your feelings from an early age. You might also lack faith in your own ability to handle conflict in a positive and productive way. If people have manipulated your emotions in the past, you might fear trusting someone new with your feelings. This desire to avoid pain often stems from an underlying lack of trust in yourself and others. So, instead, you choose to avoid conflict entirely. But if they react negatively when you tell them how you feel, you could end up triggering an even more painful conflict. When someone you care about does something upsetting, you might choose to hide your annoyance. People often hide emotions to protect their relationships. You could also have some concerns around others using these feelings against you, especially if that’s happened to you before. As a result, you hide your sadness, fear, frustration, and other so-called negative emotions. You might worry expressing certain emotions will lead others to judge you and believe you can’t manage your feelings. Showing emotion can put you in a vulnerable place, and it’s pretty normal to want to avoid exposing vulnerabilities to others. People generally learn to suppress emotions for a few key reasons.
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