People are constantly telling others how they should feel, and the vast majority of these messages promote positivity, whether that be a parent telling a child not to complain or a therapist telling a patient to find the silver linings. This is not inherently wrong as consistent feelings of negativity causes both mental and physical challenges. Sadness, irritation, lethargy, anger and other less socially acceptable feelings have value to a person’s mental health and sense of self. When we acknowledge and feel our negative emotions in a healthy way, we can feel stronger, be more grounded, and be able to develop a better sense of self. Dimming these feelings doesn’t get rid of the impact; it just shifts it.
This emotional shifting can happen because of conscious emotional avoidance. For example, a person might increase their workload to decrease anger, a person might make jokes to dampen pain, or a person might turn to substance abuse to quell sadness. These methods circle around the root of the negative feeling and tend to trap a person in these potentially more destructive behaviors for longer periods of time. Avoidance can also happen unconsciously. For example, repressing anger can manifest into chronic fatigue, chronic pain in the back or neck, and depression. Even though they do not appear connect, repressed anger can present themselves in this way, which can appear to be more personally and socially acceptable.
Hiding emotions is superficial and temporary; it doesn’t change what one is experiencing.
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Some people can also lose understanding of what emotions they are feeling and how to approach reacting to others. When faced with a challenge, a lack of ability to feel and understand negative emotions makes it difficult to isolate or differentiate them. Anger, fear, sadness, and other emotions merge because the root of the feeling – the why – is never considered. This means that a person can react with what appears to be anger when they are feeling hurt, affecting their interpersonal relationships over time.
Nonetheless, negative emotions have some evolutionary purpose as they we still experience them to this day. Fear helps us to stay cautious in the face of danger. Sadness can improve both memory and judgment by reducing common judgment biases. Other emotions, such as anger, do not appear to have a clear consensus for their purposes and are still being explored.
Both the positive and negatives ends of the spectrum of feeling are important, especially with facing and understanding each individual emotion. Being able to acknowledge positive, negative, and neutral feelings and react appropriately to people is a skill we often do not get to learn as children. Instead, we are told to apologize whether we mean it or to smile whether we’re comfortable. These simple “solutions” to tense social situations do not really work beyond elementary school, so it is important to understand the root of all feelings as adults.
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