Free your emotions

How to re-claim your expressive self (especially if it was buried in childhood)

By Karen Elena James

Emotions and stimulations are the basis for the highly sensitive person’s experience of the world. If our emotions aren’t free, we’re denied a huge and crucial aspect of our identity.

Emotional intelligence (the ability to understand, manage and use our emotions) was publicly recognized as being equally important as logic and reasoning when psychologist Daniel Goleman’s book on that subject was published in 1995. Psychologist Elaine Aron’s research on high sensitivity was publicized with her 1997 book. So both concepts are relatively new.

Dr. Goleman expanded on the previous work of another psychologist (Howard Gardner) that claims people have different types of intelligence. According to Dr. Gardner’s theory, there are 8 types and an individual could have one or any number of the eight aptitudes.

Daniel Goleman focused on two of those types of intelligence:

Interpersonal Intelligence is about understanding and relating to other people. People strong in this area are skilled at detecting and responding to others’ moods, motivations and desires.
Intrapersonal Intelligence is about self-awareness. People strong in this area enjoy self-reflection and introspection; they’re well acquainted with their own values, beliefs, feelings and thoughts.

They sound very much like the abilities of the highly sensitive person, don’t they?

While the importance of emotions is becoming more pronounced in the medical and business communities, many people still don’t know that they have the high sensitivity trait. And among those who do know, some still struggle to understand it and to find a place for it in their life. Many societies place high value on attributes like competition and achievement, so people believe they’re expected to conform. People outside that norm can feel marginalized. Things are improving, however, and I believe there’s more recognition of soft skills and gentle personalities in competitive societies, especially as automation increases.

Enter the highly sensitive person.

We have strong emotions, react differently to some of life’s everyday circumstances and yet many of us hold positions such as accountant and mechanic. Being a minority population, we have no choice but to coexist with the 'other' world, even if they don’t always understand or appreciate us. There’s much to say about the qualities that sensitives add to the non-sensitive world, and educating them is a big opportunity for us.

But what effect does that world have on us?

One protective way for us to live among non-sensitives is to hide our sensitive qualities when we believe it’s to our advantage or it’s safer. Actually, many of us already did this in our childhood without realizing it.

Childhood drama

If there’s an unhappy but motivational side to this aspect of high sensitivity, it’s that many of us sensitives grew up in a troubled home. We may have inherited our sensitivity or we may have developed it in our early life – but either way, it often corresponds to our start in drama-filled surroundings. If this is how we experienced our formative years, our acute central nervous system was repeatedly stressed by other people’s behavior that was too harsh for our vulnerable nervous system.

We had to find ways to protect ourself from the drama around us and the fear or isolation we felt due to insufficient understanding and the nurturance we needed.

In this situation, some sensitives became defiant and rebellious and may have been punished for that. Others were able to find outlets for their distress and weren’t as harmed by the drama. But another group of us shut down and became numb, withdrawn, self-protective and fearful.

Shut down

Maybe your emotions and/or self-assuredness went underground for another reason.

But if we grew up in a home where at least one caretaker demanded excessive attention because of behavior disorders or addiction or other reasons, was emotionally immature, was unable to provide the nurturance we needed or treated other family members badly, we probably developed coping behaviors to protect ourself. Many of these behaviors continued into adulthood.

Those coping strategies may have included:

withdrawing (hiding/living small)
not expressing emotions to the point where we stop feeling them
believing we’re not important
becoming self-reliant and overly independent
not asking for what we need
practicing self-soothing automatically instead of asking for support or help
becoming hypervigilant about recognizing other people’s needs and moods

If healthy relationships and behaviors weren’t modeled for us and we stifled our needs, our emotional development may have been stunted. If there was no outside support from emotionally healthy adults, we may have accepted the unhealthy adult behaviors around us as normal. And that created the patterns for our self-expression, our self-esteem and our relationships, personally and professionally, when we became adults.

Without healing, our repressed emotions remain buried where they can contribute to stress, illness and possibly accidents because our immune system is vulnerable. As I said at the beginning of this article, emotions and stimulations drive most experiences for highly sensitive people. When they’re hampered, our life is curtailed.

How we got stuck

Suppressed emotions – those we consciously avoid because we don’t want to experience them

Repressed emotions – those we unconsciously avoid, they’re often intense and often began in childhood

Emotions are supposed to be processed. The experts don’t agree on how processing works so I will simply say this: processing includes an inner search for previous experiences and an evaluation, without our conscious awareness. Processing also includes some type of resolution. In chronically stressed people, processing is halted. When processing is halted the emotions sit, creating blockage.

Like a clogged drain, each new experience that provokes an unwanted, unconsciously buried emotion from our past adds to the blockage. Opportunities for a higher quality of life tend to get blocked also because our ‘vision’ is limited when we’re living small. Even when we know that we’re stuck and need to change, it’s hard to dig out - until something happens that spurs us to heal.

Healing

Healing those old beliefs and experiences that led us to avoid or unconsciously repress our feelings will help us get comfortable with our emotions and embrace being a highly sensitive person.

Here are some of the differences between the two scenarios:

Repressed Freely Expressive

Blocked and frustrated Self-aware and engaged

Feelings are a mystery Feels full range of emotions

Numb with occasional outbursts Easily expresses feelings

Tendency to intellectualize Integrates heart & head

May be a co-dependent rescuer of troubled people Ability to have healthy relationships

People pleaser Strong self-worth

Doormat Maintains boundaries

Agreeable in order to avoid conflict Assertive when needed

How to free your emotions

There are a number of ways to do this, usually involving an extended time period, a skilled and trustworthy practitioner to assist us and practices to access our inner world. Here are some possibilities:

Physically through massage, acupuncture, dance and other movement.
Psychotherapy or counseling.
Alternative practices such as hypnosis and shamanic healing.
Guided mediations.

The way healing works is to bring buried emotions up out of your unconscious and into your consciousness where you can evaluate their role and the events that caused them to get stuck – and release them.

This doesn’t mean that you’ll never be troubled again, but when our emotions are free, not trapped, we’re triggered less often by events from our past. As for new events and our tendency to consciously suppress negativity, you can read about our shadow self and its importance here.

NOTE: Nothing in this article or any comments here should be considered medical or psychological diagnosis or treatment.