Its Okay not to be Okay.🥺

Hey Everyone, Anna here again clogging up your notifications lol 🙋‍♀️🍌

I wanted to make a quick post about something I'm really interested in (human emotions and interactions with others). And I'll be as open and honest with my own experiences in the hopes you wont follow me down this nasty road.

Personally I very rarely show that I'm upset, Anxious, or even that I'm struggling with something. This has taken years of heartbreak, dissapointmet, and invalidation for me to get to this point and I've accepted this is who I am. But I want to remind you that hiding your emotions/feelings isnt healthy.

I've learnt to supress my emotions because of a few key reasons.... (I know others do this too)

To avoid showing ‘weakness’

Showing emotions put you in a vulnerable place, and it’s pretty normal to want to avoid exposing yourself to others.

You might worry expressing certain emotions will lead others to judge you and believe you can’t manage your feelings. As a result, you hide your sadness, fear, frustration, and other so-called negative emotions.

You could also have some concerns around others using these feelings against you, especially if that’s happened to you before.

To avoid getting hurt

People often hide emotions to protect their relationships.

When someone you care about does something upsetting, you might choose to hide your concerns so you dont cause a fight.

Yes, their actions bothered you. But if they react negatively when you tell them how you feel, you could end up triggering an even more painful conflict. So, instead, you choose to avoid conflict entirely.

This desire to avoid pain often comes from an underlying lack of trust in yourself and others.

If people have manipulated you in the past, you might worry about trusting someone new with your feelings. You might also lack faith in your own ability to handle conflict in a positive and productive way.

Lack of confidence

If you grow up being given the hint that your opinions and feelings don’t matter, you’ll likely learn to hide your feelings from an early age.

This often happens when parents and caregivers judge or criticize you for expressing your emotions. This judgment isn’t limited to negative emotions, either.

Some parents punish kids for any outburst, negative or positive. Eventually, you may no longer feel safe expressing your opinions and feelings, so you hide them to prevent further punishment.

Parents or siblings who mask their own emotions can also give us the idea that you should do the same.

So now we've talked about why we do it lets look at what happens and what gets affected if we continue to hide our emotions.

Disrupted communication

By hiding your emotions, you prevent clear communication with the people in your life. This lack of communication makes it tough to fix the problem

When you can’t work through problems, they’ll probably keep happening. You might eventually become angry and resentful, and these feelings could trigger the conflict you wanted to avoid. You could also start avoiding people who provoke certain emotions, possibly losing relationships you value.

Emotion buildup

Pretending you don’t have certain feelings might help you avoid expressing them publicly, but it doesn’t make them go away. In fact, holding back your emotions can actually make them worse.

For example lets look at Anger? Most of the time when we're angry we hold it in right? or try to ignore it?

But suppressing your anger means you don’t address it, so it continues to build and seethe under your mask of calm. Eventually, when you can’t hold it back any longer, you might blow up — and not necessarily at the person who made you mad.

Relationship strain

You might think you can hide your feelings fairly well, but people who know you can usually recognize when something’s bothering you.

Insisting “I’m fine” and “Nothing’s wrong” can confuse and frustrate them when the opposite is clearly true. If they know you aren’t telling the truth, they might feel hurt by your lack of trust and begin losing trust in you.

If they do believe you, they might lose confidence in their ability to understand you or decide they don’t know you as well as they thought. Eventually, they could begin to question if the relationship is worth it.

I'd like us to have a think about opening up a little more. Reach out to that trusted person. I know we think we are bothering them or that our problems dont matter. But you matter as much as anyone else. you deserve to be heard and loved! Allow yourrself the same affection you give others!.

I'm so sorry about the long post I hope its okay.

I love you all you're amazing

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