How to learn to express emotions when you were told to suppress them as a child

Psychotherapist Jasmine Lee Corey works with adults who were neglected as children. In the book “Mom's Dislike. How to Heal Hidden Wounds from an Unhappy Childhood”she explains how to cope with the consequences of such behavior of the mother. Or at least soften them. With permission from Bombora, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from Chapter 13.

Place in the fabric of life

Most of those who have not experienced a strong bond with their mother also feel a lack of connection with other family members or the family in general. This leaves a gap and a feeling that something is missing. We rely on family to connect us to the world in the broadest sense of the word, giving us a range of things: a safe haven in the storm, a sense of belonging to a group, identity, support. We expect that the family will give us a place where we are known and cherished.

If you now have a life partner, children, it can help compensate for the old disconnection, but what if you only have your parents' family, to which you have such weak attachment? What if you don't have a home in terms of clan or family?

I see that some people feel completely lost without feeling like they are with their family.

While both family and partner are certainly considered important parts of the security system, they are not as essential as we might think.

Our security and sense of community can change over time. We need to understand that people can constantly enter and disappear from this system and, most importantly, even a stranger or almost an outsider can come to our aid.

I heard a touching story from one of my friends. A woman my friend recently met contacted her and asked for help. This woman had recently moved to the area and was due for surgery. She wrote to eight women to see if any of them could help her. She did not know any of them intimately, and she was embarrassed to ask, but she had no one else to turn to. All eight said yes.

People who seem constantly busy and not as attentive as we would like them to often respond to specific needs. In general, people enjoy being helpful. True, when the period of need stretches over months, they can be eliminated, but this is not necessarily because they do not care. This is because they have other concerns as well.

The fears I see in those of us who feel so vulnerable, so insecure, so defenseless without parents or siblings to lean on relate primarily to our childhood parts. We are not in danger just because there is no security system around us in the form of a family, if we have the opportunity to turn to people and ask for help, as a woman did in her new place of residence. The more we take root in our adult self, the less restless we feel without being surrounded by relatives.

Nuclear Nuclear family - a family consisting of parents (parent)

and children, or only from spouses. family has become disproportionately significant since the broader understanding of the family as a tribe or community has been lost in Western culture. In some cultures, the entire village takes on the role of the family, but here we are talking about a very limited number of individuals. Instead of being tied by tens or hundreds of threads, we are held by only half a dozen or only one or two.

This is not enough to maintain a healthy sense of connection and belonging.

The solution is to build additional links and ownership. We do this in the following main ways:

A circle of close friends can serve as a family of choice, helping us through difficult times and celebrating important moments with us.
Connections with groups give us a place in the fabric of life. These can be interest groups, health groups, social groups, or any other. For some, their community is people from the Internet. While the virtual community may be missing some important aspects, it does provide a sense of connection that is valuable to many.
Meaningful work (volunteer or paid) gives us a place and purpose in life.
Connections to places physically attach us to the planet, so we are not just wanderers or "lost in space." It can be a sense of connection with your home or the area around your home. Many people feel a strong connection to the land around them.

Navigate the world of emotions

Human beings live in a world filled with emotions, but for many deprived of good motherhood, this world is a rather uncomfortable place. The ability to navigate in these waters is an important component of successful functioning in this world and all-round human development.

John Bradshaw American educator, author of the bestselling book Coming Home: Rebirth and Protecting Your Inner Child, explains Bradshaw, Homecoming, p. 71, how many break away from this world: “Children growing up in dysfunctional families are taught to suppress the expression of emotions in three ways: first, they are not responded to and are not mirrored, they are literally not seen; second, they lack healthy models for labeling and expressing emotions; and third, they are shamed or punished for expressing their emotions.” He continues with Bradshaw, Homecoming, p. 72: "The sooner emotions begin to be suppressed, the deeper the harm done."

When emotions are cut off in this way, it takes a lot of training to become part of the world of emotions. We will have to break the spell of our own "dead face" and become readable. It can be more difficult to achieve this with some emotions than with others. Feelings that our parents had a hard time, usually, and we will be hard to endure.

Expanding the spectrum of your emotions (exercise)

Which of the following emotions is the most difficult for you to accept or express?

pain	a wish
sadness	love
joy	awe
anger	disappointment
fear	repentance
vulnerability	envy
pride	jealousy
confusion	confidence
hatred	happiness

Which one was the hardest for each of your parenting figures?
Using this list as a starting point, make a list of the emotions you want to add to your emotional palette.
Add to the written emotions what will help you develop it.

Just as we can be active with the other omissions described in this chapter, we can be active in gaining or recovering emotions that we find it difficult to express. For example, in your family, you have been unable to show disappointment, and you have noticed that you are still embarrassed to express it. It may be helpful to choose a reliable person, share your disappointment with them, and ask them to rate them. Let him mirror it and bring your frustration back to normal. An example of normalization would be: “Of course it will be difficult! I would be disappointed too! If you were ashamed as a child for showing frustration, this can be a powerful corrective experience for you.

Emotional style and caring patterns

Remember that many unattended people will need to work to connect with their feelings. When a mother is oblivious or unresponsive to feelings, we often do not have a strong bond with them ourselves. Perhaps we even learned how to turn them off in order to maintain the connecting thread that we felt with our mother.

Our individual style (whether we suppress our feelings or exaggerate them in order to gain attention) usually develops in response to the style of our caregiver. It seems perfectly legitimate why children learn to suppress their feelings: guardians consistently take no interest in the child's feelings or punish the child for expressing feelings. Studies show that if caregivers are sometimes sensitive and at other times they are simply not paying attention, in order to call for help, children are more likely to exaggerate their feelings Gerhardt, Why Love Matters, p. 26.

Take time to think about the following.

Are you more likely to hide your feelings for fear of rejection, or do you wind up when you want to get something out of the other person?
If you do both, what feelings (or under what circumstances) do you tend to hide, and when do you actually intensify them? What do you think will happen if you give your feelings free rein?

Accept your needs

As far as our needs are concerned, we tend (at least at first) to adopt the same attitude towards them that our parents had. So, for example, if your mother was intolerant or disregarded your needs, chances are you too will have a hard time tolerating them. I remember one moment when I myself was undergoing a course of psychotherapy, and suddenly I spoke out quite clearly about what I wanted, and suddenly I felt very ashamed. In the end, I rolled my eyes, as if to say: “Well, this is too much! “Fortunately, I caught myself doing this and saw it as something that I got from my parents. “I'm glad you understood that,” my psychoanalyst told me, “because that's not how I feel about it.”

For many of those whose early needs were not met, they are perceived as humiliating and dangerous. Claire One of the patients of the author of the book. told me that for her to be dependent on another person is like giving him a knife to cut her throat. She associated feelings of dependence with vulnerability and insecurity on the brink of destruction.

It is not easy to get over it. We need to understand that this is no longer dangerous and that there are people out there who want to satisfy our needs! But understanding this does not come without a certain amount of risk, because we do not know until we try. Taking these risks can be difficult.

Beliefs won't change without new data.

If our needs were ignored in childhood, we often blame ourselves for having them. This can lead to the belief that we demand a lot or that our needs will scare off other people. This belief is eradicated when we openly report them and are satisfied.

It will be nice if you start reaching out for small people with whom you feel safe. This way, the risk will be less, and you will be able to gradually become more tolerant of vulnerability and gain positive experience.

For people with a self-sufficient attachment style, this will go a long way from "I'll do it myself" to "I'm so happy you helped me." You have to understand that your needs can really be the place where other people are sensitive to you.

Knowing and expressing your needs is an important developmental achievement that sustains intimacy, as Jett Psaris and Marlena Lyons, Ph. D., argue in their book Unprotected Love. And yet this is only one side of the coin. We have to be fine, even if our needs are not met by partners. As noted by Jett Psaris, PhD, and Marlena S. Lyons, PhD, Undefended Love (Oak land, CA: New Harbinger, 2000), p.1 Psaris and Lyons: "The earlier our unmet needs originate, the less we are able to maintain a sense of well-being in adulthood if this need is not met by another person." If in infancy our addiction needs were not met, our consciousness at that moment was often split into pieces. We had neither the resources nor the maturity to “stay sane,” which means being in control.

Unbearable soreness and sensitivity to needs can be traced back to these early traumas.

Flaunting these rough parts of yourself can be difficult, but it's part of the process. We bring into our close relationships everything that we did not work through or completed in childhood. From the point of view of those who view relationships as a path to growth, this is a gift of fate.

To understand how far you have come along the path of healing, consider the following questions.

How do you feel about having needs? Do you see parallels with the way your early caregivers treated and responded to your needs?
Do you tend to expect others to respond when you need them, or do you feel disadvantaged in this regard?
Which of your needs is the most difficult for you to express?
If you talked about your need, but only partially met it, can you take it calmly? Simply put, are you able to "own" your needs, and not throw them around like a hot potato, or completely suppress them?

Form the ability to intimacy

Intimacy requires emotional openness, a drive to see and be visible, and allow other people to meet your needs. This will be difficult if you haven't worked through the trauma of insensitive parenting, but it's worth striving for. Despite the pain of disappointment that you have carried with you over the years, you also most likely have a yearning in you, the power of which is worth using to help you move forward when you push back.

The key is to understand what you are doing to maintain intimacy. Which “attachment behavior” patterns are part of your repertoire, and how can you enhance them? Think about the following.

Are you able to accept comfort in threatening situations or in moments of stress? (This is "attachment behavior".)
How do you react when someone asks you for help? Can you let the person need you?
Are you capable of touching with love? Maintain intimate eye contact?
Do you maintain emotional contact during lovemaking?
What fears and defenses come up when you get really close to your partner?

One psychotherapist reports that if a couple is able to strengthen their bond of attachment, it promotes the self-regulation of each partner and solves individual personal problems. For people with a self-sufficient style, the challenge will be to awaken the attachment system, which can then function more normally, as nature intended. Think about what you can do to develop the potential for intimacy.

"Mom's Dislike" will teach you how to satisfy the needs of your inner child and tell you how to better understand your own feelings and improve your relationship with your mother. And also the advice of a psychotherapist will help you avoid mistakes in communicating with your own children.