Life & Therapy

It seems to be a pretty well known fact: if a child is suddenly quiet in another room, chances are that said child is up to no good. Some people learn this the hard way, thinking, “Ah, at last, Susie is self-entertaining, and I can relax!” Then they discover that the “self-entertaining” resulted in quiet and impressive mass destruction of whatever it was that was in the other room.
In a similar way, we have feelings that we may want to ignore, so we try to put them somewhere where we can’t see them. We think we’ve dealt with them, because things get quiet for a while. Meanwhile, the feelings are quietly wreaking havoc, unsupervised somewhere deep inside. Some common feelings that people like to ignore are anger, jealousy, or sexual desire.
Maybe we have a judgment about anger, that it isn’t “nice” to show it. So it gets swallowed and hidden somewhere away from our consciousness. That anger hasn’t been expressed, and it is not just quietly playing. Because we’ve hidden it away from our supervision, it will build itself up. When it gets built up enough, it will become rage, and will come out in any number of surprising or even shocking ways. Perhaps it manifests as road rage, maybe we snap at the unsuspecting clerk, or yell at our partner. However that hidden feeling does blow up, it will feel similar to walking into that room where you thought your child was playing quietly, and finding that mass destruction has occurred.
So, just as you can prevent quiet destruction in your home by not leaving children unsupervised, you can prevent ambushes from your own emotions. If you have an emotion, you may as well admit it is there, and witness it. Notice how you feel about that particular emotion- do you hate feeling angry? Do you feel like a bad person if you feel jealousy? Sit with those feelings, acknowledge them, and feel them, and they will eventually move through you. Ignore them, and they will make sure that they are heard above everything, and it will likely be messy.