Last update: 18 September, 2015
All the emotions you hide or oppose persist. Have you ever heard this before?
Sometimes, in psychology, it is said that pain is the best cure. This statement may surprise you and may even not want to accept it. However, there is no reality more evident than the fact that all the emotions we experience involve something to learn.
Suffering, for example, is the chisel that shapes our vital knowledge, that draws roads and paths based on the learning that comes from losses, from defeats and disappointments. While there are people who prefer not to see it, there are even those who choose to hide that pain in the depths of their being and then simply throw away the key to their emotional lock.
What happens next? The pain becomes even stronger, but it changes shape. Thus begins to arise anger, resentment ... anger. All that we oppose, we cultivate. We talk about it today in our article. Let's talk about emotional denial.
Emotional denial and its obsession
We see an example. You share a loving relationship with someone. You love him, you have a solid life that you have built together as a couple. However, something inside of you tells you that things are no longer the same. You feel that that person no longer loves you. How do you accept it? You deny it. Also, for whatever reason, the other person doesn't want to give evidence of what's going on.
Time passes and although you know that relationship is no longer authentic, you continue to deny it, you refuse to see the truth. The people around you even give you clues as to what is happening, but you ignore them. Emotional denial persists and resists day after day.
What will happen is that, however much you want to hide the truth, it will surface more evident than ever. It will continue to emerge. Instead of putting it aside and avoiding thinking about it, it will turn into a constant and destructive thinking. Because the mind adopts a terrible mechanism when dealing with negative emotions, it even turns them into almost obsessive thoughts.
If we repeat to ourselves that we will not be sad when, for example, we suffer from acute anxiety, the exact opposite will happen. The question is not to tell oneself "I will not be sad". The truth comes out when we ask ourselves: "because I'm sad?"
It will seem absurd, but it is. We avoid the problem, but in reality the problem is so big that we can't stop thinking about it.
Emotions and their adaptive function
Emotions like sadness, anger or fear are good medicine. This concept is worth repeating again. They are the most difficult emotions to deal with, we know it well, but perform an adaptive function. Fear forces us to run and escape, and thus to survive. It is something instinctive that we have learned as a species.
However, within this transformation that we have experienced, we have also learned that, sometimes, the solution is not to run or escape, but to stop and know the enemy who wants to hurt us. Denying it doesn't help. Her sadness, on the other hand, must be recognized, accepted, mourned and then faced. Negative emotions allow us to survive because, at times, they force us to take the opposite path. The opposite path where authentic truth resides.
The emotional denial that wants to resist will persist until our own destruction. Until we could take no more. Why oppose? Let it go. As is often said, opposing an enemy only gives him more strength. So the best thing is not to resist: accept the evidence, the pain, the mistake. Accept the existence of these emotions and, day after day, they will unravel until they fade away. Freeing you.
