Suppressing an emotion does not mean you have dealt with it. It may seem as if you are protecting yourself by shutting off your emotion but that is not really what you are doing. Many cultures believe that it is a masculine quality to suppress emotion and that the expression of emotion qualifies one as weak. Avoiding your emotions never makes them go away. If the same situation that led to the emotion were to happen again, you are likely to find it more difficult to manage. In fact suppressing your emotion can strengthen it. If you feel pain because your girlfriend left you, you may try to avoid the pain by watching movies, going out or chatting, however, the pain is still present in you and a little incident can trigger it and cause you to overreact to the situation. Effects of consistent emotion suppression include high blood pressure, stress, and heart disease. While I was having a conversation with a lady one day, she told me she does not forgive anyone who has made her cry. Even if she tries to forgive, she will never forget. When someone does something which makes her feel hurt, she does not tell the person about her hurt but she carries it within her. Hardly does the person know how hurt she has come to be. There was a time someone very close to her was giving her a cold treatment. She was very much hurt by this as she never expected such a treatment from the other person. I asked her to go have a discussion with the person concerning this and she was emphatic that she would never do such. She expected the other person to talk to her about whatever she may have done that led to the cold treatment instead of being quiet about it. At a point while we were talking she broke down in tears. I saw clearly that this lady was suppressing so much emotion in her. I saw a child who was feeling hurt. She was able to discuss this with me but not with the other person involved in this even though the discussion would have been a forward step in letting go of the pent-up emotion. In a matter of minutes she was back to her old state. Now she smiles but the emotion is not gone. It has gone back to its dormant state waiting for a situation to activate it again.
There is so much pain in the world but the greater part of human pain is unnecessary. This pain is self-created but we are hardly aware of this due to unconsciousness. When the mind possesses you and runs your life, you are unconscious and in such a state, you will create pain for yourself and activate other people’s pain.
Pain comes in when you are in resistance to something particularly to what is. So behind pain, you find non-acceptance. You have what is but you do not accept it, so you resist it. Your resistance then brings about pain. Your resistance is in your thought in which you have judged what is. You have judged what is and labeled it unacceptable. So you are in resistance. This reflects in your emotion which manifests as negativity. The greater the degree of your resistance to what is, the present moment, the greater the intensity of your pain. You have the present moment but you are denying it, you want to escape from it. This gives you pain and you suffer, the consequence of mind identification.
When you suppress your negative emotion, you are avoiding it. You are trying to escape from it so you do not even bother to look at it. Since you do not face it, you do not see the negative emotion for what it is, you do not see what it is in the present moment. You succeed in suppressing it. But is the pain gone? No. The pain cannot be completely dissolved without you fully facing it. So you have a remnant of the pain as you go about your life situation.
