In one of the more unusual hours of my life I once met with a coach expecting to talk about values and workplace culture. We ended up talking about emotions. Having never met him before, it was awkward, and years later I’m still not sure how to describe it or how to explain the tears and laughs we shared. That said, I do know he gave me permission to feel again, and he opened my eyes to the pitfalls of emotions.
Emotions are good things, all of them, but they do have their pitfalls. We understand it’s not appropriate to draw on the wall with our crayons because we feel like it, or for dogs to pee on the carpet when the urge hits. But we also know it’s not healthy to bottle up all our feelings. So we need to learn how to mature in our ability to feel and relate to those around us, let’s do that by exploring the extremes. On the one hand we can suppress our emotions, on the other hand we can over express them. But like anything in life its often a lot more complicated than that, let’s start by exploring each extreme.
Over Express
During one of my team meetings in my early career I was checking in on a project I thought was underway. Turned out it wasn’t. Not much had been done and we weren’t going to make our deadlines anymore. In frustration I slapped my hand on the table.
It certainly got the teams attention. The response was immediate as they all flinched and physically pulled away from me. Talk about immature. But whether it was a physical act, a verbal tirade, or even just a quick-witted word that left people uncomfortable, inappropriately over expressing emotions can cause people to withdraw. I was fortunate in that I could see people pull back from me physically, often it can be much more subtle internal withdraw.
You might have heard of this as ‘silent quitting‘ or ‘psychological disengagement’. Whatever label you give it, the result is I might be physically here, but I’m not with you. It’s always precedes someone leaving a team or breaking off a relationship. Learning how to work with people, or live in relationships is learning how to express emotions, without over expressing them and having people pull away.
Of course, there’s a nuance here, I’m sure there are people who think they should be able to feel what they want and express it. And you’re right, you can do that. The challenge is not whether it’s permissible, but rather whether it’s beneficial to you. You can feel and express your emotions, sure, but how you express every feeling is not necessarily going to be helpful to your relationships, your colleagues, your family or even yourself.
Simply Suppress
After my table banging moment, I naively concluded that it would be better to supress my emotions, but only the ‘bad’ ones. I worked hard on not allowing myself to feel angry or frustrated. Ironically for the next few years in my private conversations with trusted friends and family I found myself describing my overwhelming emotional state as one of frustration and anger.
This is when I met with the coach, and he taught me that suppression of frustration or anger, or any emotion for that matter, also impacts my ability to feel other vibrant emotions. I was becoming dull in my ability to feel at all and therefore inhibiting my ability to relate to those around me.
Further, it meant that people around me had no idea what I stood for or what made me passionate and motivated. We’ll explore this more next time, but it left people unsure where they stood with me and what I did or didn’t think was ok.
Both Supress and Express
What I find fascinating about emotional pitfalls is when we bounce between both ends of the spectrum at the same time. In my army story in my previous thought, I wanted to suppress a feeling of insecurity by over expressing a feeling of dominance. Someone might feel pain and sadness from a broken relationship, so to supress it we over express ourselves in a new relationship. We might try to suppress the shame or guilt of failure in our own projects, by over express feelings of command and power over those around us. We might want to suppress the stress, by over expressing the joy or relief found in alcohol. I find we can get really good at workplace suppression and home life expression.
There is a place for moving on from events in life, for decompressing. And when you’re in the middle of this, I’d encourage you, there’s a very important place for counselling and talking to trusted friends. But there is also a place for experiencing deeply uncomfortable feelings and learning from everything they have to offer. Grieving a loss for example is healthy, not to be supressed or supplanted by over expressing in some other facet of life.
My over expression of emotions left others unwilling to relate to me, my suppression of emotions left me unable to relate to others. Both left me isolated and unconnected. There are pitfalls when it comes to feeling and we need to be maturing in order to understand them. We need to understand the impact emotions have and reframe our thinking about them. More than just supressing or expressing, more than just ‘good’ or ‘bad’ emotions, we need to understand what they’re communicating to us. We’ll cover those in the next thought.