Stop Bottling Your Emotions Before It Costs You Years | Susan David

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0:43Susan David:People say things like stress is bad. Now I'm stressed about the fact that I'm stressed or I'm in grief and I'm being told that my grief is not a good kind of grief. And now I'm like grieving about the grief that I'm having. It's kind of like we're beating ourselves up for the emotion that we have. It is correct. It's what we're starting to do is we're starting to layer our experience of emotion, which is authentic and truth to the world that we're living in. And what we're starting to do is we're starting to layer our experience of the emotion in with judgment, fighting, avoiding. That's where your suppression comes in.

1:30Susan David:I don't want to feel it. Let me feel something else. Hustling a war inside yourself. What happens when we do that? What happens when we do that is, firstly, we aren't developing the skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, okay? Right. The world as it is, is an imperfect world. The world as it is, is this hand-holding of fragility and beauty. And so when we push aside difficult emotions, when we bottle them, when we set ourselves, and when we're doing this in a kind of characteristic way where it becomes our default mechanism, what we start to do is we start to have a couple of consequences.

2:13Susan David:The first is you're not living in the world as it is. You're living in the world as you wish it would be. For example someone who's unhappy in their job might say well at least i've got a job okay there's a recession coming at least i've got a job and so what they do is instead of facing into that unhappiness and learning from that unhappiness and using that unhappiness as a source that helps them to move forward instead what they do is they unsee themselves they turn their backs on themselves and they say, you know, I should at least be grateful that I've got a job. So I'm just going to ignore this experience.

2:51Susan David:That's suppression. And what happens is five years later, you're still in the same job. Sure. Unhappy. You haven't actually used the information to solve the problem. So that's the first thing. Forced positivity and suppression. These things like especially forced positivity, it sounds innocuous on the surface, like what could be wrong with being grateful okay what could be wrong with it but when it is forced and when it is false these are the key criteria forced false positivity then what we're doing is we are failing to develop the skills to deal with the world as it is we're failing to adapt to a world that is changing and which we are changing the job that i was happy in five years ago i'm no longer because I've changed.

3:35Susan David:And the other thing that we know is that this kind of forced false positivity and suppression, the forced false positivity, what is it? It's basically emotional avoidance. It's a denial strategy. Yes, it's like wrapped in rainbows and sparkles and social media memes, but it is forced false positivity and it's an avoidant coping strategy. So avoidant coping strategies are associated very clearly with lower rates of well-being, high rates of depression, high rates of anxiety, high levels of burnout. There is a real cost. And the last thing that I would say is that when we walk through life, when we walk through the world and we are with others who are also walking through life and potentially in pain or worried or grieving or concerned, and we do forced false everything's okay because i don't want to go to my difficulty motions what we are also doing is we are presenting in a way that is um not integrated not authentic not true not wise to ourselves and to our values right and there is no surprise then that this orientation is connected with poor equality of relationships because we, we aren't connecting with people in a way that feels real.

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