Have you ever noticed a feeling of emptiness deep inside? This feeling can be very strong or in some cases very subtle, nevertheless you still feel it, you still notice it lurking in the shadows of your consciousness. Silently calling to you in your moments of success and happiness, in the moments when it seems that everyone likes you, in those brief moments were it seems as if everyone around is “loving you”, respecting you, giving you all of the attention you always wanted, those brief moments in which it seems everything is going great at home, your family seems to love and respect you. Even in all these good moments, this emptiness is still there, it is not strong but nevertheless, you feel it, staring at you, waiting for the moment you fail and don’t live up to all of the expectations others and you have set for yourself.
It is at these moments that the feeling emptiness grows stronger to the point that it catches you off guard and takes over. Now you find yourself often staying later at work because the little inconvenient moments of stress at home with the kids and the wife or the parents have suddenly become too much to bear.
Or the moment you failed this one school test and now find yourself going out for a few beers to forget what happened. How about a moment when this emptiness takes over your mind and you become depressed because things are not working out anymore at work or at home or … (fill in the blank).
There are too many cases to count, in which people behave unconsciously because this emptiness has taken and manifested itself in the many forms of disease and suffering we have to bear because we suppress that emptiness.
Now you might think “what do you mean with emptiness”, here is my answer. The emptiness I am referring to are the feelings you have buried deep inside for the sake of pleasing others. For the sake of not getting others angry, because you depend on them for your security, For the sake safeguarding whatever kind of relationship you have with the one you love the most, even if it means being molested, you shut up, because you think that at least now you are receiving the attention you require. For the sake of not hurting the feelings of the one, you need the most because the last thing you want is the silent treatment and not being spoken to for days. For the sake of avoiding punishment (whatever kind: physical psychological, emotional), you shut up, because it's safer this way, fewer problems, less drama.
Now Keep in mind that many of these moments of emotional repression, you don’t have an awareness of, since, many of them occurred mostly in your childhood at the behest of the ones that were taking care of you, the ones you were at some point most attached to. However, even though the mind does not remember all of these moments, the body does. It’s a scientific fact that the body acts as a storehouse, a database of what you would call i.e. experiences that triggered certain emotions and subsequently moved you to behave certain ways. Neuroscientist A. Damasio has done extensive research on this, defining the self as:
“ a dynamic collection of integrated neural processes, centered on the representation of the living body that finds expression in a dynamic collection of integrated mental processes”
- A. Damasio
If for a substantial part of your life, which I can say with fair certainty, constitutes most your childhood and adolescence — according to Gabor Mate almost 75% of our brain growth occurs outside the body in the early years, furthermore the consensus in medical science is that our brain continues to develop going into our mid-twenties with most of it occurring in childhood and adolescence — you have learned to repress your emotions out of fear for loss of security or concern for others health (think about the rage you were feeling or sheer humiliation because of injustice, deceit, abuse or lying incurred to you by your elders or any other person on whom you were greatly dependent), would you not consider it to have detrimental effects on your own psychological health ?
Some do think so, take Alice Miller for example. She is a revered psychoanalyst who has researched the effects of child-rearing (what she calls poisonous pedagogy) on the health and behaviors of the adults reared children later become. Her research is for a large part based on her own experience with adults in her own psychiatric practice.
She has found that emotions that have been internalized as a result of traumatic experiences largely due to child-rearing, if not dissolved — meaning experienced in a conscious manner — then these repressed emotions will reappear later in life as destructive behaviors and compulsions like for example substance abuse or deep craving of acceptance, violence self-harm (e.x. suicide or anorexia) and many diseases usually of a psychological nature like for example schizophrenia, dementia etc..
And it seems she is not the only one, recent authors and researchers like for example Gabor Mate is building on her theories and proving this with the help of recent scientific findings on the workings of the so-called Psycho- Immuno- and Neurological functioning of the body
The point is that the emptiness inside you should not be disregarded and played off as nothing, one should put extensive effort into reconnecting with the emotions and feelings that one has been suppressing all your life. Since these feelings reflect a part of our true selves. You can do this by reflecting on your past, your upbringing asking questions like how you were raised? if you were ever beaten? how was the upbringing of your own parents? and then actively trying to re-experience those emotions so that you can understand their nature? confront the wrongdoers if necessary.
If you can’t then look for, what A. Miller calls, a “conscious witness” that has also dealt with his/her own repressed feelings. Instead of running away from them, through the different compulsions and behaviors you have set out to do your whole life, just to hide those feelings, because they are simply too painful to experience.
Many of us are simply living a lie, the idea we have of ourselves is not who we actually are, because we refuse to experience those parts of ourselves that remind us of the deepest fear, anger, pain, rage, humiliation and resent we have experienced in our life at the hands of our caregivers. Our whole lives revolve around actively hiding those feelings. Instead of facing our deepest repressed feelings we create personalities, choose careers, believe in ideologies, choose partners, basically we create environments that allow us to repress them further.
However, no matter how hard we try we cannot ignore this part which is integral to our whole true selves, we still feel the emptiness. To find yourself is to experience your repressed emotions and come to terms with them then you will know who you really are and you will be more capable of doing whatever you choose to do in life, not whatever others expect of you or you expect of yourself. you will be able to trust your gut feelings and make choices based on your own intuition.
If you don’t face your true self, all you will end up doing is running and hiding unconscious behaviors of which you don’t know their emotional source.
your running, and your running, and your running away. Your running and your running and your running away. Your running and your running, but you can’t run away from yourself”
- Bob Marley
