I Would Like To Scream And Bring Out All That I Have In Me

Sometimes we would like to run like wolves and reach the highest peak so that we can howl and tell the moon all that we are silent, all that we hide and all that we have never said out loud. We may soon be able to do this, when the indecision, appearances and fear of the opinions of others are just a faint haze to wash away.

We live in a culture that resists emotion, we all know that. It is so true that, when a child turns five, he already begins to develop certain mechanisms of repression: he will hold back tears, silence certain things and lower his head, thus respecting some of the mandates so usual in the world of adults, namely: “don’t cry, don’t say anything, don’t express anything”.

“Half the world has something to say but keep silent. The other half have nothing to say but are not silent. ”

-Robert Lee Frost

Learning from an early age to “the culture of imprisoned emotions” does not only have one consequence. It doesn’t just mean coming of age as a slave to silences and sunken truths. Very often, the child who is taught to bury their emotions ends up finding many ways through which to express what they are hiding, channels through which aggression, rage or constant challenge often emerge.

Sigmund Freud said that the mind is like an iceberg. We only see a seventh that emerges from the water and the rest is submerged in a frozen universe where lives all that we are silent, all that we repress and all the words that we have chosen to say. silence for fear of consequences in our complex public spheres.

We suggest you think about it.

We are tightrope walkers on a tightrope

More than once, when an acquaintance asked us the famous question “Is something wrong? You don’t look good ”, we quickly responded with a “ No, no, I’m fine, everything is fine ”. With this sentence, we seal an early retirement by using a banal formalism that everyone puts into practice: that of false appearances. Because no one cares that broken pieces of our being are hanging by a thread, we believe that emotional pain is reserved for the private and almost gaunt nooks and crannies of each other.

Even so, the real problem very often stems from our inability to confide in people who are not really meaningful. We don’t do this because we believe that “showing off” our pain, embarrassment, or worry means losing our personal power.

In a way, revealing to our spouse or to our family that we are not happy, due to specific circumstances or very concrete facts, causes us to develop a certain “co-dependence”; that is, we feel more responsible for how others react to this concrete fact than for our own circumstances.

Putting more value on the possible reaction of others than on the basic problem causes us to leave things as they were. We’ve been silent for so long that keeping things deep inside is not that important to us. We normalize suffering like someone taking a simple pain reliever to heal a traumatic injury or someone offering water to a drowned person.

It is not a good idea. No one is an eternal tightrope walker on their own tightrope because sooner or later that rope will break and we will eventually fall. And quite logically, the more we have followed this dynamic, the harsher the fall and the consequences will be.

You are all you’ve kept inside but you deserve to be free

This fact is curious but deserves to remain in our minds: when something displeases us, hurts us or disturbs us, like a word full of contempt, our brain takes barely 100 thousandths of a second before reacting emotionally. Later, it will register this emotion in our cerebral cortex in just 600 thousandths of a second.

“Sometimes telling the truth is not enough: it is also necessary to show the cause of the lie”

-Aistotle-

When we say to ourselves “ what I just heard doesn’t affect me, I’m going to pretend it doesn’t matter” , it will already be too late because our brain mechanisms will have already codified this emotional impact. . Trying to save it in some other way means fooling ourselves as we are consuming unnecessary energy and resources that we should invest in other strategies.

We have long been taught that showing our true emotions is a bad thing, that whoever tells the truth hurts, and that it is better to lie subtly than to reveal a bitter truth out loud. This is not true. You can be assertive without being aggressive. What’s more, it would be good to start changing the classic idea that emotion is the opposite of reason, because that’s not true either.

Allowing ourselves to fully experience feelings very often helps us understand our needs. It lights up a lot of thought voids that we often fill with false ideas: “if I put up with this a little longer, things can get better”, “they didn’t mean what they said, I’m going to pretend nothing was ”. Understanding, listening and fully feeling our emotions is a vital need to be practiced every day.

We must learn the art of assertiveness through the exercise of “I feel I deserve”. We have to howl, on full moon nights, night and day, all we are, all we need and all we are worth. It is no longer necessary to prioritize each moment and each second the emotions of others. It’s time to live fearlessly.