Successful At Work But Failing At Home ( The Principal Of Suppression)
The family dynamic is one of the most complex and one of the most beautiful dynamics we can engage in.
With a fact that many people grew up in not so healthy relationships inside of their family when they were kids, there is a huge amount of patterns they will bring with them and form a similar type of family with their spouse and kids.
I see many, many people who are very successful with amazing working habits, absolutely dominating in their occupation, riding the wave of power and upon arriving home they feel deflated.
As soon as they open the door, they are faced with another side of reality. Almost as a heat wave hit them, they have been hit by a wave of guilt and disappointments from their partner, they’ve been blamed and faced with a huge portion of dissatisfaction coming from their other half.
The family dynamic is so distorted and by giving so much to your business, riding that high wave, the only thing you can feel is a crash of energy, losing your power and not understanding what is wrong. What people inside of your house want from you.
Truth is, you have already used up all your energy, passion, and motivation with nothing left but creating a physical barrier. An alibi to go back into your home office just to write a few more important emails or take one last call from the other side of the world because they just started their work day and might need your guidance or instructions.
And again, for the moment you are important, that fragment of power is back, your mind is occupied with things that are far more easier to navigate then family and their emotional soup.
Let’s change perspective and see what’s going on from the other side of the story. Your spouse is sinking even deeper, not only that you came home late, now you are using a small crumb of family time for business again, feeling abandoned, not loved nor appreciated or desired. Your kids are anxious to tell you exciting things that happened at school or about their ideas, maybe an unfair friend, but you left the closed door. Even if you are sitting on the couch with a drink in your hand in order to decompress, you are not there. You’ve found a way to disappear emotionally, leaving them zero chances to connect with you...what is left is your tired body.
This is the most common situation in many families.
We don’t know when all of this started, we don’t understand those strange impulses trying to penetrate our skin called emotions. We feel miserable with each other because there is nothing that can be done, just to go day by day in the same manner.
And occasionally we will have a decent day. You will give some time to your family just because you needed to feel loved and you desperately needed that approval, that after all, you are a decent family person. Leaving your partner, once again filled with hope that things can change.
We are thirsty for love, for acceptance for approvals we want to be seen as a good person, as people who try hard but at the end of the day we are just too oblivious to even notice we are actually not open for any of these. Being locked with our walls built up around us, our actions are screaming to our partners: LOVE ME, PLEASE LOVE ME, PLEASE understand what’s going on inside of me, or if you can’t penetrate these walls of mine that I am not even aware of, DON’T EXPECT anything from me, just LEAVE ME ALONE….
Where is the problem?
I almost wanna start with once upon a time... something happened to us, humans. Something that is passing from generation to generation.
Vast of the population is so detuned from own feelings, that we actually hardly feel our own feelings at all.
Sometimes, we appear more sensitive to the feelings of other people then we are to our own. We feel better this way, we have a false sense of control.
Many people on the other side can’t differentiate feelings of their own vs feelings of others.
And they don’t know about the fact that we can be influenced by many people we are “connected” to even without being physically close to them. Our parents, siblings, friends...etc.
When you were a child, you were like a sponge, you heard this I believe many, many times. But I bet you haven’t heard that all the feelings or majority of the feelings that had occurred inside of us as kids were actually suppressed feelings of our parents.
See, nature has a perfect way to show us everything we are trying to escape from. Nature brings all our hidden emotions through our kids and their behavior. For what they get punished or rewarded, depending on the type of expression.
With punishment is like driving your own car and taking responsibility of empty gas tank in your dad’s car. That is how we felt as kids and that is exactly how our kids feel with us now.
When you were a child if your parents had huge emotional traumas or were disabled to feel their own painful emotions...all of them are shared upon kids. If you were only child you were “lucky” to have everything upon your shoulders.
There is very common belief how the only child can be very selfish, there is a reason if that child has to survive that kind of burden it will shut all senses to manage that kind of attack.
You as a child don’t understand those signals called emotions coming your way. By nature child is so open, you just feel you are drowning in a whirlpool of unknown and confusing feelings.
That is a time when we slowly learn how to block our feelings and detune. We got punished for crying or being “weak”, we were suppressed with “sh sh don’t cry”, or for expressing frustration, or any other expression that was pointing clearly of what was going on inside of us. That is pretty clear signal to - SHUT DOWN.
Growing up we still feel those emotional attacks from our environment as our own feelings.
It’s very confusing to distinguish your real feelings from other people's feelings and how these things mixed up together.
It becomes even harder to know what your real feelings are when you’ve already desensitized to your feelings and emotions.
The only way you’re going to be able to discover what your own feelings are is to become more sensitive to your own feelings and also to become more sensitive to feelings of others.
The problem is when you desensitize your feelings you can’t choose to do only that, you are shutting down all the system. Because when you desensitize one aspect of your soul you’re attempting how to suppress every aspect.
And that is the principal of suppression.
If you suppress one aspect of your soul then automatically lots of other aspects of your soul are automatically suppressed whether you like it or not. Many times I was working with people escaping from own painful emotions by shutting down, and when I would ask them If they are happy with their lives, they would have the same look on their faces...searching for some foreign concept with a nostalgic spark in their eyes and saying: Oh yes, I am. Totally dead inside with no energy in those words to carry the truth.
What you are really doing when you suppress one aspect of your soul, for example, your sensitivity to other people’s emotions, is that you are also suppressing your own sensitivity to your own emotions.
And there is nothing you can do about it, if you are going to chose to do that. If you do one, the other will automatically follow. If you suppress your own you will automatically become insensitive to other people’s emotions as well.
If I go back on the beginning of my story, you coming home drained and most likely with pretty strong mechanism to block your emotion, and not to mention in order to succeed at work and competition you had to become robot-like person, insensitive, and your partner is sharing with you how she/he feels, you will feel puzzled. You hear the unpleasant tone and words of being responsible for and blamed for unhappiness but disable to understand or relate to.
By feeling attacked and responsible you go into defense mode and say things that will not produce any good effects. We don’t understand that we are not supposed to take responsibility but to connect and listen with an open heart. To be present.
So, the only real way of finding out what you are feeling is, by becoming open to the concept that you need to become more sensitive to your own emotions and feelings.
Once you become more sensitive to emotions and feelings inside of you, it won't kill you- I promise!
But holding onto them and suppressing will not do a favor to you- I can promise that to you as well!
People generally think, if things inside of them are moved and suppressed to some dark corners of their soul and are not visible to the other people nor them, things will just be fine. Do you know how many of successful, prominent people live in fear that others will eventually find out who they “really” are?
We are so afraid to open that door, we think inner critic will eat us alive, feeling of insecurity and feeling of being unworthy would pull us down, and we could eventually see that we are living proof of imposter syndrome. And we don’t like that, we don’t like those feelings at all.
If you wanna heal these parts, because they are coming to the surface level you liking it or not, you have to become sensitive again.
We live in the world that values numbness and to be a good business person, the heart needs to disappear, and we just have to leave out our emotions.
We have false beliefs on toughness and resilience, on kicking asses...
Where in fact, everything that is not expressed in us will hunt us and find a way to show up in our lives at the level we will not be able to close our eyes and ignore.
In health oriented communities we talk about sleep issue a lot, and I can agree on many levels of external factors, but we often forget that we try so hard to engage our mind to forget who we are and what we feel, and we just put show for others and ourselves, and then when it’s a time to calm down, we either can’t press the brake or if we are capable of pressing it, fear of facing ourselves arises and terrifies us.
You have to soften your heart to your feelings not to the point of being a victim or in disharmony with truth and love, but actually to grow out of fear. To follow your feelings deep inside, let them flow through you and release them.
Once that happens you become more sensitive to everyone's feelings around you knowing what they are thinking or feeling. You will also be able to recognize emotions that they are holding onto it and suppressing.
You will develop that presence, our intrinsic goodness, our natural propensity for compassionate action.
This can help you immensely in your life, determining what are the right courses of action you wanna take in any situation and feel real and truthful to yourself.
It’s not about using your intellect, it’s not trying to use your mind to work out whether it’s coming from what’s going on.
That will automatically occur once you are more sensitive to your feelings.
That’s the key!!!
How we do this?
You become open to being loved and wanting to love
You become open to receiving truth and wanting truth
3. You become open to your own emotions
If we all stop talking from our head about being humble and for the first time just dive in and actually pray or meditate to whoever you believe in and ask for assistance and help, to open up to this process, we can heal our broken parts and have a real impact on people around us.
It's not about reaching perfection, it's about being willing to grow.
