If your husband represses emotions, what is left for you to do?
We, women, spend much time talking about how we feel. Men instead are used to repress their emotions. We keep sharing our emotional reactions to life's situations: who did what to us and add a description of how we feel about it. Sometimes, perhaps we talk and talk about our feelings as the focus of our connection with others...This is not common to both genders at all. Men have been socialized in a different way.
Most of the men are afraid to really experience their feelings because it's equivalent to losing control, and they are afraid of the pain involved in feeling their emotions, (feeling loss or failure or worst, abandonment), those are the main dangers to avoid by closing up.
If there is a risk of feeling too deep hurt as to cry, men can't allow themselves to go there. So, how can you know when and how your man is repressing his feelings?
How We Repress Emotions by Denial
Life is always offering us experiences that can be scary or difficult, and we don't know how to deal with pain, or hurt. We can choose to block the experience by getting busy, drink more, or deny the challenge in multiple ways. It helps if we "forget" the pain and bury it. Perhaps we can believe that it's gone, but repressed pain feelings have a way to stay hidden in different body locations...feelings can persist localized in our muscles, ligaments, stomach, midriff, or lungs. If we manage to repress emotions long term, probably we will discover the pain coming back as some body damage. A broken heart by abandonment gets translated years later into a heart attack.
Normally, the methods people use to avoid feeling their emotions are like:
- Watching too much TV, keeping conversations superficial, not personal
- Eating heavy, not nutritious food
- Excessive drinking of alcohol or recreational drugs
- Using prescription drugs such as tranquilizers or Prozac
- Exercising compulsively; working too much, keeping always busy or in motion
- Constant intellectualizing and analyzing
- Rejecting or avoiding emotional movies, books, or stories
If he Has been Repressing Feelings for Ever, What are the Symptoms of Repressed Emotions?
Keeping negative emotions repressed is a long term battle! and it takes constant vigilance to keep them buried...and hard work: you have to be always protecting yourself from the emergence of those pesky feelings. It takes some energy, every day, to keep repression in place. If your man has mastered this habit to the point that he doesn't even recognize he is doing the active repression, what do you see?
- Fatigue and lack of interest in life's joys;
- A lack of ambition or motivation
- Depression without an apparent cause
- Loneliness, few or not personal friends
- History of hurtful relationships with his family
- Making a big drama of a minor incident, sometimes very late after it happened
- Inability to express himself and/or talk about his feelings or personal matters
- Having a chronic knot in his stomach, headache or throat congestion
- Cynical, distrusting, and distancing attitude towards others and himself.
In this context, is impossible to share deeply personal ideas and feelings...She feels isolated, alone, and abandoned to her own devices. She has no way of separating a chronic emotional denial from the voluntary repression of meaningful communication called "silent treatment"...which will force her into resentment.
In this last situation, we have a silent marriage which could be devastating...No marriage survives this isolating tactic with the connection intact.
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