How Unprocessed Feelings Can Keep You Stuck

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Nancy is an overprotective mother to Jade, her 16-year-old daughter. Jade is a well-adjusted girl who gets good grades, plays on the tennis team, and has a close group of friends and a steady boyfriend. Even so, Nancy frequently checks Jade’s phone to make sure she’s not talking with any “bad kids.” She enforces a strict and early curfew. Jade finds Nancy to be intrusive and often complains that her mom is “so anxious over nothing.” Nancy can’t shake her fear that her daughter might fall into the wrong crowd and start engaging in unhealthy behavior.

Victor is a store manager and is noticing that his reactions toward customers are interfering with his job performance. When dealing with customers that can be rude or harsh, Victor feels an intense surge of energy run through his body. It takes so much for him not to react in anger that he has difficulty interacting with these customers altogether. Victor’s boss schedules a meeting to talk about his difficulty communicating effectively.

Carter is happily married to his wife, Corrine. Carter is a successful businessman who has always prided himself on being self-reliant. Carter’s car broke down, and his wife planned to drive him to and from work for a week. Corrine got stuck in traffic and forgot to bring her phone to let Carter know she would be late. Carter grew incredibly upset as he waited longer and longer for his wife to arrive. He angrily called a taxi and spent the night in a hotel, refusing to hear his wife’s explanation of what happened.

Caught in a Riptide

Nancy, Victor, and Carter do not know it yet, but they are being provoked by unresolved feelings from childhood. It happens to all of us. It’s like being in calm waters only to unexpectedly have a riptide pull you off in a random direction. Then, once you break free from the strong currents, you’re left feeling perplexed and frazzled.

Old feelings live within these riptides, swirling with a forcefulness that sucks you in, right back to old memories or experiences that were never dealt with. Nancy’s anxiety, Victor’s anger, and Carter’s tendency to flee are old, unprocessed feelings, waiting to be touched off at the drop of a hat.

Feelings From Childhood: 3 Must-Knows

1. Feelings that have been suppressed, walled off, or pushed down never go away. They live inside you, waiting to be acknowledged and easily set off.
2. You may find yourself in a current situation that elicits these buried feelings. It can be related to the original cause, but not always. The old feelings may then attach to an experience, event, or person in your life, oftentimes in an unsuspecting and undeserving way.
3. Just because your old feelings have been lying dormant does not mean they’re unimportant. They can be powerful and overwhelming and catch you off guard. Often, people wonder where these feelings are coming from and begin questioning themselves and their intense emotions or behaviors.

How Nancy, Victor, and Carter’s Feelings Came to Be

Nancy, Victor, and Carter all grew up in families that were not able to notice and respond to their feelings. Each for different reasons, none of the three learned how to recognize, identify, manage, or communicate their feelings. So, they all grew up with childhood emotional neglect. They had each entered adulthood with some old, unprocessed feelings waiting to riptide them in their current lives.

Nancy

Nancy’s parents divorced just as she was entering high school. Her parents were so busy fighting over custody and working long hours that they left Nancy essentially unadvised as she went back and forth between houses. She joined an older friend group that used drugs and alcohol and found herself taken advantage of by men. With no one noticing Nancy’s declining grades or risky behavior, she ended up battling alcoholism for much of her young adult life.

Even though Nancy is sober now, many of her intense feelings from adolescence have been walled off. On the other side of the wall are Nancy’s feelings of pain, abandonment, and deep sadness that her parents weren’t around to protect her. Now that Jade is at the age Nancy was when she was struggling, old feelings are resurfacing and unfairly placed on Jade.

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Victor

Victor grew up with a domineering father. His dad would not only show his aggressive nature inside the household but to undeserving bystanders in his day-to-day interactions. Victor lived in fear of him, and vowed to never feel, or act, the way his dad did.

But Victor has never dealt with his squashed feelings, especially his harbored anger toward his father. In fact, he feared his father’s anger so much that it made him fearful of the emotion of anger itself. As an adult, when others treat him aggressively, they inadvertently trigger his buried feelings about his father.

Carter

Carter grew up fending for himself most days in his childhood home. He was an only child being raised by a single, working mother. He walked himself to school, studied hard, and even got his own library card when he was just 8 years old. With a lack of parental presence or support, Carter learned to survive on his own.

As Carter finds himself dependent on his wife in this situation, his sense of independence feels threatened. Old feelings of loneliness and a deep longing for connection make their way to the surface. Just as Carter learned to survive by being self-reliant, his sense of survival triggers when he feels others around him are unreliable or letting him down. In these circumstances, he finds himself fleeing from love and dependency and toward self-protection and safety.

Making It Safely to Shore

1. Increase your awareness. Only things outside of your awareness have the power to overtake and control you. When you become aware, your old feelings won’t be so triggering and disorienting.
2. Take charge. Once you recognize your feelings, you get to choose how to handle them. It’s in your control to handle them in a healthy and effective way. Label your feelings with words and begin exploring what triggers them.
3. Acknowledge and process your feelings. You are now able to face the feelings you’ve walled off for so long. Allow them in and remember they don’t control you. Begin processing your memories and stories from childhood. It may be useful to find a mental health professional for support.
4. Pay attention and take responsibility. Begin separating which feelings are old and which are new. It’s your responsibility to process old feelings and make sure they don’t unfairly attach to people or circumstances in your life now.
5. Get informed on childhood emotional neglect. Just like Nancy, Victor, and Carter, many people don’t know that they’ve grown up with childhood emotional neglect, which is far more common than you may think. It’s never too late to learn how to use your emotions in a way that can lead to healing and freedom from the past.