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Anger

Stuffing Feelings vs. Regulating Emotions

It’s never a binary choice to either suppress or express.

Key points

  • Stuffing, suppressing, and avoiding emotions are bad for your mental health.
  • Expressing emotions in ways that amplify and magnify them is also bad for mental health. Regulating emotions is good for mental health.
  • Emotion regulation yields more accurate and benign interpretations of experience than stuffing and expressing.

Some of the worst things you can do for your mental and physical health are stuff, suppress, and avoid negative feelings. They’ll keep triggering thoughts that stimulate cortisol. You may feel increasingly powerless and, eventually, inadequate, anxious, or depressed.

Many clinicians and pop-psychology authors fall into a dichotomous trap: Since it’s bad to stuff feelings, it must be good to express them. This hapless advice ignores the motivational component of emotions and the social context in which they occur.

I've had many clients who reported an apparent mantra of previous therapists and self-help authors:

“Feel your feelings; that’s what they’re for.”

Well, that’s not what they’re for. They evolved as an important component of mammalian motivational systems. Negative feelings, like physical pain, get your attention so you'll act on the motivation to heal, correct, improve.

Emotions Are Motivations

Emotions send neuropeptides to the muscle groups and organs of the body to prepare us for action. The action they prepare us for can be fit into three broad categories:

  • Approach — get more of something, experience more
  • Avoid — something or someone
  • Attack — devalue, warn, threaten, or intimidate a perceived threat.

We’re certainly entitled to our negative feelings, but we’re not entitled to devalue or attack. I’ve had hundreds of clients in my practice of treating chronic resentment, anger, and abuse, who were advised by previous therapists to feel their anger without acting on it. To the clients, that was like tasting without swallowing. It’s extremely difficult for anyone to express hostile feelings without devaluing. And it’s hard to imagine a social context in which expressing anger does not escalate conflict.

Emotion Regulation

Put simply, emotion regulation is calming yourself when upset and cheering yourself when down. More specifically, it’s changing the implicit judgment that triggered the emotion and its motivation to devalue.

Implicit judgments are always based on past experience but are greatly influenced by the current state of self-value, as well as physical and mental resources. When we feel good, our implicit judgments are mostly benign. When we feel less than good, our implicit judgments are mostly negative.

For example, my partner says or does something I don’t like. I’m resentful about something else, so my implicit judgment is that she’s thoughtless, inconsiderate, rude, controlling.

I regulate the anger and resentment that makes me want to devalue her, by making a more accurate explicit judgment that she’s distracted, stressed, hurt, feels treated unfairly, or is reacting to something I’ve said or done.

If I suppress the initial feeling, I’m likely to get anxious or depressed. If I simply express it, I’ll no doubt get a more negative response. By regulating it, I remove the risk of hurting her feelings and give her a chance to respond more positively.

If you stuff, suppress, or avoid negative feelings, they’ll work against your best interests, erode your self-value, and weaken your relationships. Expressing those feelings will amplify and magnify them and risk similar negative results.

Regulate your emotions, and they’ll help you act in your long-term best interests, solidify your self-value, and strengthen your relationships.

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